Tentative pre-coffee thought: it’s often been considered really valuable to be ‘T-shaped’; to have at least shallow knowledge of a broad range of areas (either areas in general, or sub-areas of some particular domain), while simultaneously having very deep knowledge in one area or sub-area. One plausible near term consequence of LLM-ish AI is that the ‘broad’ part of that becomes less important, because you can count on AI to fill you in on the fly wherever you need it.
Possible counterargument: maybe broad knowledge is just as valuable, although it can be even shallower; if you don’t even know that there’s something relevant to know, that there’s a there there, then you don’t know that it would be useful to get the AI to fill you in on it.
I think I agree more with your counterargument than with your main argument. Having broad knowledge is good for generating ideas, and LLMs are good for implementing them quickly and thus having them bump against reality.
Tentative pre-coffee thought: it’s often been considered really valuable to be ‘T-shaped’; to have at least shallow knowledge of a broad range of areas (either areas in general, or sub-areas of some particular domain), while simultaneously having very deep knowledge in one area or sub-area. One plausible near term consequence of LLM-ish AI is that the ‘broad’ part of that becomes less important, because you can count on AI to fill you in on the fly wherever you need it.
Possible counterargument: maybe broad knowledge is just as valuable, although it can be even shallower; if you don’t even know that there’s something relevant to know, that there’s a there there, then you don’t know that it would be useful to get the AI to fill you in on it.
I think I agree more with your counterargument than with your main argument. Having broad knowledge is good for generating ideas, and LLMs are good for implementing them quickly and thus having them bump against reality.
IMO the best part of breadth is having an interesting question to ask. LLMs can mostly do the rest
Yeah, well put.