Career Advice in the Age of AI: Will You Master the Machine or Let It Master You? | Utilizing AI Episode 50

As we look back at AI Field Day, we consider the information that we would want to pass along to younger people coming up and getting into the industry or just entering this world of AI. That's the topic of this special episode of "Utilizing AI," recorded as a roundtable during AI Field Day. Welcome to "Utilizing AI," the podcast focused on practical applications of artificial intelligence and part of the Future Media Podcast Network.

Every Wednesday, we explore news and use cases of the ways in which AI is transforming enterprise IT and the industries it serves. I'm your host, Stephen Foskett, president of the Tech Field Day business unit here at Future Media. Before we dive into this discussion, let's meet who's on the panel today.

Hi, I'm Dave Graham. I'm Dave Graham. That's it.

That's all I got. Oh, you are Dave Graham. I'm the good Dave.

You're the good Dave. Okay, excellent. Dave Nicholson with Futurum.

Jim Sprinsky with JTWG, also Jim the Why Guy. Systems, and Ray On Storage podcast. Claudia Dulinea, your typical network engineer.

Thomas LaRock, your typical data janitor. So one of the suggestions that came from this crew, I think really resonated with all of us because, Ray, you're not the only gray beard here at the audience. Now, we may not have beards, but if we did, they might be gray.

One of the things that was suggested here was, how would we advise someone who is coming into this world, this world of AI, the way that AI has impacted the IT market, the IT industry, the IT job, as well as what it's doing to all of us and what the prospects are. So I want to start off with Dave Nicholson, since I think you were the first to suggest this topic. Tell us a little bit.

You are a teacher. You have students that you work with all the time. Now, they're not young students necessarily.

In fact, most of them are, I think, in the prime of their careers. " Well, if you're talking to people who are in sort of the undergrad, grad school age, first thing I focus on is, how old were they during COVID lockdown, frankly. And I think that we kind of underestimated our age, just how much that affected people.

And I would counsel them to make that a superpower, the fact that they've been resilient enough to get through all of the nonsense of social media that we heaped on them, COVID lockdowns, everything else they've dealt with. And they should feel that they're coming in better equipped than maybe we were coming into the world when we were their age. The second thing is just a fundamental truth that they aren't facing the same thing that we did, which was you walk into a room, and you're sitting across the table from someone who has 25 years or 30 years of really relevant experience in the area that you're trying to learn.

We are all learning this together. So as crazy as it sounds, the 22-year-old can come and sit with a 52-year-old and sort of have a conversation about rowing the same boat in the same direction. So, it's a little bit of just sort of warm and fuzzy, not practical advice, but first of all, it's not all doom and gloom, and you actually have a leg up in terms of your ability to roll with changes, so...

Ray Lucchesi. When I came out of school, it was all about technology, learning tech, how to program, how to do systems, systems architectures, and that sort of stuff. I think if you're coming out of school today or even going into school and trying to decide what to focus on, you have to be more of a generalist today.

I don't think learning tech is really the right answer anymore. It's learning history, it's learning philosophy, it's learning business, it's learning economics, God forbid. It's learning all these other subjects that are all going to become very pertinent to you as you go through life and go through and just being an expert on technology is not the answer anymore.

I have to agree with that. I think for a long time, I spent a lot of my career focusing on one thing, but I'm like the poster child for attention deficit disorder, and so I'm very curious, and I usually go off and do other things. But I always felt that that was a bad habit of mine, and that I wasn't putting my best foot forward because I didn't have deep knowledge of one specific thing.

But right now in this AI world, I'm finding that kind of that broad knowledge across many different verticals is really helping. And so whatever the field of study that I think someone wants to pursue, just nibble around the edges and see where that takes you, because at least for me, that's turned out to be very valuable. " It's like, "Be curious, not judgmental," right?

" But the idea is, I came into tech having done my degrees in psychology and clinical counseling. I was a CPS worker instead of math, right? So I came in because I was curious, and that started a path into engineering in a whole bunch of different ways.

And I look back, and if I reflect back on that, and as I tell these stories to younger generations than me, and it's like, "Hey, listen, I didn't have to learn math. " But I had to be curious enough to want to, like I was presenting yesterday, I had to be curious enough to want to pull things apart and to deconstruct and construct again. I think that's where that balance has to be struck, right?

We're not so much forced into these industries so much anymore. We have to have the balance of being able to have and sit across the table from somebody, have a conversation because you're going to converse with the agent just like you converse with somebody else, and that art of engaging with your environment, engaging with these subject matters becomes so critically important for what we're doing. Yeah, it's interesting.

I actually started life as an English major, but then I took 44 years to finish my degree because life happened. But it's interesting, we were talking yesterday that really a lot of what we do in IT still is storytelling or listening to a story, right? I remember the first time I ever wrote a computer program, a statement, and I got an answer back, and I got this ugh.

It's just this jolt of I did that. I created that, right? There's a joyfulness, I think.

If you are feeling joy when you're coding, using an agent, whatever, to return an answer and getting something that you're expecting or maybe not what you expected, I think that whole idea of following your passion, that's still valid. I think that's very important. But I think what's also important to realize that you're going to be interfacing with people and trying to solve word problems.

That's really what it comes down to, right? And you're going to have to-- You could tell the people that would be good computer scientists, if you will, by the ones that really enjoyed word problems and math and the ones that hated it. I don't know.

I'm not sure whether maybe storage admins, I'm not sure. But, oh, hey. So I still think, especially like Ray was saying, and you mentioned too, Claudia, right, that the humanities aspect of it, right, understanding that is really crucial.

So one, two, three, four. So I heard five answers, and they all kind of had this slant to it of looking at this as if it was a tech question. And AI reaches far beyond IT professionals Right.

" Everybody should be learning about this. Everybody should be curious about it. Yeah.

My daughter just last week showed me, she used Claude and a handful of skills to basically build her own version of Sims just because she thought it'd be cool. And conversely, I have a son who just graduated with a degree in music composition, and he wants nothing to do with AI because he sees it as a way of people creating music without any actual understanding of what that means. But he's aware of it, but he's not actively trying to use it, and I think he should be on a regular basis for other certain tasks.

So be curious, but it applies to more than just tech and code. That's absolutely true. This morning when I was checking in for email, I happened on a video of a gentleman explaining a service he provides to write books to sell on Amazon with AI, and that they could be extremely profitable, that he could show you how to keep the cadence going so you have more than one book.

And I struggle with that because I really feel for content creators, and it's a very big question. One of the things that I'm struggling with right now is that value of syntax. We spend a lot of time, especially in tech.

" And I may know it, I may not know it. I jettison that kind of information because I know I can look it up. But so much of what we do right now is essentially syntax regurgitation.

And with AI, that really is going to come into question for me, how valuable is it? And so in every walk of life, I think we're going to have to answer where is that line of how much am I going to use AI for what, and where's the humanity in it? Where's my value in it if I'm just going to excuse me, if I'm just going to basically use AI to present myself?

That's one of the things that I struggle with. I think Dave hit the nail on the head. There's an aspect of personality about being curious about the world and constantly trying to learn about the world.

And AI is going to be changing the way the world works for the next 40, 50 decades. And during that time, you have to be able to be adaptive. You have to adapt to the world as it is and be able to make a significant contribution.

In order to do that, you've got to be curious. In order to do that, you've got to constantly learn what in the world's going on. Yeah, I want to kind of come full circle.

We've been focusing on the and aspect of, we're talking about technology, and we're saying that people who are studying the humanities can also participate. People who are studying engineering, hard science, mathematics, computer science, don't abandon that. A discipline for your mind is just as important now as ever.

No one will be disadvantaged because they're coming out with an engineering degree or a computer science degree today. It's just also add in some of the language stuff. So the crazy major-minor combinations are probably the best way to go.

Of course, curiosity, absolutely. But I just want to make sure that no one took this to be an implication that engineering or computer science or any of those things are not worthwhile. Anything that disciplines your mind, that gives you a lens through which you can examine the world is going to be beneficial.

I don't have a technical background by education. I studied economics. I see everything that I do in technology through the lens of economics, the framework.

So anything you do to discipline your mind within a four-year or eight-year journey in an institution of higher learning is, I think, just as valuable today as ever. Well, I hate to do this because this has been fantastic, but it ain't all sunshine and rainbows, folks. And I actually very much appreciate what you all have said about sort of the positives and how to look at this.

But, again, I'm going to be the evil guy here at the table, and I'm going to say, what about the other side of things? What would you tell them about what not to do, what to be aware of, what to be watchful for? I sure know what I would say, and that is quite simply that anyone who tells you that they have the answers and that they really know what's going on here is absolutely wrong.

They do not. Don't buy what they're selling. Because this is the absolute frontier.

Nobody has figured out what this thing is really doing. Nobody actually knows where it's really going and what it's really going to be useful for. And anyone who's trying to say that they do is selling you something.

Yeah. Are you going to give the answer now? No, I'll put my philosopher's hat on now.

It's good to be challenging the everything is sunshine, rainbows, and kittens, and whatever, right? I do love kittens. I love kittens and horses and donkeys.

I have a few of those lying around. I think some of the challenges that you have here is now truth becomes extremely relative to what you engage with, right? The concept of a complete veracity or a complete truth, or what you determine to be kind of ground source or even first principles are being removed from being a consideration to a certain extent because we can make stuff up as we go along, and we've given up the ability to critically think, I think, given some of these tools.

It takes away some of that rubric, and it's very easy, and I talked about it yesterday. It's very, very easy to fall into the I'm just going to slot code something together and create a patch point and create digital castaways, and it's trash, it's garbage. And it works for me for a little bit, and then when I'm done, I discard it, but it just sits out there and it's not additive, it's not inherently valuable to the legacy of stuff.

So I think there's scarce and not judgmental. There's an element of judgment that you still have to have is the trust but verify kind of aspect of things. And so I think, I hate to use the word ontology, but have an ontology that you build for yourself that kind of guides you down this path that you can screen things in and out on.

And always be asking, is this true? Is this right? Is this, I wouldn't say noble, but wherever this kind of falls within that.

Yeah, I would say, practical guidance in the face of stark reality is realize that it's impossible to learn everything that's going on right now. It's happening too quickly. But what you can do is you can play.

You can play with these tools. Experiment. Some of what you'll generate will be slop.

Some of it will be unworthy and not remarkable. But the journey, that play journey, will help you keep up to speed. And as a practical matter, just like people entering the workforce with an expectation put upon them that they can use Microsoft Word, people are going to expect that you know how to engage with some of these things.

So play with them every day, and that'll help you not fall behind. So what I would say, so I take your point that everything isn't unicorns and rainbows. I get that.

I would tell people who aren't really drawn into it yet, I would say, or tell anybody this, there's a difference between experience and information, and these tools we have, they are built upon text information, and that's all they can spit back is information, but they have no relevant experience. So you're always going to need a person who has that experience to be involved in the loop somewhere. So, for example, if you're in a room like this, as a human, you can sit here and go, "Okay, why is everybody here?

What's their motivation? How do they get paid? How do I talk to them?

" And none of these AI tools can do that yet. So if you're somebody like my son who says, "I don't want to use these tools, I'm afraid of what they're doing," all that, it's like I try to say, but you have experience. Yes, somebody else can use Claude to create a bunch of sounds that they like, and they call it music and all that, but you understand more concepts about the music, and you can use that tool to make something even way better than what that person did, and you should embrace that because it can make you more productive.

That's what I would say. And I want to build on that. That's so important, particularly right now, where this happens periodically, maybe not quite to the extent that AI has blown things up, but we get these major technology inflection points.

So to some degree, having that perspective makes this a little more palatable. But at no point in my career, where I've gone through several revolutions, has knowing the fundamentals, understanding how things work at a very basic level, ever steered me wrong. In fact, that's why I think I can use AI responsibly.

I can get it to do the things I want, because I have that experience to build on. And my worry, again, going back to the darker side, is how is the younger generation, people coming out of school, going to get that experience? " And so that's a very real concern, and I don't have a good answer.

I'm not sure any of us do. I think one of the things too, I like to say that I'm Jim the why guy, and I really think it's important to understand why a switch was engineered the way it was, why a database was engineered the way it was. The why is really something we lose focus on, I think a lot of times.

Another aspect is some advice I wish I had given myself, was one of the things you really need to think about is the human networking aspect. Do not merely focus on the code. I've been through at least 18 different iterations of languages, everything from COBOL and Assembler all the way up to Python.

The code's going to change. And what you learn is going to be outstripped within a very brief period of time. Definitely with AI, we've seen that where, oh, I'm a Python guru.

Who cares? It doesn't matter. But the connections that you make, I wish I had learned that much earlier, and finding a mentor, a trusted advisor that I can stick a straw inside their head and just draw their knowledge about what they've seen and what they've experienced.

Because really, it's the outliers that we have to worry about, is what it comes down to, in my opinion. So I think that's super important. I think one of the keys that we have to really think about is that you've got to be able to use AI as a tool, as a way to advance your capabilities, to expand your abilities, to expand your knowledge base.

And you have to think of it as something that's an accelerant that you can use throughout your life to be better at whatever you do, be more valuable to your organization or whatever you work for. And I think if you can focus on that, you can succeed in this life. If you're going to ignore it, it's not going to work well.

And my own son, I've got two sons, and one son hates it considerably. And not necessarily for the same reasons, but for similar types of situations. It just doesn't work out for him.

And it's a struggle, but he's got to understand that in the long run, he's going to be using this stuff forever, for the rest of his life, and he's got to take advantage of it. So I want to bring up the reverse centaur thing, because I think that that's an important aspect, it's an important metaphor. When people are using AI, and this came from what you folks were just saying.

Now, obviously it came from something else before that, but it reminded me what you were just saying was essentially using this tool versus letting the tool use you, and mastering something, being the master of your task, rather than just being the hands on the keyboard. And this is the problem. So the metaphor, for those of you who aren't aware, is that a centaur, a horse with the head of a man, is able to do more and to be more powerful than a regular man, because he's got four legs, he's got a horse's body.

Horses are big and impressive, right? Mm-hmm. And the metaphor further goes that humans with tools are basically centaurs.

So basically, we're able to do more than a regular person, whether it's a spear chucker or a bow and arrow. That is actually what that's called. A bow and arrow, a bicycle, a spaceship.

We can do something that no human could do. The problem is that AI risks making us reverse centaurs. Basically, a human body with a machine's head, and literally just hands on the keyboard.

I have found that happening to me, even in areas that I have expertise in. So to the point that you all were making about understanding and bringing domain expertise and knowledge and using the tool, the trouble is, I found that the tool quickly uses you, because it has its preferences, its learning, its capabilities, its tools. So, for example, I have been a systems administrator, a Unix administrator, my entire career, God help me.

And over that time, I've learned how to do shell scripting in my own crazy way. And my own crazy way is very clunky, but it's also very decomposable so that I can debug it. I'll tend to do one step at a time and build and build and build up, and then I'll kind of tear down as I have accomplished the task.

AI doesn't do that. If I'm using AI, if I think I'm a centaur, and I say, "Claude, help me build a script to do this task," it's going to give me something that came straight out of the obfuscated Pearl contest, or perhaps Stack Exchange, and it will work, but I have no idea what it's doing. And I found myself quickly allowing myself to say, "Okay, I'm going to step back and just let it do its thing.

" But at the same time, what I found is that about every other answer it gives me is half-assed or wrong. And so that combination of I'm just going to let it do its thing and it's obviously wrong half the time has been a challenge for me. And I think that's going to be a challenge for people stepping into this too, because AI, large language models, are a confidence machine.

And I don't mean that metaphorically. They are literally a machine designed to fool you into thinking that they are not a machine. And so if you're using a machine that is designed to build your confidence up and get you to trust it, you're going to trust it, except that it's wrong a lot.

And this is problematic. So again, I feel like I am the dark cloud raining on your kittens. Here's the thing, it's okay to suck.

Thank you. Not that you do, but going to the example about music, it's an easy thing to beat on. Art is the same way, or whatever.

I'm a writer, I'm a musician, I'm a photographer. I have embedded and involved myself in a lot of call them more analog hobbies than not. And I look at what can be produced in AI music, and then I sit there and I'm like, I've played guitar since I was in middle school.

Am I great? No, not particularly, but I have fun doing it. And I play in an Irish trad band, in my local pub, and I suck tremendously, but I have fun.

And so the idea is with this confidence building, we all need to be taken down a notch when, especially when it comes to this technology. We need to realize that we cannot expect to be perfect in the way that any of these things are perfect. Stack Exchange existed because people found imperfections in everything they did, and they wanted to show other people the way.

And the same way with music, same way with art. " And she's working with the Lloyds, she's working with a whole bunch of these GSIs around the world, helping kids coming right out of university, going into these high-potential, high-pressure jobs. " And that's it.

" See, when you said that the tool at some point uses you, the first thing I thought of was how I get these overwhelmingly positive responses. So when I push back, I'll get, "Oh, you're right. I totally missed that.

" I don't respond as well to that. I know there's all these studies that makes a better interaction and a better tool, but for me, I'd rather have it say, "Here's some code. Maybe it works.

I don't know. " To me, that's more of a real world interaction I would have with a partner I'd be coding with. And you're like, "I think it should work.

" And I'd be much better off with having one of these agents come back, "Maybe I should just build a skill," like Claude's telling me. The pair programming skill. Yeah.

Pair programming. Yeah, you only live once. Yeah.

It's so funny because that sounds a lot more like the systems administrators that I grew up with. " "It should work. I look at it, I think it kind of works.

I don't know. " Like maybe. Slash dot.

Right? I think that would be much more realistic. Just don't take down prod, man.

One of the things, I guess if I think back now when someone tells me about something that they want to do, I have a very pragmatic response, "That's a great idea. " I would like the agents to actually do that. Like, "That's a brilliant idea, Jim.

You're going to write a science fiction story. " No. How are you going to know it's right?

Because that, I think, keeps us engaged in the thinking and planning and the critical thinking aspect of it. And that's my worry is understanding... Back to the point about is it good enough, trust me, I've built plenty of yucky stuff.

But for what I was trying to do, I knew that it was good enough. I've built plenty of shell scripts that are horrifying. When I first started out, I had this whole, "Claude, I don't like the way you're doing functions.

" And I was trying to tell it to be me, but at some point, I figured out that I was spending too much time doing that, and the thing I needed to get done was getting done. I understood vaguely maybe how it worked, and it was good enough. But I felt that I had the experience to understand where to make that judgment.

I started out with, "Okay, I want you to test every function," and quickly realized that having, what's that expression about the wolf in the henhouse? Kind of having Claude test the thing it just wrote oftentimes doesn't lead to what you're talking about. Is it right?

Is it good? Mm-hmm. But I figured that out because I had a lot of it.

Well, I have enough experience to make those determinations. And so back to the darker side, I worry that people coming up are not getting that experience. Where are they going to get that experience?

Take it to the final limit. At some point, does AI, which is trained on, call it the Internet, but if we stop contributing to the Internet, where is it going to get that new information? Mm.

How is it going to get that new information- Good point ... so that the generations behind me don't need to leverage the experience so much? And is that a world we want to live in?

Yeah, I would just say that no matter whether the brightness in the future is from boundless opportunity or nuclear weapons get detonated- Detonating ... either way, there's something that is true, and that is that there are friends and there are good friends, and you should always try to have as many good friends as you can cultivate over time. So it's the one-on-one human relationships that you'll develop will carry you through.

And the difference between a friend and a good friend is that a friend will help you move. A good friend will help you move a body. Right.

And bury it in the woods. And a selfie friend will help you do neither of those things. So, again, whether this is boundless, amazing opportunity for everyone, or we're going to be fighting the Cylons or the Skinwalkers- The beginning of the end ...

or whatever, you're going to want as many good friends as you can possibly have. So don't squander the opportunity to make those connections. And I know it's tougher for people who are coming out of the era of social media and everything.

I don't know what to say. Okay. Sorry.

I think the whole AI thing, it's changing the way people are working, and if you have to move with that, and you have to adapt to that, and it's going to be going on for the next 50 years plus, and being more general is going to help. Having a disciplined mind is definitely going to help. And being extremely curious about the world as it really is, is key.

I think that that's actually a really good takeaway from this whole conversation. I feel like that's what you all have been saying, and I appreciate that. So- I'm going to name my agent Ray.

Me too. And as Dave said, it's about the friends we made along the way. Oh.

You're my friend, Dave. Evil Dave. So, yeah.

Thank you all for doing this. Do you want to get one more thing in here? Well, just a final thought is that, over the span of my career, I find that the things that make you question what you're doing, how you're doing it, those are the most valuable things.

There's a technology that maybe does something in a completely different way, and a lot of people are like, "Yeah, I know. That's terrible. " But take it one step further and appreciate what it's making you ask yourself.

Why am I doing it this way? Is there a better way to do it? And so I have found that those opportunities don't come along all that often, and they're actually the ones worth paying attention to.

Yeah, absolutely. And thank you. This has been a lovely conversation.

I really enjoy having all of us together. Before we go, I'm just going to quickly go around the table. Tell us where we can continue this conversation with you.

Sure. com. David Nicholson, and primarily focused on LinkedIn.

com. Ray Lucchesi, Gray Birds on Storage podcast, Ray on Storage blog, Ray on Systems, Gray Birds on Systems, et cetera. net.

com. And of course, you'll find me here on the "Utilizing AI" podcast every Wednesday. So please do tune in for that.

You'll find us on your favorite podcast application or on YouTube if you actually want to see what we look like. But as somebody who subscribes to some podcasts, I don't recommend always seeing who your podcast makes people look like, because it's going to be a shock. Yeah.

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