AI may be transforming your job, but critical thinking is still key.
That’s according to Bluesky CEO Jay Graber. She told Business Insider that developing critical-thinking skills is “very necessary” in this day and age.
“AI is able to automate a lot of critical-reasoning tasks, and if we fully outsource our own reasoning, it’s actually not good enough to run in an automated fashion,” said Graber, who previously founded a social network focused on events called Happening.
If you’re a student, maybe that means writing your essays by hand, Graber said. The idea is to build “the muscle for critical thinking,” and keep it growing, the CEO said.
“You can’t just fully outsource your thinking, or an essay, to AI,” she added.
Graber said Bluesky uses AI in areas such as moderation and curation but never lets it operate autonomously. She said employees check and revise the output and use critical thinking to decide what actually gets implemented.
“When you let it run autonomously, it doesn’t have actual context or intelligence, or the many things that we need as humans to make good decisions,” Graber said. “And so it’s producing stuff that sounds or looks right without actually being right.”
Cultivating a range of skills
Graber advises embracing a generalist mindset. With AI providing “specialist expertise packaged up,” the real value lies in discerning what’s important.
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“You need to have the good judgment of how you’re going to use it, and then you have to have the flexibility to take that knowledge and do something useful with it,” Graber said.
While these new skills are important to learn, Graber still believes job seekers should have a firm understanding of the basics of their industry.
“I think it’s still very necessary to learn all these skills, whether it’s writing or coding or anything else that you’re going to use AI assistance for,” Graber said.
Just because AI can write essays doesn’t mean people shouldn’t learn to write anymore, she said, and the same applies to skills such as coding. While AI can help insert structure, figure out bugs, and generate code, Graber said you still need to have a solid foundation.
“If you don’t know what good code looks like, if you don’t know how to actually build a system, you’re not going to be able to evaluate its output,” Graber said.
