https://arab.news/44gwz
The rapid progress of large language models over the past two years has led some to argue that artificial intelligence will soon make college education, especially in the liberal arts, obsolete. According to this view, young people would be better off skipping college and learning directly on the job.
I strongly disagree. Learning through hands-on experience is valuable and always has been. But it works best when people have a good sense of which jobs and skills will be in demand. If there is one thing we can be confident about, it is that the future of work is highly uncertain. Advising young people to forgo college in favor of early entry into the labor market is misguided, at best.
Geoffrey Hinton, widely regarded as one of the pioneers of modern AI, once compared progress in his field to navigating through fog — you can see what lies immediately ahead but not what comes next. Accordingly, the central challenge for educators is to prepare students to operate effectively in fog-like conditions. The answer is not to train them for specific tasks that may soon become obsolete, but to make them as adaptable as possible. Trying to prepare people for a fixed set of challenges, when those challenges are constantly changing, is a losing strategy. We want skilled drivers who can navigate unfamiliar roads and unexpected obstacles.
