What is the one advice for the youth about the job of the future? Here it goes… Learn to speak well to an idiot.

I recently watched a video with one of these Big AI names. You know the type. A “trusted voice”. One of these gurus who happen to be expected to “know the future”.

The topic is bringing fear in everybody’s mind and we all know how fear is selling well. We are doomed! You will all lose your jobs! No future. Apocalypse!

Maybe… or maybe not! I tend to think that apocalypses have been announced far more often then they have happened. And the ones that have happened were not very much announced. No-one has sent a message about the 14th Century Black Death. The “Spanish Flu” was not much foreseen. These were real disasters.

On the other hand, we are never short of AI apocalypses, are we? And the one about job is indeed worrying. I have no prediction myself about it but I do have an observation or two.

The guru was asked: what should the youth learn in order to have a job in the future? And his answer was nothing short of amazing: “Learn how to talk to AI!”. Yes. You read me well. His advice was to learn how to speak to a bloody LLM! Prompting! That is a serious skill, my friends! I am actually thinking that the world is going for the better with skills like that. I am thrilled, excited and nothing short of enlightened.

For those who are actually working with AI and LLM and generative AI, you will know that entering in conversation with them is an absolute pain. No proper context. No feeling for what you mean. Just plain pain to explain to a 3 years old what you mean with your adult request. Every single time I open any of the LLM I am paying for, I am now dreading the chat. Why? Because indeed, I had to learn how to talk to it. I had to regress in all my communication. I had to learn how to talk to an idiot. (An idiot that was sold to me as a PhD level tool.) And so, the great advice from the guru mentioned above was : “Learn how to speak to an idiot!”

I tell you what: if Oxford and MIT start to teach that skill to our future generation, I think the world is in good hands.

Now, I do NOT know what the future will hold. What I know inside out is how an AI system is working, why it is like a 3 year old (no disrespect for our 3 years old kids), why it produces amazing results and appalling ones. I know exactly how to get the best of them and how to stop hopping for magic. I develop AI architecture for businesses. And the one advice I do not have for my children is: learn how to regress. Because if this is all what we have… then maybe it will be the apocalypse. An intellectual apocalypse. I hope we have better ambitions than that.

What would you actually recommend the kids learn for their future?

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