Naomi Alderman: "[P]erhaps the most important skills of discernment you can learn to prepare for work in the world of AI are the skills of research. How bad is the world possibly going to get? Maybe quite bad, I can’t promise anything, humanity has been through rises and falls before. But the one thing I can promise you is that powerful people and organisations will always, always want to have access to true, accurate, relevant information and to thoughtful, intelligent analysis based on it. This has been the case throughout human history. It is based entirely on self-interest: people who have power want to hold onto power and therefore they need to know how things really are and what will really work. And if you imagine yourself as part of a future resistance against great structures of power, those abilities will be valued there even more. So you need all of the old-fashioned skills:
a. the skills of a historian: how to work out whether something you’re reading is plausible or just seems a bit fishy, how to evaluate sources, how to understand the limitations and biases of whatever you’re reading
b. the skills of proper research: where to go to research stuff that isn’t on the internet. There’s a lot of stuff that’s not on the internet, still. Those are the things that will gain value as everyone can use internet search tools. How to, as Robert Caro1 says, turn every page and come up with something no one’s found before
c. the skills of taste: how to tell whether something is beautiful or ugly, whether its message is meaningful or just a cliche, whether a building will have the right or the wrong effect on the people inside it
d. the skills of imagination and creativity: using the human parts of you to feel the zeitgeist, to try to sense what it is that you are craving, what within you needs expressing, what questions are unanswered in those around you that desperately need an answer
There are many others. I’ve listed these because I am certain that they have been valuable since the Ancient Greeks until this very day. When you have those skills, AI can be a useful tool at speeding up some processes. Without those skills, all you’ll produce even with the best AI is stuff that is extremely, aggressively mid."