How to prepare for the age of AI?

[damyon]

Offtopic:
Firstly, I believe labeling this era as 'the age of AI' is an overstatement. It seems you're referring to LLMs and perhaps image generation techniques, where images are transformed into vectors and vice versa. We've had the same technology for years, and it has gradually been improving (with a leap in 2022). While it's true that AI has dramatically enhanced productivity in specific domains, it hasn't rendered jobs obsolete. The generated answers can still be unreliable especially with obscure topics or themes where acute analytical abilities are required.

What should I learn? Any online classes or courses that you recommend?

Now, as for the actual advice:
I think it depends on your final goal. Do you want to make lots of money? Do you want to have power and status? Do you want to improve someone's life?
If there is no goal (at least as of now), I recommend learning the skills with enduring value, such as human psychology, coding/automation, cooking, etc.

To be more specific, I would also recommend focusing on your craft (I think you mentioned that you are a college graduate) and learning how to use AI in your workflows to improve your productivity.
Additionally, the ability to understand what problems people face (which can be materialistic or emotional) is always a useful skill. I cannot recommend specific courses for it, but an "introduction to sales" book can probably be a good starter.

 

[Aergia]

I haven't gotten very far into it yet but Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence comes highly recommended and seems to be what you're looking for.

 

[DarkRange55]

Become a specialist. I think it's always important to have one specialist skill and one generalist skill. But as the world becomes more complex, being a specialist rather than a generalist is probably the way to go. Also clerk-type jobs will go away first.

Charted: The Jobs Most Impacted by AI

We visualized the results of an analysis by the World Economic Forum, which uncovered the jobs most impacted by AI.

www.visualcapitalist.com

Are you referring to language models or AGI? Language models are not "true AI."

business in the next decade will be defined by (in the non-cheesy way) true AI & cloud businesses that have the hyper-scaler networks that will allow them to compete in a way that other companies can'T.
I expect two major advances in artificial intelligence in the next few years (well within the next decade):
1) Far-more-efficient neural-network chips will bring roughly-chatGPT-level AI to edge devices. Vast numbers of businesses will capitalize on this to deliver "intelligent" applications, many of which will be annoying, but some of which will actually be extremely useful. A few of the companies with useful applications will remain independent and will become financially very successful, although most will be bought up by existing major players before they get too big.
2) A few of the big companies (and military researchers) will develop neural networks with more sophisticated internal feedbacks (more-brain-like interactions between neurons). When these advances get incorporated into the more efficient neural-network chips, we will see fairly general artificial intelligence, and yes, businesses that have these will be able to compete in ways that other companies can't.

https://advisor.visualcapitalist.com/key-investment-theme-each-decade-since-1950/

AI/ robotics, medical tech, autonomous transport. Then more medium term fusion power. Fusion is hard. Even if mastered, it does not look inexpensive enough to compete with solar for many decades.

 

[RosesFlourish]

I think it's inevitable that AI will get regulation. It's just sad that it's being used for blackmail and right now there are copyright concerns. My optimistic guess is artists won't get replaced. In fact, here's a funny video ranting about animation and interpolation:

 

[Blurry_Buildings]

-Get New Zealand citizenship and buy yourself a sheep farm just in time for the AI induced nuclear winter obliterating the northern hemisphere.

-Use your woolly friends as an organic distributed wide area surveilience network against the humanoid AI and humans that attempt infiltration with their weird "electronic" contraptions.

-Exchange sheep wool for food only if necessary, keep contact with outsiders to a minimum... the AI lurks everywhere.

-Trust no one.

 

[sserafim]

Usually in python for this type of stuff, I've seen C++ used a lot as well.

Oh okay. I already know some Python. I don't know C++ though. I heard it was hard. What else?