Fuck College, Learn Agentics | Hacker News Reader

Fuck College, Learn Agentics

algarch.com

5 pointsjdalton10 comments

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> You learned Java. AI is now writing entire operating systems. You studied marketing fundamentals. AI is predicting consumer behavior before consumers know what they want. You memorized case law. AI is finding legal precedents your professors never heard of.

> ... Enough doom and gloom. Here's your action plan:

Putting my deconstructionist hat on, this is entirely self-contradicting. For all we know, in a decade, the most important skill might be the ability to clearly mentally imagine "the change you wish to see in the world", and your neural implant will do the rest. If anything, their premises could lead to a strong argument that the best course of action is a well-rounded Liberal Arts degree.

If anything, their premises could lead to a strong argument that the best course of action is a well-rounded Liberal Arts degree.

This.

The obvious answer in an AI world is that the domain expert becomes the valuable employee. If you don't know enough to direct these models with the intelligence, wisdom, and judgement that only being a domain expert can confer, you're not going to get the results out that you need to actually get anything useful done.

So no, they won't need techies, but PhD level biologists are safe. In fact, PhD level biologists leveraging the advanced AIs to come in the future are likely to be exponentially more valuable than entire bio startups are today. So if you're young today, don't be foolish. Don't go to college and get some CS degree with an eye towards getting a job in tech. That's very likely not going to work out for you long term.

I feel there will be room for PhD level roles like you mentioned, but it would seem that over-time they become HITL by regulation...not knowledge.

I think college as it exists now is mostly a scam but if there's one course I really got my money's worth out of it's been philosophy. I mocked it at the time, I felt like algorithms would be much more valuable. So far I have not once had to insert values into a any kind of tree from scratch since.

I think that's the issue with college. It's become a sort of administrative/application oriented thing rather than focusing on knowledge.

Is that philosophy course via college?

> So far I have not once had to insert values into a any kind of tree from scratch since.

I keep inserting elements into the DOM every day, but I don't know if that counts as "from scratch", and I haven't tried to balance it yet.

In a world where AI will always be smarter than us, what's the point of getting a degree? Should we just focus on learning to work with AI?

Define "us" in your comment. Once you've done so, you'll understand the actual purpose of getting a degree.

The person who is able to articulately and coherently able to prompt the AI, backed by a broad spectrum of knowledge of their field will easily get more out of the AI than the people who do not. An advanced education is therefore _more_ crucial in a hypothetical age of AI rather than less.

If you can get such an education out of your AI, good for you, but most will benefit from a designed program of instruction.

The challenge is many struggle with giving context. In tech we were always told to "dumb it down" but in a world driven by context people need to "smart it up."

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