The Impact of AI on Computer Science Degrees

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Computer science has consistently been one of the top majors in the United States for the last decade. But with the ability to task A.I. to code, startups and tech giants alike are hiring fewer and fewer entry-level computer scientists. Reports suggest that at major A.I. companies, the hiring rate for software engineering jobs has fallen over the course of 2024 from a high of about 3,000 per month to near zero. If enrollments in computer science degrees dry up as jobs disappear, the whole pipeline from education to employment could crash.  It’s not so surprising that chatbots might threaten technical jobs before writing ones. -Leif Weatherby, director of the Digital Theory Lab at New York University, writing in the New York Times

18 Articles about how Businesses are using AI

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Why Companies Are Already All-In on AI After Arriving Late to Everything Else - Wall Street Journal

Amazon CEO tells employees that AI will shrink its workforce - Washington Post

AI layoffs start hitting a wide swath of Corporate America - Quartz

601 real-world gen AI use cases from the world's leading organizations – Google Cloud 

Amazon is reportedly training humanoid robots to deliver packages – The Verge  

No AI, no job. These companies are requiring workers to use the tech. – Washington Post

The Future Of Leadership In The Age Of AI – Forbes  

Americans to business: Take AI slow and do it right - Axios 

Google offers AI certification for business leaders now - free trainings included – ZDnet

Microsoft helped kick off the AI boom. It needs humans more than ever, its CEO says - Semafor

Wake-up call: Leadership in the AI age - Axios

How ‘causal’ AI can improve your decision-making - IMD

Walmart Is Preparing to Welcome Its Next Customer: The AI Shopping Agent – Wall Street Journal

AI agents bring big risks and rewards for daring early adopters - ZDnet 

AI-first: did Duolingo make a fatal mistake? - UX Collective  

Professors Staffed a Fake Company Entirely With AI Agents, and You'll Never Guess What Happened - Futurism 

Google AI Overviews leads to dramatic reduction in clickthroughs for Mail Online – Press Gazette 

An AI Analyst Made 30 Years of Stock Picks — and Blew Human Investors Away - Stanford Graduate School of Business

How AI can help you finally demolish your business's mounting technical debt - ZDnet 

Fast, Frictionless, and “Good Enough”

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The Industrial Revolution replaced artisanal craftsmanship with mechanized production, enabling goods to be replicated and manufactured on a mass scale.  Shoes, cars, and crops could be produced efficiently and uniformly. But products also became more bland, predictable, and stripped of individuality. Craftsmanship retreated to the margins, as a luxury or a form of resistance.  Today, there’s a similar risk with the automation of thought. Generative AI tempts users to conflate speed with quality, productivity with originality.  The danger is not that AI will fail us, but that people will accept the mediocrity of its outputs as the norm. When everything is fast, frictionless, and “good enough,” there’s the risk of losing the depth, nuance, and intellectual richness that define exceptional human work. -Fast Company

Measuring Intelligence

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People have been measuring what they believe is intelligence without having a really firm understanding of what it is that they are measuring. Many theorists in psychology believe that conventional tests of intelligence measures only a relatively narrow aspect of intelligence. The result is that what we may take as a difference between two people in their levels of intelligence may reflect only a difference in a fairly small portions of their levels of intelligence.

Robert Sternberg, Thinking Styles

The Best AI Bot to Use

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"In a head-to-head test of AI bots, 'An AI tool’s capability in one field didn’t necessarily translate to another. ChatGPT, for example, might have been tops in politics and literature but ranked near the bottom in law. I’d also recommend running your document through at least two AI tools, so you can compare the results. And for anything that’s actually important in your life, it’s definitely worth taking the time to read it yourself.” - Geoffrey A. Fowler writing in the Washington Post 

Encouraging Critical Thinking in Children

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If we want our children or students or employees to express themselves creatively, then we have to give them the opportunity to do so. It doesn’t matter much if we tell them that we value their creative thinking, and then criticize or forestall every idea they propose.

From time to time, I do workshops for teachers, parents, and businesses that are eager to encourage open-ended, exploratory, creative thinking. One unfavorable sign is when someone asks me exactly what they should do to encourage creativity. They want me to tell them step by step, blow by blow. Their desire is an unfavorable sign because if they want a recipe for creativity, the won’t find it. Moreover, someone who wants to be told exactly what to do is not likely to model a creative style, no matter how much they may wish to do so.

Ultimately, you must encourage creative thinking by modeling it. It is hard to encourage creative thinking if you do not model it.

Robert Sternberg, Thinking Styles

"I use ChatGPT for Comedy"

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"I use ChatGPT for comedy. It's not going to give me a finished joke, but it's going to start the conversation. I find it useful when I'm writing the setup for a joke. With a parody, it's not one-to-one. You're taking things that are different and exaggerating them. I was writing a roast speech for a guy at a coding conference. I asked ChatGPT to delve into the inside jokes of coding communities. What's amazing to me is I do not have writer's block anymore — like truly. I think writer's block is the feeling of solipsism and it is the feeling of being totally alone. And I don't feel alone anymore because of this tool." - Sarah Rose Siskind, comedian

21 Articles about AI & Legal Issues

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 Trouble with AI 'hallucinations' spreads to big law firms – Reuters

Alabama paid a law firm millions to defend its prisons. It used AI and turned in fake citations – The Guardian  

New Arizona law prevents AI from making health insurance denials – AZ Family 

Australian authors say no to AI using their work – even if money is on the table – The Conversation  

AI firms say they can’t respect copyright. These researchers tried. – Washington Post

Artificial Intelligence is now an A+ law student, study finds - Reuters

Arizona Supreme Court unveils AI avatars to announce rulings - Arizona PBS

In lawsuit over teen’s death, judge rejects arguments that AI chatbots have free speech rights – Associated Press  

Law&Crime Recreates Scenes From Diddy Trial With AI and Official Transcripts – Mediaite 

ChatGPT Turned Into a Studio Ghibli Machine. How Is That Legal? – The Atlantic

Deepfakes on trial: How judges are navigating AI evidence authentication -Reuters

Former school athletic director gets 4 months in jail in racist AI deepfake case – Associated Press

AI copyright report sparks new fight - Axios

White House fires head of Copyright Office amid Library of Congress shakeup – Washington Post

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

This ‘College Protester’ Isn’t Real. It’s an AI-Powered Undercover Bot for Cops – 404 Media

AI Can Assist Human Judges, But It Can’t Replace Them (Yet) – David Lat Blog

Lawyers face sanctions for citing fake cases with AI, warns UK judge – Reuters

White House fires Copyright Office leaders as controversial AI report surfaces – Mashable

Anthropic's lawyers take blame for AI 'hallucination' in music publishers' lawsuit – Reuters

Disney and Universal Sue A.I. Firm for Copyright Infringement – New York Times

What if the AI prompts You?

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You can prompt these tools to ask you questions, to get you thinking, to prompt you to start writing. The instinct is to say, 'Oh, this thing just writes for us.' But it can also ask me questions. It can also get me thinking and shape my ideas. What if instead of you being a prompt engineer, you see what it can prompt out of you? The Al can be a nonjudgmental collaborator that helps pull out these great, unique insights from you. -Stew Fortier, founder of Type.ai

Is Artificial General Intelligence Around the Corner?

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In a recent survey of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, a 40-year-old academic society that includes some of the most respected researchers in the field, more than three-quarters of respondents said the methods used to build today’s technology were unlikely to lead to A.G.I. Scientists have no hard evidence that today’s technologies are capable of performing even some of the simpler things the brain can do, like recognizing irony or feeling empathy. Claims of A.G.I.’s imminent arrival are based on statistical extrapolations — and wishful thinking. -New York Times

Tough & Tender

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In some parts of American society, it is considered inappropriate for men to express any emotion save one—anger. When a man learns to express other feelings and not be so concerned about whether others think he is strong or “manly,” he takes a major step forward.

Sure, there’s a time and place to "come on strong and take no prisoners." But it's a denial of your humanity to oversimplify, hiding behind a narrow definition of manhood. Men are more complete when they are both tough and tender. Maturity comes with the understanding of which one is appropriate at what time. 

Stephen Goforth