Adults Lose Skills to AI. Children Never Build Them. (Psychology Today, 3/22)

[LisaM]

34. I see this with software all the time. I am not a computer scientist

I am an English major, but when I was in college (mid 80s) we were supposed to take some classes that were in a different discipline from our major so I took computer programming classes. I took BASIC, Fortran, and COBOL.

There was a pre-requisite for the first class, which was Logic 101 and which was offered through the Philosophy department.

I cannot stress enough how this has helped me. First, the class in Logic, which I would never have taken otherwise. It was a solid foundation and I learned Boolean logic.

Next, the programming classes (I really loved Fortran) which have been immeasurably useful over the years with the various software programs I have used at work. I was always able to understand the underlying principles of filtering data, incrementing variant, etc., no matter what software program management capriciously chose for us to use and often ended up training the other users at my jobs.

I work in trademark law, and searching and reporting are huge tools that we use. I don't know that I am naturally good at this, but my programming background helped a lot.

I've been at this for a while and increasingly, I see new users who simply do not grasp the back end of what they are doing. They all want to push a button for quick results. There are programs that do this now, but they often miss things. I remember when one company introduced a product that did design searching using OCR. The baby lawyers loved this product, but I was able to quickly prove it had missed results through the shortcuts. I kept that example around for years (and sent it to the search company so that they could improve their product). It gets worse with each batch of new employees.

I am not saying this to toot my own horn or to dismiss younger employees as lazy or stupid. This is how they have learned things. The underlying principles hold no value for them because they don't even know they are there. I am really glad it wasn't that way for me.