Re: AI in the workplace

[duelafn]

Given the context, it seems like "AI is evil/dangerous" isn't going to fly well as a message to bring to this meeting.

We are a small industrial machine manufacturer. We do not use AI as a company, but individuals can and do use AI on occasion. For example, I have a prompt I use that turns an SQL table definition into a Rust struct with accessors and documentation in the format that I like. I pull this out if I need to convert a large table or several tables at a time. I've also found AI search to be useful in cases where a standard search engine will fail due to an abundance of related but non-relevant results. As a bad example (made up because I can't recall my latest such search), attempting to resolve a networking issue on, say, Android can be difficult due to the high number of results that explain how to disable airplane mode. An AI query can understand an included phrase of "I checked and airplane mode it not enabled" to skip past such mundane debugging suggestions.

For a college, therefore, my recommendations are,

• Students should be familiar with the AI opportunities available including their significant limitations and dangers.
• Emphasize that there is a time and a place for AI (and that is definitely not everywhere or all the time)
• AI should never be used as a substitude for expertise
• AI tools should only be used as a convenience in contexts where their output can be verified or corrected – first-round bug triage is a good example
• AI can assist, not replace
• At this time especially, AI will not provide large boosts in productivity – both because AI currently sucks and because the added load of determining its capabilities and limitations offsets most benefits it might provide and the rapid development means those analyses must be continually re-evaluated.