Meetings are still like exams, if you can't craft a line of thinking on the spot it doesn't come off well.
You don't need a final answer but you can't just answer "I don't know" otherwise you risk being slimed (shout out to anyone who still remembers "You Can't Do That on Television")
True, but only for things that that your colleagues don't expect you to know already. Remember the "I'll circle back" meme about Jen Psaki? This response can only be used sparingly before it's seen as a sign of underpreparedness/inability to do back-of-the-envelope thinking.
The answer is "accepted", in the sense that it won't get you fired. But the meeting plows on, and decisions are made in absence of the answer to the question! — and never revisited once the answer is known.
And like 90% of the time it comes up, it's because the data contradicts the decision.
Every conversation you have with a person is an "exam." Not being able to extemporaneously express yourself or reason analytically without running to Claude seems undesirable.
In my professional career, my clients value the depth of ready knowledge that helps me use my tools with particular insight and finesse -- a kind of knowledge that exams demonstrated far more effectively than homework when I was back in school.
Stand-alone bottom-up observations (even if valid) obscure the fundamental problem that AI (or "AI" if you like) is inducing systemic change across human civilization.
If cohorts are graduating into the workforce with decreasing stand-alone skills, that implies the economic value-add of labour is shifting to AI, which implies broadly falling standards of living, falling political power, and an ongoing transfer of power and wealth to capital.
If students are taking shortcuts with AI when their brains have the highest capacity for learning they may be permanently weakening their prospects. It doesn't seem likely that whatever "AI management skills" they incidentally learn will make up for, over their lifetime, the economic value loss they suffer due to reduced cognitive skills.
On an individual basis, in the next few years, this might not matter. Across decades, economies and polities, it will.
> Stand-alone bottom-up observations (even if valid) obscure the fundamental problem that AI (or "AI" if you like) is inducing systemic change across human civilization.
Students have been cheating and taking shortcuts on their work long before the current generation of AI tools existed (and probably for as long as graded exams have existed).
And civilizations do fall. The bronze age civilizations did collapse. There was something dark about the dark ages. There is no law of nature which says that things will be okay, and plenty of examples where things have fallen apart.
Just to add to this, if AI is as epochal a change as its boosters say (and I am open to that argument), then surely it must have the potential for awful consequences, in proportion to its potential for good.
When you lower the barrier to taking the shortcut, you get more people to take it who wouldn’t otherwise have done so. If cheating becomes incredibly easy, lots of students who would have otherwise been honest take the easy way out. Moral conviction gets harder to keep as doing the right thing becomes less rational.
> The social aspects are more important than the exam sitting most of the time.
To spell it out more clearly: every single aspect of your career is an exam. The interview is an exam, quite literally. The day-to-day responsibilities (meetings, planning, problem-solving, collaborating) are parts of the exam. If you're failing at those or automating them away, then what is your role? The assignments (solve X bug or add Y feature) are parts of the exam too. Failing to do these things will mean that, yes, you are failing the exam.
Your employers want those assignments done. That’s why they pay you. School assignments belong in the trash can and you pay for someone to look at them before throwing them away.
Even if we grant that education is to prepare for employment, which a lot of people disagree with, it does not follow education should do the same thing as what's done in employment.
Meetings are still like exams, if you can't craft a line of thinking on the spot it doesn't come off well.
You don't need a final answer but you can't just answer "I don't know" otherwise you risk being slimed (shout out to anyone who still remembers "You Can't Do That on Television")
“I don’t know but after this meeting I will find out and get back to you”
Is an acceptable answer.
It's only an acceptable answer when used sparingly. The more often it's used, the more questions arise about your role in that meeting.
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True, but only for things that that your colleagues don't expect you to know already. Remember the "I'll circle back" meme about Jen Psaki? This response can only be used sparingly before it's seen as a sign of underpreparedness/inability to do back-of-the-envelope thinking.
Why would they ask you when they can ask Claude then?
Not really, in any company I've ever worked.
The answer is "accepted", in the sense that it won't get you fired. But the meeting plows on, and decisions are made in absence of the answer to the question! — and never revisited once the answer is known.
And like 90% of the time it comes up, it's because the data contradicts the decision.
Every conversation you have with a person is an "exam." Not being able to extemporaneously express yourself or reason analytically without running to Claude seems undesirable.
In my professional career, my clients value the depth of ready knowledge that helps me use my tools with particular insight and finesse -- a kind of knowledge that exams demonstrated far more effectively than homework when I was back in school.
The exams aren't the thing that matter, they're an experiment to measure the thing that matters. Which, presumably, still matters at work!
Stand-alone bottom-up observations (even if valid) obscure the fundamental problem that AI (or "AI" if you like) is inducing systemic change across human civilization.
If cohorts are graduating into the workforce with decreasing stand-alone skills, that implies the economic value-add of labour is shifting to AI, which implies broadly falling standards of living, falling political power, and an ongoing transfer of power and wealth to capital.
If students are taking shortcuts with AI when their brains have the highest capacity for learning they may be permanently weakening their prospects. It doesn't seem likely that whatever "AI management skills" they incidentally learn will make up for, over their lifetime, the economic value loss they suffer due to reduced cognitive skills.
On an individual basis, in the next few years, this might not matter. Across decades, economies and polities, it will.
> Stand-alone bottom-up observations (even if valid) obscure the fundamental problem that AI (or "AI" if you like) is inducing systemic change across human civilization.
Students have been cheating and taking shortcuts on their work long before the current generation of AI tools existed (and probably for as long as graded exams have existed).
Somehow, civilization has managed to survive.
And civilizations do fall. The bronze age civilizations did collapse. There was something dark about the dark ages. There is no law of nature which says that things will be okay, and plenty of examples where things have fallen apart.
Just to add to this, if AI is as epochal a change as its boosters say (and I am open to that argument), then surely it must have the potential for awful consequences, in proportion to its potential for good.
When you lower the barrier to taking the shortcut, you get more people to take it who wouldn’t otherwise have done so. If cheating becomes incredibly easy, lots of students who would have otherwise been honest take the easy way out. Moral conviction gets harder to keep as doing the right thing becomes less rational.
Your career is a continual exam and the assignments are just parts of it.
Disagree. School exams test for academia-readiness too. And sometimes the schools and lecturers are filled with ideology irrelevant to real work.
Career exams tend to be a mix but a lot less ideology.
Fortune cookie ass statement.
Your career is more akin to the totality of school than it is to any specific facet of it imo.
The social aspects are more important than the exam sitting most of the time.
> Fortune cookie ass statement.
> The social aspects are more important than the exam sitting most of the time.
To spell it out more clearly: every single aspect of your career is an exam. The interview is an exam, quite literally. The day-to-day responsibilities (meetings, planning, problem-solving, collaborating) are parts of the exam. If you're failing at those or automating them away, then what is your role? The assignments (solve X bug or add Y feature) are parts of the exam too. Failing to do these things will mean that, yes, you are failing the exam.
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Your employer gave you your job based on your exam results.
Exactly. And what is a job interview but an exam?
Your employers want those assignments done. That’s why they pay you. School assignments belong in the trash can and you pay for someone to look at them before throwing them away.
As an example: my employer doesn't require that I learn how to communicate well. It requires that I already learned to do so.
Even if we grant that education is to prepare for employment, which a lot of people disagree with, it does not follow education should do the same thing as what's done in employment.
evaluating/reviewing your LLM's output/code/reasoning is an exam
unless you're just blindly passing it on for someone else to deal with
One of the main reasons safety standards are written in blood.