22 Articles about How AI is Affecting Jobs

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Why AI Interviews Could Be Bad News For Honest Designers – Andy Budd

The future of AI is in western Pennsylvania - Washington Post

I’m a LinkedIn Executive. I See the Bottom Rung of the Career Ladder Breaking. – New York Time 

AI and the future of work – Cambridge

An AI tool for better career decisions – David Bauer  

How AI Is Helping Job Seekers Pivot to New Careers - Wall Street Journal 

AI poses a bigger threat to women's work, than men's, says report – Reuters  

If you haven’t been worrying about AI, it’s time to start preparing - Washington Post 

Something Alarming is Happening to the Job Market: A new sign that AI is competing with college grads – The Atlantic

The AI Threat for Coding Jobs Is Becoming Clearer – Bloomberg  

The Hottest AI Job of 2023 Is Already Obsolete  - Wall Street Journal 

AI isn’t ready to do your job – Business Insider  

Microsoft says AI coworkers are coming fast – Yahoo Tech

The Dangers Of AI-Generated Job Candidates – Forbes 

AI “interns” are too big to ignore – Fast Company 

Why AI Might Not Take All Our Jobs—If We Act Quickly – Wall Street Journal

Americans worry AI is coming for these jobs – Washington Post

Say Hello to Your New Colleague, the AI Agent – Wall Street Journal

Google AI Search Leaves Website Makers Feeling Betrayed – Bloomberg

"AI-first" is the new Return To Office – Anil Dash

Innovate Why AI Won’t Replace Venture Capitalists Any Time Soon – Inc 

13 jobs that don't require a college degree − and won't be replaced by AI – USA Today

Unchecked AI-generated Code

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Unchecked AI-generated code can massively amplify technical debt, the hidden problems that make software brittle and costly to maintain.  Many early vibe-coded projects look good on the surface (“it works, ship it!”) but hide a minefield of issues: no error handling, poor performance, questionable security practices, and logically brittle code. - Addy Osmani writing on Elevate

Instructors Using AI Get Student Pushback

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"Students are complaining on sites like Rate My Professors about their instructors’ overreliance on A.I. and scrutinizing course materials for words ChatGPT tends to overuse, like 'crucial' and 'delve.' In addition to calling out hypocrisy, they make a financial argument: They are paying, often quite a lot, to be taught by humans, not an algorithm that they, too, could consult for free." -New York Times

Deep Practice

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Deep practice feels a bit like exploring a dark and unfamiliar room. You start slowly, you bump into furniture, stop, think, and start again. Slowly, and a little painfully, you explore the space over and over, attending to errors, extending your reach into the room a bit further each time, building a mental map until you can move through it quickly intuitively. the instinct to slow down and break skills into their components is universal.  

We heard it a billion times while we were growing up, from parents and coaches who echoed the old refrain “Just take it one step at a time.” But what I didn't understand until I visited the talent hotbeds was just how effective that simple, intuitive strategy could be.  

In the talent hotbeds I visited, the chunking takes place in three dimensions. First, the participants look at the task as a whole—as one big chunk, the megacircuit. Second, they divide it into its smallest possible chucks. Third, they play with time, slowing the action down, then speeding it up, to learn its inner architecture.

People in the hotbeds deep-practice the same way a good movie director approaches a scene—one instant panning back to show the landscape, The next zooming in to examine a bug crawling on a leaf in slo-mo.

Daniel Coyle, The Talent Code

Free Educator Newsletters about AI

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The Academic DJ - Justin Cerenzia

The AI Edventure - Jason Gulya 

AI x Education - Stanford University

AI and How We Teach Writing - Annette Vee

AI, writing, and pedagogy - Anna Mills

The Biblioracle Recommends - John Warner

The Broken Copier - Marcus Luther 

The End(s) of Argument - Mike Caulfield

One Useful Thing - Ethan Mollick

Writing Hacks - Jane Rosenzweig

Mathematics may shift to more closely resemble the humanities because of AI

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Perhaps mathematicians will spend most of their time trying to understand the proofs the AI system generates. Mark Kisin, a mathematician at Harvard University, foresees the field shifting to more closely resemble the humanities. “If you look at a typical English department at a university, it’s not usually staffed by people who write literature,” he said. “It’s staffed by people who critique literature.” Similarly, he said, mathematicians might assume the role of critics who closely analyze AI proofs and then teach them in seminars. Ronen Eldan, a mathematician who recently left the Weizmann Institute of Science for OpenAI, recalls a conversation in which another mathematician predicted that “mathematicians will be like pianists today,” he said. “They don’t play their own compositions, but people still come to hear them.” It will in some sense be the end of research mathematics as it’s currently practiced,” Daniel Litt of the University of Toronto said. “But that doesn’t mean it will be the end of mathematicians.” - Jordana Cepelewicz writing in Quanta Magazine

Straight A’s won’t matter in real life

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When I was in college, I obsessed over getting straight A’s, said Adam Grant. Now that I’m a professor, “I watch in dismay” when I see students joining the same “cult of perfectionism.” They think straight A’s will provide entrée to elite graduate schools and prestigious careers. The evidence, however, says otherwise. Research across industries shows that while there’s a modest correlation between grades and job performance the first year out of college, after a few years, the difference is “trivial.” Why? “Getting straight A’s requires conformity. Having an influential career demands originality.” While straight-A students are locked in their dorm rooms or library pursuing “meaningless perfection,” their peers are developing skills that aren’t captured by grades: “creativity, leadership, and teamwork skills and social, emotional, and political intelligence.” Real career success doesn’t come from “finding the right solution to a problem—it’s more about finding the right problem to solve.” In high school Steve Jobs pulled a 2.65 GPA, J.K. Rowling had a C average at Exeter, and Martin Luther King Jr. managed only one A in four years at Morehouse College. This tells us that “underachieving in school can prepare you to overachieve in life.”

Adam Grant writing in The New York Times (as quoted in The Week Magazine) 

Grammarly Offering Authorship Tool

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Grammarly has created a new authorship tool. It tracks the writing process, showing where text is typed into a document or pasted, as well as which parts of a document are created or modified with AI. When the paper is complete, a report is generated, which students can show teachers if there is any question about the source of their work. -Wall Street Journal 

Approaching AI in Your Career

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Other than mastering AI, I suggest leaning into the parts of your job that involve your physical presence and human relationships and away from the parts that involve analysis of large datasets or bodies of text. While you’re using these news tools — figuring out what machines can do and what you can do that they can’t — you should stop to enjoy the new functions, rather than simply assessing the threat.  -Megan McArdle writing in the Washington Post

Stealing from Yourself

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There once was a thief, a man named Emanuel Ninger. The year is 1887. The scene is a small neighborhood grocery store. Mr. Ninger is buying some turnip greens. He gives the clerk a $20 bill. As the clerk begins to put the money in the cash drawer to give Nr. Ninger his change, she notices some of the ink from the $20 bill is coming off on her fingers which are damp from the turnip greens. She looks at Mr. Ninger, a man she has known for years. She looks at the smudged bill. This man is a trusted friend; she has known him all her life; he can't be a counterfeiter. She gives Mr. Ninger his change, and he leaves the store.     

But $20 is a lot of money in 1887, and eventually the clerk calls the police. They verify the bill as counterfeit and get a search warrant to look through Mr. Ninger's home. In the attic they find where he is reproducing money. He is a master artist and is painting $20 bills with brushes and paint! But also in the attic they find three portraits Ninger had painted. They seized these and eventually sold them at auction for $16,000 (in 1887 currency, remember) or a little more than $5,000 per painting. The irony is that it took Ninger almost as long to paint a $20 bill as it did for him to paint a $5,000 portrait! It's true that Emmanuel Ninger was a thief, but the person from whom he stole the most was himself. He was another in the endless list of thieves who steal from themselves when they try to steal from others. 

Zig Ziglar

A Journalist’s AI 'Go Bag'

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"What should be in a journalist’s AI go bag? For starters, the one basic thing that should be in everyone’s bag, the AI prepper’s equivalent of a flashlight and bottled water: skill at using AI tools. It is not enough to use it as a slightly better Google; you need to keep abreast of the latest releases and spend time every week pushing both its capabilities and your own. Trying to make it do your job is table stakes. Try making it write a children’s book, or invent a new game, or solve cold fusion. As with any learning process, the outcome is less important than the effort, because the effort is how you learn not just what it can do, but what you could do with it." -Megan McArdle writing in The Washington Post

The advantages of flexibility

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Flexibility is valuable in almost any aspect of life – in school, on the job, in intimate relations with other people, and even in dealing with oneself. Just think of how much more effective teachers could be if they accommodated themselves to the varied styles of thinking in their classrooms, or how easy it would be to work for people who allowed us to be ourselves and to get our work done in ways that are effective for us, or how enjoyable it would be to be in a relationship with someone who fully appreciated us for ourselves – for our own likes and dislikes – rather than for what they would like us to be. The advantages of flexibility are so overwhelming that one wonders why we don’t emphasize it much more than we do in our teaching of our children, our students, and our employees. 

Robert Sternberg, Thinking Styles

22 Articles about What AI can do now

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NBC will use Jim Fagan’s AI-generated voice for NBA coverage –The Verge 

Eldercare robot helps people sit and stand, and catches them if they fall – MIT

4 ways I use AI as an accessibility specialist – Scott Vinkle Blog 

AI Helped Heal My Chronic Pain – Wall Street Journal 

AI headphones translate multiple speakers at once, cloning their voices in 3D sound – Univ of Washington  

New Lego-building AI creates models that actually stand up in real life - Ars Technica  

An AI-created video of a murdered man is used to deliver a victim's statement at a killer's sentencing – BBC

World biometric identity network launches in U.S. with iris-scanning stores - The Washington

Visa and Mastercard unveil AI-powered shopping – Tech Crunch 

The Evolution of AI Products – LukeW

Researchers Secretly Ran a Massive, Unauthorized AI Persuasion Experiment on Reddit Users – 404 Media   

I Recorded Everything I Said for Three Months. AI Has Replaced My Memory. – Wall Street Journal

An AI-generated radio host in Australia went unnoticed for months – The Verge

These autistic people struggled to make sense of others. Then they found AI. – Washington Post

Mother feeling lonely? Pay for an AI app to give her a call – The Times

Google created a new AI model for talking to dolphins - Ars Technica  

Wearable AI system helps blind people navigate – Techxplore  

An AI model that learns to predict how quantum systems evolve – The Quantum Insider  

Google AI masters Minecraft - Semafor 

Philly’s new Vision Zero dashboard shows where and how crashes happen – Technical.ly

Invasion of the Home Humanoid Robots – New York Times

Walgreens doubles down on prescription-filling robots to cut costs, free up pharmacists amid turnaround – CNBC