What are the skills of the future? Better yet, what are the incentives of the future?

Last week, I finished delivering a course on Business Applications of AI at IE New York College with 37 master's-level professionals. On their way out, I asked them four questions about what they'll actually use AI for, what they still didn't understand, what worried them, and what they were now sure of.

1. They're not worried about losing their jobs.

Twenty of them said they were worried about losing the 3 years of development that happen when you first join a company. Research, first drafts, summarizing, screening... All the tedious work that taught us how to catch errors... Struggle through work.. Think critically.

Funnily enough, 12 of those 20 answered a different question by saying that they will be automating the exact things that they were afraid of losing. Two of them noticed the contradiction in their post and the others didn't.

They're not wrong by the way. Economists call this a collective action problem where, if everybody holds back, it's nice for the greater good but why would you do it if you're the only one sitting on the sidelines?

2. 25 of the 37 found it difficult to determine the right answer from a plausible one.

Why did one prompt work a certain way and another prompt give you a completely different answer? Where is this phenomenon leading us?

The ease of creation awarded to us by automation and AI is shifting bottlenecks to the review of the work and not the development of it. But how are you gonna review the work when all you've done to create it is click a few buttons?

My theory: What employers want now are ready-made products (people) and they are outsourcing all the important training and scaffolding to other institutions. More on that next week.