A recent study found artificial intelligence appears to be a greater threat to entry level jobs for software developers and computer programmers and a Drake University computer science professor says it appears professional experience makes someone more resilient as AI influences business decisions.
“Recent college grads have a lot of book knowledge that is maybe easier to automate than the kind of knowledge that a mid-career person has,” says Chris Porter, director of Drake’s Artificial Intelligence Program, “…but the students that we have that we’re putting out there who don’t have that expertise and experience yet, they’re more vulnerable right now.”
Drake’s AI major has been offered since the fall of 2020 and Porter says it’s been designed to give students the right experience and he warns them to not rely solely on Chat GPT and other forms of artificial intelligence to solve problems. “Students who major in AI at Drake, maybe half their curriculum is technical and the other half is philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, linguistics, design, law,” Porter says. “…So I tell them, you know, ‘The digital ethics course that you take is just as important as the machine learning course you take because you can automate machine learning, but being able to solve ethical problems, like, your employer’s going to rely on you to have that know how and have that ethical outlook and be able to lay out the issues and that’s not something that you can easily automate at all.’ And why would we?”
Chris Snider, who teaches digital media classes at Drake, says one of their priorities is helping students land internships and have classroom experiences that are like an entry level job, so when students graduate they’re applying for that next step up the job ladder. “We need to make sure we’re giving them advanced skills in their area, plus the knowledge to apply AI ’cause there are a lot of people out in the workforce who would rather just bury their head in the sand (and say): ‘I don’t want to use AI. I don’t want to learn a new thing,'” Snider says, “and so I think our students can have an advantage.”
Snider and Porter made their comments during a recent appearance on Iowa Press on Iowa PBS.