The future of our professions? Time is now.
Thomas Steiner
Head of Cyberlearn, professor and CEO of immotour ltd - digital transformer, tourism expert, consultant and board member
We are living a defining moment: the transformation of our professions.
On November 8, 2022, I predicted during a talk given at the Swiss Museum of Transport that 5 years later, digitalization would have profoundly transformed my teaching profession. 3 weeks later ChatGPT was released. 3 months later my BA course was generated and co-taught with AI. Today, students begin to generate course contents themselves. So I'm very confident that within the next 5 years, AI will be generating AI, apps will be writing apps, and students will be teaching students.
With over half a billion applications in the cloud by 2023 (https://chiefmartec.com/2020/12/martech-2030-trend-3-great-app-explosion/), we can continue to teach software engineering and contribute to the fact that we'll soon be up to a billion. We'll simply drown in the mass. An alternative strategy, for IT as for all professions - and a real added value, would be to refocus on the "appropriation pedagogy", get users to build their own applications and students their own learning contents.
This transformative acceleration applies to all professions.
Expertise is shifting from production to support for "self-production".
I have been producing my own music albums with AI for 2 weeks now, even though I don't master any instruments, and when I sing, it usually starts raining... https://soundcloud.com/r-ai-dio/albums
A simple lyric becomes a song. A simple script becomes a course. A simple description becomes an application...
This transformation is not incremental, but broad and deep, and it's within everyone's reach. If we are to act for our professions, we must do so now.
A provocative approach, with which I largely agree. For quite a few years now, before the wave of generative AI, I've conceived my teaching activities as a gig. When it comes to the transformation you describe, I see two big obstacles: the intellectual laziness of students (who regularly prefer to ask the teacher instead of searching with Google, Copilot, Perplexity etc.). And of course, "imaginary truths" and other unpleasant surprises in an AI's answers. For the latter, improvement will come very quickly, but for the former...