Life and Physics

Thanks to Hetan Shah and Margot Finn on Bluesky, I came across this article by Gillian Tett in the Financial Times. It’s a discussion about the rhetoric and reality of AI adoption in business with, as you’d expect, a focus on the financial sector and its regulators. The bit that caught my attention was the description of a New York financier evaluating, for the first time, summer interns who had grown up using AI. While they appeared impresive initially,

… when senior financiers later probed their ideas they found them alarmingly shallow.

Consequently this person’s company made fewer return offers and is now focusing less on graduates in science, technology, engineering and mathematics — and more humanities students instead.

Now, I am speaking as a physics professor and a physicist of course. In my experience, there is a lot of critical thinking involved in science, engineering and maths, and I get a bit testy – grumpy even – if I think my humanities colleagues are trying to claim it as their thing.

However, there is also a prevalent “get stuff done” imperative. I learned my ways of working in a world where if you didn’t think critically at the start, you could waste a lot of time. I mean, years. A career even. I suppose the FT equivalent would be buying up sub-prime mortgages.

As I watch the students and postdocs around me exploit the productivity gains of rapidly-improving AI tools to solve problems, write code, test hypotheses, develop and validate new techniques – “get stuff done” – I have two concerns.