>He doesn't think prompt engineering will really be a job/skillset in the future

I agree with this too. But I'm not talking about 5 years from now, I'm talking about next year and the year after. The opportunities are coming now. I stated it in the post too, prompting will likely be a thing of the past before it ever really becomes a thing in the first place. I don't suggest "learning prompting" exactly, I suggest learning what AI can do for you now, and thinking about what it can do in the short term before it's totally ubiquitous. Before there's no new land to discover.

When I talk to people about how incredible smartphones and the internet are to people, all they every think about is a camera, social media, and a calculator. They simply skim over the fact you have access to most human knowledge in your pocket at all times. We still have that persistent "don't pull your phone out when talking to someone" mentality that comes across as rude or ignorant. We can literally look up any word someone uses, any reference to a a historical event, a song we want to remember, a formula, etc. We can use our phones to multiply our intelligence, yet so many times you can be talking with someone and they have zero inclination about a certain problem or task they come across when the answer is probably on the internet. We still have the problem of people believing information without fact checking it, and they assume social media is factual.

While all that stuff can currently be learned, it is important to learn how to use AI now while it's still ground zero for takeoff. AI will not magically make everyone accustomed to it, you will have to still make an effort to learn it to maximize its potential. The type that refuse to fact check will continue to do so and slip further away from being able to climb out of an echo chamber.

There is marginal returns in training the ability to use a specific tool. If you have as technologically illiterate as my granny, yes, learning how to use the internet and send a private message would make a huge difference to your life, but given that the majority population, at least in places where internet access is universal, already have a lot of experience using various internet tools, whether it is web pages, mobile apps or games, and the interface of these AI tools, at least in the current world, are not that different from another app or another website. Spending more time on FB at this point is unlikely to bring you any advantage, unless you are a business owner trying to use FB to market your product, but then, you are learning digital marketing, not using FB. Your skills of making good videos and graphics on your FB page will transcend through platforms. Even if people decide to stop using FB and use Tiktok only, the skills you gain from making those videos are transferable.

The problem with using AI tools is that, there is no universal skill of making them doing what you want. If you master the art of making chatbot A respond to what you want, it is very unlikely that chatbot B will do the same when you apply the same techniques. It is because different AI tools might have very different underlying architectures and trained on different datasets, but you don't have access to these information, so you will never know when to apply pre-existing assumptions about AI tools.