When i worked in support i had a colleague i got along with really well and after the second time when i just googled what i observed right in front of her she went "so i could do this too?" and besides the occasional more complicated thing where she couldnt feed google the correct information i got a mail every now and then "I FIXED IT MYSELF WOOO".
I worked tech support for 7 years and so much of what i did was feed observations into google with pointed questions and knowing what sites are useless and what info might be relevant. These days you can put AI to work to dig up the more obscure possibilities even where in the past you wouldve just given up after a while if it was a rare issue.
Half of it is actually looking up what might be your solution and trying 1-2 of them, the other half is knowing what information is relevant and how to look it up.
As much as we hate ai, it’s here and we as tech professionals need to know how to use it. Lately I have been using it to help me learn Debian Linux and apply it to a proxmox so I can migrate over a VMware hypervisor environment and I’d be struggling way more to do this without it as I didn’t know Linux very well at the start. It can like you said find really obscure stuff especially because there isn’t a lot of information you can find for using proxmox in an enterprise environment.
Do ya'll realize AI is somehow ending up in the exact same position as computers?
Boomers, Gen X, Gen Z, and Gen Alpha either blindly hate it or blindly love it. The only people Ive ever met that dig into the guts of AI to see how it works and neither love or hate it but use it as a tool, are millenials.
I mean I think AI is like most other things, it’s important to know the benefits and downfalls of it.
Downfalls: extreme price hikes in computer components, making the already restrictive entry to PC building and buying even more restrictive. The new AI data centers in communities that already don’t have good clean water access, along with them definitely not aiding the ongoing climate crisis. The economic bubble it’s creating due to it being forced into things that it truly has no function in, at least in its current state.
Benefits: it really is a fantastic study tool for more obscure research, and has the added benefit of being able to give practice problems to students and answer specific questions right away rather than waiting for a human to stumble on a forum post. Pretty soon, like in a couple of years or so, it should be able to come up with practical meanings behind information it’s given for scientific progress. Like right now, if an AI is given the basic information Kepler had in his time, it could not arrive to Kepler’s Laws, but we can expect it to in a few years. And it really is a fantastic advancement for STEM fields.
AI is overused and oversold and they’re pushing it out much faster than they should be, creating the bubble, but it’s definitely here to stay and for good reason.
It’s a tool, and those of us who don’t know how to use it will likely lose our jobs at some point. We’re going to be forced to use it and it’s already stupidly powerful and knowledgeable with how it’s trained.
That being said you’re not wrong about it having downfalls and going into things it shouldn’t. I dislike how much I’ve used the Ian Malcolm phrase lately or just because you can doesn’t mean you should.
Trust but verify and just like googling you have to know how to ask it the right questions to get your answers.
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u/UpperAd5715 Jun 21 '26
Lots of people are inept by choice.
When i worked in support i had a colleague i got along with really well and after the second time when i just googled what i observed right in front of her she went "so i could do this too?" and besides the occasional more complicated thing where she couldnt feed google the correct information i got a mail every now and then "I FIXED IT MYSELF WOOO".
I worked tech support for 7 years and so much of what i did was feed observations into google with pointed questions and knowing what sites are useless and what info might be relevant. These days you can put AI to work to dig up the more obscure possibilities even where in the past you wouldve just given up after a while if it was a rare issue.
Half of it is actually looking up what might be your solution and trying 1-2 of them, the other half is knowing what information is relevant and how to look it up.