Long before wisdom
I am loathe to applaud venture capitalists for saying sensible things, but Mark Cuban said some very sensible things on Twitter (and was quoted in this relevant Quartz story):
I personally think there’s going to be a greater demand in 10 years for liberal arts majors than there were for programming majors and maybe even engineering, because when the data is all being spit out for you, options are being spit out for you, you need a different perspective in order to have a different view of the data. [You need] someone who is more of a freer thinker.
And, in the tweet itself:
Artficial intelligence will write programs long before they create wisdom.
Steinbeck once wrote that I guess the trouble [with socialism] was that we didn’t have any self-admitted proletarians. Everyone was a temporarily embarrassed capitalist.
Similarly, I think most STEM majors — or at least most programmers — think of themselves less as self-admitted truck drivers who drive a different genre of truck and more as practitioners of something that approaches philosophy.
I don’t think AI is as close as a lot of people think it is; but I don’t think it’s as far away as a lot of people think it is, either.