Coexisting with AI: How can young people win at the starting line in the era of artificial intelligence?

Tencent Parenting

2024-07-01 11:20Tencent parenting official account

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01Artificial intelligence (AI) has become one of the most transformative technologies in the world today, and it has a profound impact on the future career development of teenagers.

02AI technology has basically been equated with the average level of graduate students in China's 985 schools, which belongs to the stage of strong artificial intelligence, changing the nature of work and the job market.

03Teens should develop AI-related skills, such as creativity, problem-solving, and the ability to use AI tools, to adapt to future careers.

04However, the development of AI technology has also brought a series of ethical and social responsibility issues, such as data privacy, unemployment, and declining creativity.

05Parents and schools should guide young people to make informed professional and career choices to face the challenges and opportunities brought about by the AI era.

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Driven by the wave of digitalization, artificial intelligence (AI) has become one of the most transformative technologies in the world today. Not long ago, two leading figures in the Internet industry, Zhang Chaoyang and Zhou Hongyi, had an in-depth discussion on the choice of majors for college entrance examination candidates in a live broadcast. Among them, Zhou Hongyi especially recommended cutting-edge fields such as artificial intelligence, energy and biology, which not only represent the development trend of science and technology, but also indicate new trends in the future workplace.

The rise of AI has had a profound impact on the future career development of young people. It not only changes the nature of work, but also provides young people with broad career prospects and unlimited possibilities for innovation. But at the same time, it also brings a series of challenges, and how to find their own position in the AI era has become a problem that every teenager must face. In this issue of Tencent Parenting's "Growing Up Stories", we will delve into the impact of AI and artificial intelligence on the future career development of teenagers. We invited Tencent News Knowledge Officer, National Level 2 Psychological Counselor Qingtian Mother; Ph.D. in Artificial Intelligence from Peking University and Dr. Yu, an AI expert from Stanford Entrepreneurship Mentor; Liang Hong, an expert in children's AI art and a publisher of several children's AI monographs, analyzed how AI technology is shaping the future job market, discussed how teenagers should prepare themselves to adapt to this change, and how parents and schools can guide teenagers to make informed professional and career choices.

Sunny Mom: What is the current stage of development of Al technology, and what is the possible development trend in the future?

Dr. Yu: Generally speaking, the current artificial intelligence is basically equivalent to the average level of graduate students in China's 985 schools, which belongs to the stage of strong artificial intelligence. For the vast majority of people, artificial intelligence was originally a relatively distant thing, starting with ChatGPT, especially at this year's Spring Festival Sora conference, which made more ordinary people familiar with it. For artificial intelligence, it can be simply divided into two main stages. The first phase can be called Phase 1.0. If you use a mobile phone as an analogy, it is the so-called era of feature phones, such as the scanning code payment of mobile phones, which may also be the technology of artificial intelligence, and the IQ of artificial intelligence at this time is still relatively weak compared with ordinary people. The second stage can be called the era of artificial intelligence 2.0, that is, generative AI. When you learn to use artificial intelligence, you will suddenly find that it can generate articles, pictures, videos and sounds, so now this stage is also called the strong artificial intelligence stage.

Liang Hong: From the perspective of enterprises, I would like to talk about what kind of changes have taken place in the past two or three years. We began to provide book illustrations to the publishing industry in 2022, and at that time, the industry basically did not recognize this matter and was skeptical, but in less than two years, we have established contact with many domestic publishing houses to provide them with AI-assisted design services, which represents the improvement of the efficiency of the industry brought by AI, and the part of AI painting, manuscript, and even AI layout design has far surpassed 80% of human illustrators. From another perspective, we can also see that the development of AI technology is changing with each passing day, and even the speed of the change may not be able to describe it, and in the past month, there will be more than 10 related news. At first, we thought that AI was an efficiency tool, but after thinking about it, we found that it is not only an efficiency tool, but also began to change the mode of production and production relations, thus bringing about huge changes in the social structure.

Sunny Mom: About 80% of the art design, or the work that everyone thought was very creative and aesthetically capable in the past, has actually been quietly affected, there are many digital exhibitions, immersive exhibitions, it is already using AR or VR, or even data to do it, and there are also a lot of art work, which has been gradually marginalized. In September last year, we had a very interesting conversation with the AI team at Tsinghua University, when we had a draft comparison, we found ten artists, and we used AI, and finally found that everyone invariably chose AI paintings.

Sunny Mom: How does Al technology change the existing career structure and job market?

Dr. Fish: When a new thing comes along, if you don't understand it, either you fear it, or you resist it, or you despise it. But the more this time we should know, the more no one should question whether artificial intelligence is real or fake, and artificial intelligence will no longer be like other technologies, when it appears, it is said to be a subversive thing, but after a while, it is not so good. Instead of looking at what changes might happen in the future, let's look at ourselves, what can we grasp, have you ever learned about artificial intelligence, have you used it to make a picture, have you written a song for your child, have you learned a little bit more about artificial intelligence? I think when you put that into your own practice, the possibilities for you to grasp the future become greater.

For example, before the emergence of AI, when we talk about a large factory, it has a whole building and tens of thousands of employees, and after the emergence of AI, when we talk about a large factory, it may only have a few people or a dozen people, and when we measure it, it is not how many people and how many assets it has, but more about its influence on human beings. People who study art may be the most opposed to AI tools, and editors are also resistant, and we may feel offended or invaded when something new comes, but I think AI is here to help us, at least in the short term, we can get a huge boost from it.

Sunny Mother: Many people have a kind of doubt, the question of new things is that people have not learned to walk, they want to fly, and they will worry that everyone will become unreliable in the future, for example, he should have mastered the basic knowledge before creating, but now he has skipped all the basic steps. In fact, when new technology comes, we don't have to deliberately think that it will replace us, and there is a kind of arrogance of vested interests, it actually solves a simple problem, not a customized problem, so I think it will change the structure and the market and must happen in a way that we can't imagine.

Sunny Mom: What AI-related skills should teenagers develop to prepare for their future careers?

Dr. Yu: I use the word "refactoring" in many lectures, and one of the basic premises of refactoring is that you have to be aware of it, and at the same time, you have to be willing to give up some of the things that you might have taken care of, and you may also get more newer things. In the past, we used to learn to memorize, memorize something and then output it, but today when you think about it, observe it, and make some attempts, you can immediately get a result, and you can quickly give feedback and corrections. You want to design a circuit board, but you have never learned it, it doesn't matter, today with the blessing of AI, you can learn it quickly, so maximize the use of AI as a tool, productivity, and amplify the ability.

Hong Liang: Refactoring this thing requires you to stand at a higher level, rethink the tools you use, the people you serve, the purpose of your work, and then design a better process when AI comes in. The other is creativity, McKinsey mentioned in the 2030 workplace talent change survey: the demand for creativity in the future vocational ability is gradually increasing, reaching 19%, and the original writing ability, quantitative ability, and statistical analysis ability The demand for positions has dropped sharply, because AI can replace people, so in the use of computing power and data, human beings do not need to have such strong skills, but have a higher skill requirement for creativity. However, I think that for a long time, AI and humans will work together, and it is not AI that is replacing humans.

Sunny Mom: The people we use this tool themselves have temperature, in fact, we can also better use this tool to achieve what we want to do, I have tried it myself, for example, a problem, I threw it into the AIGC tool, and then use its perspective to look at it, and I will make a comparison according to my own experience and judgment. What I find interesting is that maybe the tools and technology seem to be richer because it's data-rich, and it's more structured and logical.

Sunny Mom: How does Al technology promote teenagers' innovative thinking and problem-solving skills?

Dr. Fish: Improving skills, social and emotional skills, and cognitive skills. AI is a meta-ability, and when you master this ability, you can use it to reconstruct all your knowledge and understanding of the whole world. Now it's useless to rely on rote memorization, the process of mastering new skills is useful, learning a new language, learning a new knowledge, learning to meet new people, learning to understand a new world, all of these are useful. When our child was young, she would have all kinds of whimsical ideas every day, and every time she finished speaking, she could only say that you thought it was good. Now in turn, I will grab her and say, you come and tell a story to Dad, and then I will put the story she tells into the AI, form it into a relatively complete story, and then generate books and picture books, which can also be made into video cartoons. So it's not about letting the child do things entirely with AI, but about letting it help the child refine their ideas.

Liang Hong: The education of the previous generation is to cultivate all kinds of talents for the industrial era, and everyone needs to be able to store more and more knowledge, and at the same time, it needs to be very capable of calling on knowledge. In the future, the amount of knowledge stored may not be important, because there is a very vast ocean of knowledge brought by the AI era outside, so the ability to call up knowledge and solve knowledge becomes very important, and they can be very good at using tools to solve today's problems. For example, we teach children to use AI tools to draw, input an instruction to AI, AI based on its computing power and data volume, can feedback a painting in real time, when children see this painting, they will say this is what I want, or not what I want, AI will continue to modify, in the process of producing a lot of paintings. This is not an art course, but more of a thinking training that trains children to use AI and their imagination and creativity.

Sunny Mom: What ethical and social responsibility issues have been brought about by the development of Al technology, and how should teenagers understand and deal with them?

Liang Hong: When the members of our own team learn AI, there will be three stages, the first stage is to learn to use AI tools, the second stage is to learn to rely on AI, and try to solve everything with AI, but we must not stop at this stage, if we stop here, there will be ethical and moral problems, and we will lose our creativity, so the third stage is to pull him out of the second stage and learn to have independent thoughts and judgments, AI is just a tool, not a leader. If you can't jump out of the second stage, it's hard to really get into the free creative process. For children, tools are born at the same time as them, so using tools to solve problems is a natural instinctive habit, so parents and teachers need to be guided, to solve problems as a guide, let him use AI tools to solve a specific problem, in the process to evaluate how much the child's autonomy and creativity are, can not be completely laissez-faire.

Dr. Yu: These questions are bound to arise, but at the moment, they are not particularly fundamental. From the perspective of learning, after the emergence of a new tool, we should first consider how to make good use of it as soon as possible to improve and grow our learning and cognitive ability. When entering the commercial society, it has some rules of the commercial society. At the global level, they are all more cautious and inclusive. Prudent tolerance means that we have a certain degree of tolerance for these small problems in the development process of new things, and we can change them when we encounter them. Therefore, I think development is the best solution to solve and face this problem, and we must face it positively and continue to learn and use it.

Sunny Mom: In the era of AI, what is the importance of lifelong learning, and how should teenagers use AI for lifelong learning?

Liang Hong: I think that before you can train your child to become a lifelong learner, parents must first become a lifelong learner, this is the best way to educate, no matter how you ask your children, it is better to show them, you have to make sure that you are curious about the world, and have been exploring new technologies and solving various problems. I've received countless visitors, some of them are curious, some really want to learn, some are afraid, some want to resist the threats brought by the new era, and every founder also wants to make the team's employees become active embracers of AI, but it turns out that learning is very difficult for adults, so adults themselves must become lifelong learners before asking children.

Dr. Yu: In this era, don't say let your child learn first, you have to learn by yourself first, it doesn't take a few years, it doesn't take a day or two, or even an hour or two to get something. As long as parents have been in junior high school or above, they can use AI software, which means that there is no threshold for this thing, and the problem here is, when you realize that AI is such an important thing, have you done some action? It is actually difficult for parents to ask their children if they don't learn and demonstrate by themselves, so parents also need to grow up twice, and the era of artificial intelligence needs parents and children to grow together.

Sunny Mom: Maybe most people's understanding of AI is still stuck in the fact that you ask it questions and he answers you, or it just chats with you for a day, falls in love, and provides you with some emotional value, but in fact, it can not only help you do analysis, help you organize documents into PPT, it can actually do a lot of things, depending on how you are willing to domesticate it, it is a very easy to use senior assistant. So for many parents, first of all, it depends on whether they can keep up, everyone is already evolving, you can't go back to the previous era, for AI products, it is more like a good teacher for children, it can provide some support to children in some information and technology, and help children learn better.

Sunny Mom: What advice can I give to my children on professional and career or interest development?

Dr. Yu: Recently, the question of whether to apply for the computer major has been very popular, in fact, the more important AI is, the more you should consider it in many ways when you are faced with a choice. First of all, when everyone realizes this, the score will definitely go up; Secondly, whether it is a computer or AI, just use it well, you are not the one who created AI, there is no need to say at this time, because AI is popular, you rush up, don't blindly make choices. Of course, if you want to create AI and do the underlying research and development of AI, you can choose a computer major.

Liang Hong: The rest of our lives will coexist with AI, so this is the truth that we must clearly recognize, and we have been talking about learning AI, I think the good news is that learning is not so hard and not so troublesome, we don't have to worry about whether the child can learn to use chopsticks, we only need to worry about what he wants to eat and how to eat. In the future, what we need to cultivate is that children are more imaginative and creative, if they really want to express themselves and create art, they will naturally be able to learn the drawing tools of AI, and if they have a song in their hearts that they want to sing but can't sing, they will naturally be able to learn the music tools of AI.

Sunny Mom: When the new technology came out, everyone actually stayed in the concept, saying that it was good or not, but there were actually very few people who actually tried it and saw how this thing could be used by me. From my own point of view, we should give it a try, and when you and your child can really realize that a lot of things are just a tool, or just a choice, you can choose how to use it and where to use it.

Finishing: Chen Yanbo

Review: Cai Juan

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