I do not understand the urge to minimize the benefit of children being able to read books for entertainment. It doesn’t have to be a long-term benefit to be a benefit. Three additional years of childhood is a long time to enjoy reading books.

Yesterday I asked Jeremy Howard: "How might people prepare for AI?" (@jeremyphoward from @answerdotai and @fastdotai) "I've lived through these cycles and can see them repeating like clockwork." This is an edited and re-organized version of our chat. What do you expect for AI product capabilities in 2030? I don't believe anybody has any ability to predict what's going to happen in 2030 on the basis that nobody so far has had an ability to make sensible predictions about what will be happening with AI. I created the first LLM a bit over six years ago. I was pretty sure that it was going to be really significant, but I didn't know what anyone was going to do with it. What should people do now? How should they react to the rapid changes in AI? My very strong suggestion would be to act on the assumption that we will be unable to predict where we will be at in the future. Every new technology starts going up in capabilities following a hockey stick, and every one flattens out into a sigmoid. But more interestingly, new hockey sticks appear that people didn't even realize were on the field before. I'd also say people who work in the field of AI have no better ability to predict than anyone else. In fact, they're going to be overconfident. Instead say "Hmm, we're in a tumultuous phase of technology, aren't we? How should we react to tumultuous phases of technology?" Does that mean assume high volatility? It might not be high volatility, but assume high uncertainty. Technology has been developing rapidly, at an increasing rate for over 100 years. I think people dramatically underestimate the utility of looking backwards. I've lived through these cycles and can see them repeating like clockwork. So assume change and do something that works regardless? Yeah, exactly. One way to deal with that is to be extremely counter cyclical, so I pick the things that most people aren't excited about. Pick something that's close to home, that you deeply understand, and are passionate about. What's your advice to college-age people? It's a great question. It's hard. It's hard to pick something you're passionate about because your school's told you what to do for so long. I don't think much of university full stop. It's just another step on this path that society has created to try and create good little worker drones. There's so many other things you can do nowadays. If you're at university, try to spend a lot of time doing other things, have a lot of side hustles, have a lot of side interests, have a lot of things that you're studying an learning and building, and try to curate friendships with other people that are more bold, and not wanting to just become good little worker drones. Maybe a more positive framing is there's so much you can do on your own or with friends nowadays. I'd say over half the people I meet who are presenting at NeurIPS are alumni of @fastdotai. Andrej Karpathy also takes a very different direction but incredibly high quality, much better teaching than you'd ever get at any university. If you can't code, it's going to be harder to turn your ideas into reality, but it's so much easier to code now. AI can really help you a lot with your code. Lots of side hustles, forge your own education, find other people. Yeah create a community. And that community can be online. Asking your parents and your professors about this stuff is a waste of time because they don't know anything about any of this. They're going to tell you how they did things when they were kids. And the world's changed. What's your preparation advice for programmers, and for general knowledge workers? My advice would be the same to both groups. Where we are right now feels very similar to where we were with the internet in 1990. It was really obvious the internet was going to be a big deal, and it was really obvious it was going to touch every part of everything. And just about everybody I knew who was over 35 told me that the internet was a stupid waste of time. And unfortunately, I listened to them. I should have followed some of my friends who flew to San Francisco and dove in. I would say not engaging deeply with AI right now would be stupid. I think a lot of that is a fear reaction "oh my god, I'm old, I don't know what AI is, I'm going to be left behind, I must be stupid, I hate it, I don't like AI, it's stupid slop. Oh look it made a mistake, it's got hallucinations, can't trust it. What about the Chinese? Blah, blah, blah." You've got to get that out of your life, but also, don't fall for the hype. If you're a knowledge worker you should be really deeply engaging with this technology in a very practical, grounded way. Talk to lots of other people in your space, find the very best people who are working with AI in the very best way and then try and do it even better. Have groups of friends who are interested in pushing this, see how far you can take it. Combine it with your areas of interest and expertise. This is what we focus on now at Answer AI. People are saying "holy shit, I feel like I have superpowers now, I've got all my existing skills, plus I've got this additional technological help, and it's allowing me to do things I couldn't do before, or do things at a speed I could never do before" and they also often say "Wow, I feel like my colleagues who are not learning this are setting themselves up for failure, how are they possibly going to compete with me?" Nobody at OpenAI, or Anthropic, or at an AI research lab, is going to be able to understand the opportunities and constraints in your field as well as you can, because that's your field. So you're not about to be made useless by AI nerds. You're needed. So take a curious tinkerer mindset? And would you say be exceptional at using AI, or be exceptional at very human skills? Yeah, tinkerers. When we hire people at Answer AI we specifically say we're looking for tinkerers. And both AI and human skills together. Folks who are more on the technical side could spend a lot more time learning the broad skills, and folks on the humanities side can now feel less intimidated that they can learn a lot more technical stuff more easily. You might think you're not a math person but you might find that you are, you've just never had a teacher that's as good as a really adaptive dynamic AI helper. So it's a good time to be a generalist. Now is a great time to be a generalist. And it's also the easiest time in history to learn to code. Absolutely. How can you get good at using AI tools? Recognize it's really hard to use them. It looks easy because there's a text box and you can type English into it, and it's like talking to a person. But it's pretending to be a person, it's actually a computer program, it's a very big and complex computer program. So using it correctly takes months and months of diligent study and practice. When you start doing it, you will be shit and you will get bad results. That's because you're shit at it, not because AI doesn't work.