Now that software writers and coders are looking imperiled due to evolutions from AI systems like ChatGPT, the next question is this: “what are the skills we need to thrive?” Simple answer: you need the capacity to boss and manage the machines*, and the components include analytical judgment, ability to work flexibly, emotional intelligence, creative evaluation, tenacity and curiosity.
If you check, the hot prompt engineering role does have some of those components. A prompt engineer is a compass to generative AI systems like ChatGPT. The person helps in getting AI systems to produce exactly what he/she wants. The people in this emerging trade make tons of money – and are indeed a little “smarter” than the AI systems.
According to ChatGPT “…Prompt engineering is the process of designing effective and efficient prompts for generating high-quality responses from natural language processing models such as GPT-3. It involves the selection and combination of various text inputs that can help guide the model to produce specific outputs.
Prompt engineering requires a deep understanding of the underlying language model and the task at hand, as well as the ability to create prompts that are tailored to the specific needs of the user or application. The goal is to design prompts that provide sufficient context and direction to the model, while avoiding ambiguity or confusion that could result in incorrect or irrelevant responses.
Two decades ago, writing and posting a web article involved “coding” at html level. Then, WordPress came and made blogging easier, with no requirement to master html syntax. Just like that, WordPress brought many people into the game of running blogs because it took out the tech in posting online.
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With ChatGPT, what WordPress did to html-level writing could be done to the whole world of coding! In other words, for basic coding needs, you do not need to know anything about coding. If you earn a living in this space, you must prepare for that future.
*AI+ goes beyond tech.
Read this piece below.
ChatGPT has the fastest growing customer base of any technology in history, gaining 100 million users in just two months. And all signs suggest that business adoption will be equally swift. The new technology is top of mind for every CEO I talk with these days.
But while all are impressed by the power of these new tools, many are still perplexed about where to start. Unlike previous generations of A.I., which focused on relatively narrow tasks—predicting customer churn, for instance, or targeting supply chain issues—generative A.I. models can tackle a wide variety of creative tasks. And while the amazing breadth of these models makes them impressive, it also makes them daunting. Our recent polling shows the vast majority of Fortune 500 CEOs are still at the experimental stage, or planning their first step.
Accenture CTO Paul Daugherty has a new piece for Fortune that may help light the path. He highlights five core ways that people can work with generative A.I. to create value. McKinsey also has a paper out this morning that is a primer for businesses exploring generative A.I., and provides helpful use cases. McKinsey’s Lareina Yee, one of the authors, told me their analysis “of the apparel, fashion and luxury sectors found that GenAI has the potential to add $150 billion in operating profits.” Hard to overlook.
Both Daugherty’s article and the McKinsey paper highlight writing software code as one of the areas where generative A.I. can make a huge difference—increasing productivity by 50%, McKinsey says. Which raises another interesting issue: For the last decade, the surest route to a good job was to learn to write code. But now that machines do that, what’s the new formula for job security? Microsoft provided some guidance this week in its Work Trend Index Annual Report. The skills needed to survive are those that will help humans manage the machines: analytical judgement, ability to work flexibly, emotional intelligence, creative evaluation and curiosity.
To sum it up: generative A.I. is likely to have the most profound impact on the business world of any technology since the PC. And the best way to remain relevant will be to learn how to use it smartly. What’s coming, says Daugherty, is a reinvention “of the way work is done, dramatically amplifying what people can achieve.” And the companies and people that get there fastest “will gain a big leg up on less innovative competitors.” Fortune Newsletter
In this age, jobs are expected to be lost even as new ones are being created: “Despite how frequently layoff announcements reference the economy, an economic rebound won’t necessarily bring those jobs back. That’s because the rise of artificial intelligence is making companies question how many white-collar workers they really need, The Wall Street Journal reports. While demand for blue-collar workers remains strong, investors and executives realize they overhired at the middle management level in recent years, experts say. As leaders look to move forward with less bloat, one analyst tells the Journal that the need for knowledge workers may have peaked.”
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This is largely for developed economies, for the rest of the world, Generative AI systems will take several decades to have substantial impacts, so while gaining new skills and remaining part of the new conversations is important, you must not forget to understand how things work, in each system.
We don’t have meaningful data about basic and mundane things yet, but we are already prepping up to master working with machines. We are yet to fully digest and recover from wholesome absorption of a sort of education or schooling systems that never factored or respected our peculiarities and cultural construct, and AI systems are here to do another numbers on us.
Aside from those positioning to meet the needs and demands of developed economies, the rest should get on with the enormous task of fixing real problems in the land.
Ndubuisi, ChatGPT is powerful but from the much I have seen from my interactions with the tool, I think life is going to get more exciting for businesses and others. The core is in knowing how to give Generative AI tools clear,instructive prompts that will ensure it delivers accurate answers.
Can ChatGPT and other Generative AI models do all the work for you? The answer is a big no. Infact, before you can rely on its answers, the user will need to know*something* about what you are asking the machine to do for you, if not, it may give you substandard answers that can do more harm to your project than good.
What’s my point? Jobs ain’t going to be taken away rather human thinking levels will be forced to rise to new heights giving us the ability to tap deeper into capacities that our brains have always been capable of but was never utilized previously
Sure – not all jobs will go. Yet, we need to agree that this is disruptive. ChatGPT cannot do all the work but the little it does will mean people are displaced. In my email system, Microsoft has a tech which can compose responses for me, looking at the thread, with reminders on what I have to follow up with. Largely, you do not need an office assistant as the thing can do that. Another job gone!