Guest Matt Beane

Episode 456 – Guest: Matt Bane
Guest: Matt Bane

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Kelly connects with Matt Beane, University of California professor, to discuss his new book: “The Skill Code: How to Save Human Ability in an Age of Intelligent Machines.”

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You highlight in the book that the biggest problem with AI is when the technology gets in between the expert and the novice.

“What we’re talking about is not formal training. It’s not classes; it’s not written down. It’s like learning by osmosis, by working with somebody who knows more. We don’t even have names for that in English, because we all take it for granted. Anyway, yeah, that that’s the trouble: that there’s nobody who’s, you know, on the hook for noticing or who even has the professional vocabulary to notice it. ”

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And one of the things you note is that learning – when it’s working – is uncomfortable.

“The world has become a padded playground in certain senses. The research is just super clear on this. And I found this in every study I’ve done. You must be uncomfortable, performing not at your best, and focused and like sweating in the console to be learning. You are not satisfied. You are not relaxed. You are not having fun in the capital F sense of the word. And that’s how you know you’re learning. If everything is too straightforward written by the book, by a manual and easy then you’re depriving people of the challenge that they need to learn and grow.”

 

Are the robots going to be taking our jobs?

“What’s going on now for let’s just say 2.7 billion adults in the world is not that they’re going to lose their job, but they’re going to have to change how they do their job. The stats show that they are. And change costs money and time. It’s difficult because you have to learn new skills to handle the new way to do your job. So, the best models out there – and they’re very conservative – suggest that 80% of working adults are going to have to change between 10 and 15% of how they do their jobs these days because of Chat GPT. How are they going to learn those skills? Who’s going to teach them? We’re all just taking for granted that they’re going to learn through that process that we were talking about earlier. And we’re nuking that process right now at the worst possible time. That is a trillion-dollar problem.”

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Photo Credit: Jon Chomitz