05/03/2024
The Verge of AGI, and what you really SHOULD be teaching your Children
As parents, we've always tried to give our children the best foundation for their future education.
And until the advent of AI, it seemed that the most valuable skill you could teach a child was coding.
And until recently - in fact yesterday- this was my opinion too.
I was laying the foundations by exposing our son to linear algebra and geometry, and coding, to lay the foundations for him to understand the fundamental building blocks of computer science and artificial intelligence.
.. But I've changed my mind. And I'll tell you why in just a moment.
But first we need to understand the premise we've all being following that lead us to believe learning how to code is the most important skill that we can teach a child.
Computer science and technology has been the driving force in the development of the most disruptive industries and markets in history.
Everything from education, research to social science and even intelligence gathering has been reshaped by the stuff that the ability to code has brought about.
.. But, AI has changed all of that.
Since the first months of the release of open AI's chat GPT my wife and I spent hundreds of hours testing and experimenting with AI and all the ways it can be implemented in daily life and business.
One day we reached the limit of our ability in regards to coding.
There was no app or program to do what we wanted to do. And so we had to start playing around with code to move forward.
But we are more like engineers and not coders.
So we turned ti AI...
And what we discovered was amazing.
.. We didn't have to know how to code aka programming language.
We had to understand the idea and how to communicate it - with human language.
.. AI did the rest. Write the code. Debug the code.
In other words if you know how to prompt AI - your possibilities, and capabilities are enhanced by a magnitude that previously could only be leveraged by academics and programers.
.. But, and I say But... this is not only true for the areas that previously relied on the ability of coding.
.. video.. arts.. content generation... story telling
.. and in future thanks to the combination of defusion and AI even the movie industry will be disrupted.
"Scientists are increasingly drawing on artificial intelligence to understand society, design new materials and even improve our health." - Stanford news
The truth is that even the people who build AI have no idea how AI learn and does what it does.
.. They don't even really know what AI is fully capable of.
Researches train AI to do one thing and in the process realize that it "miraculously" also is capable of doing things they never trained it to do.
While the people working on AI follow deterministic academics and science - the way AI is developing and advancing is far from deterministic...
In fact most of the disruptive AI discoveries have been swinging in and out of a Britney Spears Song Corus like "OOPS... I did it again..."
In other words most of the disruptive AI abilities of the recent past have been "OOPS" discoveries.
Kind of like an open brain surgery where the doctor pokes a cathode on one area of the brain, and observes the patient's response.
Every oops is another description to the market and brings about new applications and possibilities.
So far the "Oops'" have been kinda beneficial.
.. but - and this is the concern of people like Elon Musk, Mo Gawdat, Joscha Bach etc.
One of the Oops could be a disruption that may be detrimental to human society, economy and greate circumstances that we may find hard or maybe even impossible to recover from again...
.. Be it as it may.
Back to my premise and why I believe that something other than coding is the most important skill we can teach our children.
One constant in the development of AI that has become increasingly more important is the ability to prompt.
That's right.
I believe that understanding "prompt engendering is the most important skill that a child or future adults will be able to weald."
And I'll tell you why in a moment..
But more importantly why prompt engendering it's self is not a skill. It's a compound- method.
Prompt engineering is a stack of skills and they originate in the arena of HUMANISTICs.
In other words the more our children understand themselves and what it means to be human, the better they will be at handling AI in future.
Why?
.. Because AI is nothing more than a synthesizing approach to recreating the human mind.
AI learns from humans.
It is fed with huge amount of human generated content.
Human generated data emissions. Which is kinda like the data we create by behaving as humans and engaging with each other.
That means AI is also learning from our behavior, which reflects our emotions, mentality, values and ethics, and to some extent artifacts of our culture.
So, put simple AI is on a trajectory to become more human, so it is more than rational to say that the better humans we can become the better AI's we will create - and the better we will he able to prompt AI.
And even if the word "prompt engineering" sounds like you need an academic degree to be good at it, the truth is that anyone can prompt.
"It is our job to create computing technology, such that nobody has to program. And that the programing language is human." - NVIDEA CEO Jensen Huang
This means that in future there will be no gap in technology and you will be able to engage with in ground breaking ways whether you can program or not.
The ability to code will become absolute.
Because the systems that used to do what had to be programmed will now be operated by AI.
.. AI that can code.. AI that can be engaged without the need to code... a system that is adaptive, evolves, and self teaching...
It's kinda like in the past you needed a back end developer and a front end developer and a graphic designer and if you had the budget a copy writer to build a website.
.. today all you need is an idea and the ability to prompt, and the AI will do the rest for you.
.. granted you still need a basic understanding and f the frameworks you are dealing with so that you can judge the AI's output and determine wether the result is within the standards you need it to be.
But if you've ever spent money on web design or a programmer, you'll understand how disruptive this is.
"This is the miracle, this is the miracle of artificial intelligence. For the very first time, we have closed the gap.
The technology divide has been completely closed. And this is why so many people can engage artificial intelligence.
.. And for the very first time you can imagine everyone in your company being a technologist." - NVIDEA CEO Huang said further.
So, in a nutshell. The reason why coding is not the most important skill you can teach your child is that by the time they grow up. No one will be coding - they will be "prompt engineering."
.. and in order to engineer good prompts you don't need to try and figure out how AI thinks. You need to learn more about how humans think and learn, and apply that to how you engage with AI and the emerging technologies of the future.
In other words it has become more important than ever to explore who we are and what makes us humans.
Because if we don't ... AI will and it may neat us at it - in a way that not even Britney spear could sing about.
