From the blog of the Oxford University Press, October 16:
A generational divide: differences in researcher attitudes to AI
As part of our interest in helping academic researchers harness AI, we surveyed 2,300 researchers to understand their use of AI, as well as their attitudes and worries. Our findings show that a quarter (25%) of those in the early stages of their careers have reported having sceptical or challenging views of AI. However, this proportion falls to 19% among respondents who are later in their careers. Early Career Researchers also have more divisive opinions on AI, with fewer expressing neutral views than Later Career Researchers.
In a roundtable discussion we asked Dr. Henry Shevlin (Associate Director at Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, University of Cambridge) and Dr. Samantha-Kaye Johnston (Research Associate at the Department of Computer Science, University of Oxford) for their thoughts on why this might be:
Henry Shevlin
The survey findings were empirical evidence for something I have observed for some time. My dad is almost 80, and I introduced him to ChatGPT’s voice functionality. He absolutely loves it and uses it every day; he says he has had enough of typing on tiny buttons on a tiny phone screen. Now he just chats to ChatGPT every day.So, it was really striking to me to see that the most enthusiasm (in terms of the largest number of “Pioneers”) was found in Boomers and Gen X, whilst younger generations were a lot more sceptical.
There are all sorts of theories for why that could be, but one I will explore here is an analogy with cars and mechanical skills. When I think back to my parents’ generation who got their first cars in the 1950s and 1960s, they really needed to have mechanical skills to run a car because cars were really unreliable and broke down all the time. By contrast, I can just about change the oil in my car. My car is pretty reliable and so I haven’t ever needed any more skills than this. Also, if I wanted to do anything fancy or impressive, car mechanics are so advanced these days that I would probably need to plug in a computer to get the diagnostics information.
I think we probably have seen something similar happen with the understanding of computers. For so many people these days (and particularly for young people), the primary way of accessing the internet is through a phone or a tablet. There’s far less need and far less opportunity for the kind of tinkering that my parents’ generation did in the 90s when you had to key in commands or use Boolean search. That kind of tinkering was crucial for building understanding of the fundamentals, and for giving people the confidence to experiment and learn....
....MUCH MORE
