AI Skills you may want to consider
This post was inspired by another post about learning Python, Data Science, and Math as the top skills of the future. In the past I believed the same — but that was at “GPT-2”-Time or for everybody else 2019. Today my list of skills to acquire is profoundly different:
– Neuroscience
We will deal with countless versions of AI and all have one in common, get as close to Human Intelligence as it can get. Is this a bad thing? Not at all.
I don’t think the farmers who made the first acre of corn about 12,000 years ago were angry about the person who developed the plow about a thousand years later. It allowed farmers to plant more corn much more easily. AI is the modern plow. Not to augment our muscle power but our brain power. The day one fully comprehends what that really means, changes everything — but only for that person. AI doesn’t change anything else but that. It’s YOU and everybody else who uses AI, who possibly changes a lot when using AI. But what do you need to know to be successful?
It is beneficial to understand some basics about how our brain works. Hence NEUROSCIENCE. Learn how cells connect. Learn how pre- and post-synaptic actions work and get inspired by how high-performance AI Agents could work in the same way. When we built our first Neuro-AI-Agents at BlueCallom, we left the digital 0|1 tech field and looked at how the brain does things like airplane builders know probably anything about any bird alive or dead. The human neural network, it’s conscious layers, it’s way to decode and encode information, and it’s speed far beyond electric signals is overwhelming. You don’t have to rebuild the brain to do great things with AI — but it helps find new ways to solve problems.
– Linguistic (neuro linguistic)
Understanding these magical Large Language Models requires a base understanding of Linguistics. And once you understand our highly structured and carefully shaped human language, you will understand why computer languages were crutches to get to what we call AI today — but that’s the end of a fantastic era I was born into.
The new programming language is called “Natural Language” aka Chinese, English, French, German, Italian, Korean, Vietnamese… And a GPT system is the compiler for that language. If you know how language as a process works, you are ahead of the curve to craft powerful prompts. Always keep one thing in mind:
You ‘speak’ to the most knowledgeable ‘person’ or entity that ever roamed planet earth, knowing almost everything that we publicly learned and what ever was documented in history, in every school and university. And that thing can build relations between any event, discovery, situation, thing and person you are putting into your request.
To ask the right question with the right background, in the right context decides whether the answer meets your expectation or not. This is why Linguistic is a key to have good conversations with your AI — and that means excellent, comprehensive, yet compact prompts. It shaped our own learning to write prompts and inspired us to create a linguistics oriented prompt development system that allowed us to build million-dollar prompts. It’s also the reason why we now prefer natural language over computer language and why we create Neuro-AI-Agents with prompts and not python. Another learning:
A Large Language Models (LLMs) contains language snippets and relationships, not computer code. So we need to interface with natural language not code.
This is certainly a much larger effort in the beginning but resolving the complexity, linearity and rigid structure of business software cannot be resolved with yet another code development system.
– Other skills / talents to develop
– Common sense development – Abstract thinking – Critical Thinking – Ingenuity Development
It would exceed the scope of this post but they are all highly relevant when dealing with an AI. Develop a common sense to judge what makes sense and what does not. Every situation will be different and you need to think for yourself. Be able to abstract the important from the less important, true or false, and find the core among all parts. Nobody is perfect — that’s also true for the AI. Critical thinking is a must when dealing with an AI. No matter how ‘intelligent’ it appears. Ingenuity is the reason why we did not extinct. And maybe the reason why biological life can exist beyond the lifetime of our planet. AI cannot survive without us. But it can augment our intellectual ability — as long as we understand how to use it. Unfortunately, those talents are not — yet — taught at school or university but there is lots of knowledge out there and courses you can sign up for.
In nay case, the AI Skills you may want to consider are Neuroscience, Linguistics, Critical Thinking, Abstract Thinking, and ingenuity.
How did I end up with that skill set?
We know today that AI is so much better in Python than we ever will be. No-code systems will replace conventional coding for one reason: Natural Language is the new programming language. Hence, “Linguistic” is one of the two top items on my list. Same with math and data skills. Hence, The AI Skills you may want to consider should include: “Neuroscience, Linguistics, Ingenuity, Critical Thinking, Common Sense, and Abstraction”.
Elevating the use of our brain
Today we have a choice to elevate the use of our brain, very much like we did when we developed the first complex tools like a plow and had the choice to use it at a farm about 12,000 years ago. Don’t get stuck on building ever better plows, build machines — that was what we did around 1765 when we mass-produced fabric for the first time.
Forget building better software for an AI — Create better thinking by leveraging AI to a degree that allows us to get rid of the many boring repeating tasks. Don’t get stuck with better coding, augment your intelligence — and crack into an AI with your amazing Prompts and Agents that is key in 2025 and already today.
Engineering is a skill for building a technology. But now we are using technology to solve problems with our brain and the help of AI. AI Skills you may want to consider for that seem to be neither coding nor engineering but an understanding of language and how we shape thoughts and process them. The challenge of those who write prompts and agents for others is not coding – but understanding what questions they may have, what domain expertise they have and how to make a leap in business efficiency and productivity.
Human Intelligence Augmentation
The term ‘Human Intelligence Augmentation’ was coined by Douglas Engelbart in the 1960’s. Only today we can make his vision a reality, which is part of our mission at BlueCallom.
It doesn’t make you more intelligent — like the plow didn’t grow your muscles. But it augments your intelligence to a degree that is almost incomprehensible today. We created an innovation process that helped us develop six true breakthrough innovations over two weekends and were rewarded with the German Innovations Award 2024.
We built a single prompt to assess an enterprise ESG Report in 10 seconds, which took a week to be carefully assessed manually by a human. Does it kill jobs? No, but we, who built that prompt, may be seen as a job killer. So what about freeing jobs for more intelligent work? There are an estimated 100,000 problems on Earth that are too complex to solve, how about taking those on instead? Crafting prompts and agents to solve problems is a huge task. It needs the skills we talked about above. And most people use ChatGPT only as a Google search replacement.
Last but not least, there is a new thing called the Gen-AI Economy. Learn all about it: business Models, Financing, scaling, payments, and recurring revenues in the Gen-AI space.
Learning how to leverage linguistics to get more out of a conversation with an LLM and learning a bit from neuroscience about how to build powerful AI-Agents is the task at hand. To do that we are working on a Gen-AI Academy concept and wonder if you have any inputs?
What skills do you see relevant to make a career over the next 40–100 years assuming you reach the age of 130 — which is a good probability?
#GenAI #future #skills #no-code #agents #GPTBlue #BlueCallom
