Leaps in technology lead to new skills
Casey Greene, Professor of Biomedical Informatics, University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus
Technology changes the nature of work, and knowledge work is no different. The past two decades have seen biology and medicine undergoing transformation by rapidly advancing molecular characterization, such as fast, inexpensive DNA sequencing, and the digitization of medicine in the form of apps, telemedicine and data analysis.
Some steps in technology feel larger than others. Yahoo deployed human curators to index emerging content during the dawn of the World Wide Web. The advent of algorithms that used information embedded in the linking patterns of the web to prioritize results radically altered the landscape of search, transforming how people gather information today.
The release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT indicates another leap. ChatGPT wraps a state-of-the-art large language model tuned for chat into a highly usable interface. It puts a decade of rapid progress in artificial intelligence at people’s fingertips. This tool can write passable cover letters and instruct users on addressing common problems in user-selected language styles.
Just as the skills for finding information on the internet changed with the advent of Google, the skills necessary to draw the best output from language models will center on creating prompts and prompt templates that produce desired outputs.
For the cover letter example, multiple prompts are possible. “Write a cover letter for a job” would produce a more generic output than “Write a cover letter for a position as a data entry specialist.” The user could craft even more specific prompts by pasting portions of the job description, resume and specific instructions – for example, “highlight attention to detail.”
As with many technological advances, how people interact with the world will change in the era of widely accessible AI models. The question is whether society will use this moment to advance equity or exacerbate disparities.