Wharton Professor Mollick: Switching to Skilled Trades Won't Withstand the AI Shock; Four Core Capabilities Are the Key to Breaking Through

Wharton School professor Ethan Mollick believes that relying on "learning to use AI" or switching to hands-on skilled trades to withstand the AI shock is of little use, because the robotics research community has already realized that there is a possibility of connecting large language models with robots. He points out that the apprenticeship training chain has already broken: newcomers directly throw requirements at Claude and submit the results as-is, yet lack the ability to judge whether the output is good or bad. The way out is to strengthen formal vocational education, or to have companies treat mentoring as a serious job and implement it properly, avoiding recruiting only seasoned veterans, which leads to a break in the talent pipeline.