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Comment by Almondsetat | Hacker News Reader

Perhaps AI will achieve what Excel, scripting or programming failed at?

Education is slow, people still don't know how to use a spreadsheet software or scripting language to enhance their lives/work. Students don't use Excel or python to cheat on their homework or exams, so they don't really have reasons to learn those tools.

Meanwhile, user-facing AI tools are often extremely intuitive and feel quite natural to interact with, so by the time young people reach working age they already have familiarity with what they need

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There’s a high possibility that AI will have exactly the opposite effect on work productivity for young people, at least for this generation, because technology in companies around the world lags years or even decades behind for simple economic reasons.

In a similar way, the overuse of simplified touchscreen-based devices makes them unprepared for working with computers and other “old tech” permeating the modern office. Many of them do not even know what files are, and their tech skills make them almost completely unhireable.

I suspect the average tech skill is about the same as in earlier generations.

It's just that for older folks amount of time spent with computing devices was a decent proxy for tech skills. That correlation has probably broken down.

I'm not sure about the average but I have 0 data. We will see in the future because the generation currently entering the workforce still used computers a bit due to tablets and phones not being that powerful. It's all about peeps currently in school.

You need to spend time with computers to learn how to use them so if average PC usage drops I'd expect the average skill to drop as well.

I truly hope so, even IT majors at my college gave me weird looks when I said I used Excel and later Python to quickly do our math homework. I was taught very explicitly in my engineering course to do so, as my teacher had an Excel sheet made for calculating hydraulic cylinder requirements which inspired me to do all the work ahead of time. “Do everything to reduce downtime”, he’d say, because downtime is lost revenue.

To be fair, Excel skills are tightly bound to Excel.

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