Four years of college, and you can’t even get on the day shift?
I read an article yesterday that Americans have lost a lot of trust in our school systems. Aside from politically motivated false fears, students face the real threat of AI destroying the value of a career-oriented degree. How many careers will AI take over and transform?
Speculation includes the legal, engineering, and some medical professions. Those not entirely replaced by AI functions will be significantly transformed, with fewer and fewer of the existing jobs still being viable careers.
How do we thrive with this transition? Increasing your flexibility and resilience and staying bold and engaged are vital. How? A big part of resilience is adaptation, or learning (better ways of) to learn. A key overlooked skill in accelerating your ability to learn is your critical thinking skills.
Critical thinking skills are something that AI is not very good at and is unlikely to become skilled at soon.
At this point, AI can only respond to prompts: Its results will never be any better than the prompts it was given. If nothing else, critical thinking will enable you to create better prompts, manage your use of AI better, and empower you to stay on top.
Critical thinking skills are needed to survive and thrive in a more competitive world than ever. You are no longer merely competing with other human beings who are as intelligent, dedicated, driven, and competitive as you are.
Now, you’re also competing with artificial intelligence models created by those human beings who are every bit as driven, intelligent, dedicated, and competitive as you.
And the thing is, unlike merely competing with those dedicated, driven, etc. humans, you are now competing with the AI artifacts they are creating.
Artificial intelligence models are virtually unlimited in quantity, in the number of those intelligences that can be applied to each area of life, to every problem and opportunity.
Wait! This is not doom and gloom, although you can read it that way. It is a tool you, too, can use.
Like in the early days of the internet, these tools are freely available. If you are reading this, you already have what you need to access a comprehensive suite of AI models to train yourself.
This is where your critical thinking abilities come in. It is those abilities that enable you to learn from using AI. Critical thinking, as we espouse in our language models, including the Meta Model and the Milton Model, is the key tool to empower you to manage your engagement with AI.
Critical thinking is not just picking apart arguments, as you might do with your Meta Model tools. Creative thought is an equal part the flip side of analytical thinking. One place in NLP where this is embodied is the Milton Model.
In short, learning and applying critical thinking skills is your best defense against career irrelevance. Critical thinking must include the creative part: If all you do is analyze, you have broken an opportunity into small pieces. Without creativity, it only leads to analysis paralysis.
Critical thinking skills will do more than anything else in the academic realm to forge the resilience to thrive in you.