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   Paul Cantrell (inthehands@hachyderm.io)'s status on Sunday, 24-May-2026 11:46:50 JST Paul Cantrell

   RE: https://toot.cafe/@baldur/116623365748048798

   “My guess is it is not as ubiquitous as the nightly news, legislators, and the frantic calls from university administrators make it seem.”
   …
   “Urgency is meant to flood the mind of the customer so they can’t take a pause to consider whether the thing that’s being sold really needs to be bought.”

   Thank you, Sonja Drimmer — and Baldur for sharing the link.

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     Paul Cantrell (inthehands@hachyderm.io)'s status on Sunday, 24-May-2026 11:50:16 JST Paul Cantrell

     in reply to

     Sonja Drimmer’s post asks us to conduct our own informal survey of whether job listings actually require “AI skills,” whatever that might mean.

     As it happens, a colleague shared this fascinating graph from a fairly bland report. It gets at roughly the same question. Note the position of “AI skills” in the list.

     This is for 2026.

     https://naceweb.org/docs/default-source/default-document-library/2026/publication/research-report/2026-job-outlook-report-spring-update.pdf

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     Alistair K (libroraptor@mastodon.nz)'s status on Sunday, 24-May-2026 12:26:32 JST Alistair K

     in reply to

     @inthehands Crikey, that high!? We might explain this by few respondents knowing what AI is, and reporting "AI skills" when they meant something more like "get answers from a chatbot because I don't know what search engines are either" skills.

     Last time a "professional" raved at me about how great it was that AI was saving him so much time writing reports, I told him that my time is increasingly spent on fixing the garbage in those reports and theses. I lamented how it unfortunate it is that these tools are being used by people who've never heard of basics like Hebbian backpropagation and he stopped talking.

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     Paul Cantrell (inthehands@hachyderm.io)'s status on Sunday, 24-May-2026 12:26:32 JST Paul Cantrell

     in reply to

     • Alistair K

     @libroraptor
     At least some portion of this is “what the CEO mandated” or “what HR heard about at the last conference” or “what a company thinks will make it sound cool.” But even in that context, good old “ability to work in a team” tops the list same as ever.