Communications of the ACM
How to Prepare the Next Generation For Jobs in the AI Economy
Credit: Harvard Business Review
If the next generation is to use AI and big data effectively — if they're to understand their inherent limitations, and build even better platforms and intelligent systems — we need to prepare them now. That will mean some adjustments in elementary education and some major, long-overdue upgrades in computer science instruction at the secondary level.
For example, consider how kids are currently interacting with AI and automated technologies: Right now, it might seem magical to tell Siri, "Show me photos of celebrities in orange dresses," and see a photo of Taylor Swift pop up on a smartphone less than a second later. But it's clearly not magic. People design AI systems by carefully decomposing a problem into lots of small problems, and enabling the solutions to the small problems to communicate with each other. In this example, the AI program divides the audio into chunks, sends them into the cloud, analyzes them to determine their probable meaning and translates the result into a set of search queries. Then millions of possible answers to those queries are sorted and ranked. Thanks to the scalability of the cloud, this takes just a few dozen milliseconds.
People who create this type of technology must be able to build teams, work in teams, and integrate solutions created by other teams. These are the skills that we need to be teaching the next generation.
From Harvard Business Review
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