Why AI-Thinking is a Must-Have Skill to survive in the evolution of ChatGPT and AI models
This article is inspired by the talk of Dr. Jiang from Stanford University. You can find the original video in the link here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZA9K0JMrbWg
Lately, I’ve been using ChatGPT to help me with various tasks such as summarizing ideas, organizing meeting agendas, and fixing code bugs.I feel like I have a supportive colleague without burdening him/her.. This got me thinking about how businesses and regular people who don’t work in the tech industry can also use AI. How we can combine AI with human abilities to achieve highest results.
After some thought, I came to the realization that we need to learn how to work with AI since it’s becoming a crucial skill in generative AI areas. While AI can help automate tasks, increase productivity, and lower costs, there are also risks like confidential information being leaked and unethical practices happening. It’s a two-sided coin with opportunities and challenges.
That’s why I want to introduce the term AI Thinking, which can guide us on which areas to use AI and which areas to manage and control. AI-thinking can be broken down into 3 sub-section as below:
1. Understand AI
AI is good at figuring out patterns, like predicting if a student will graduate high school by looking at things like attendance and test scores. But it can only do this based on the information it was trained on. For example, Chat-GPT is a language tool that was trained on old information with the cut-off time at 2021 and can’t access current online info like Google can. So if you ask it about something that happened after 2021, like the current state of COVID-19, you might get old or wrong information.
2. Distinct AI and human
How does AI thinking differ from human thinking? If a child and ChatGPT were asked the question “What do you think about COVID-19?” they would likely provide different responses. ChatGPT would provide factual information about COVID-19, while a child may share their personal feelings and experiences, such as missing social activities. The main difference is that human thinking includes emotions and empathy, while AI thinking is primarily based on information processing, algorithms, etc.
3. Learn to work with AI
Having an understanding of how AI works and the difference between AI and human thinking can help us decide where to use humans and where to use AI to automate or complement human abilities.
Humans excel in creativity and empathy, which AI currently can’t match. However, AI can process millions of transactions in milliseconds, which would require millions of humans to do in the same time frame.
The ideal solution is to let AI focus on what it does best, while humans concentrate on their strengths. For example, AI can help run meetings more effectively by using ChatGPT to summarize meeting notes, then provide key action items and who is responsible for them. This task, which can be tedious, can be fully automated using AI.
Another example is that the upcoming generation of software developers can focus on understanding business needs, translating them into software requirements. Then, AI can enter the next phase and write the code based on the detailed descriptions from the software engineer. This reduces the time and effort required by humans tremendously. Humans still play a significant role in the process, but their time is spent more on creativity and designing user experience, which cannot be replaced by AI.
Last thought!
With the help of AI, our skills shift from memorizing answers to knowing which questions to ask and what answers are acceptable.I believe that AI Thinking will become a “common language” taught to children in schools and used by humans in their daily activities. It can have a significant impact on us if we learn how to use and regulate it properly.
