Musk, Jack Clark, and Jaime Teevan all suggest that young people should broaden their knowledge base and learn how to ask questions—but the barrier to skills like prompt engineering is being eaten away by models themselves, and the entry-level jobs needed to practice asking questions are also shrinking because of AI. This is the right direction, but the path is missing. (Background: Musk praised China’s AI on CCTV! “The world’s top compute power—within two or three years, they’ll make up the gap.”) (Additional context: Musk predicts that in 5 years the world will have at least 100 million humanoid robots, even 1 billion.)   Three people with completely different identities have recently given young people the same advice: don’t bet on just one specialty; widen your knowledge as much as possible. They are Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla; Jack Clark, co-founder of Anthropic; and Jaime Teevan, Microsoft’s Chief Scientist. All three are in the tech industry, so it’s not surprising their direction aligns. Three people, one answer Musk recently gave an interview to CCTV, and the host asked him how 20-year-olds can find their value during the AI transition. His answer wasn’t a list of majors, but a range: “Accept the broadest possible foundational education—covering arts, sciences, engineering, and also broad general knowledge.” The logic behind it is simple: “If you want to know what to ask robots for, you need the ability to organize the questions first. The broader your general knowledge, the more accurately you can ask—what people call prompt engineering.” In the same interview, Musk also predicted that within 10 years there will be at least 1 billion humanoid robots, and it’s very possible it won’t take that long. Following this logic, the more robots there are, the more human roles will shift from “doing things yourself” to “asking for things,” and the quality of your requests determines the results you get. Clark, earlier this year, said at a conference that he graduated from a literature program, which is not typical for a co-founder at a leading frontier AI company—but afterward it proved useful: he learned a great deal of history and how people tell stories about the future. He believes what truly matters is knowing what questions to ask, and maintaining intuition when insights from different disciplines collide. He also recommends avoiding purely rote memorization of programming and instead choosing degrees that emphasize interdisciplinary synthesis and analytical thinking. In a (Wall Street Journal) interview, Teevan laid out the list in more detail: flexibility, adaptability, willingness to experiment, critical thinking, and courage to question existing views. Teevan calls these metacognitive abilities—plainly speaking, the ability to manage how you think—and said, “For this, traditional liberal arts education is really important.” Devalued question-asking skills But on the other hand, as models get better and better at directly understanding natural language, many people think the need to painstakingly polish phrasing to please the model is no longer as necessary as it used to be. The barrier to question techniques is being eaten away step by step—by the model itself. So what Musk truly seems to be saying probably isn’t about phrasing技巧; it’s one step earlier: do you know what you want? The machine can’t help with that, because it relies on understanding the world—breadth. Clark’s wording is clearly more precise: he talks about “knowing what to ask,” not “knowing how to write instructions.” This distinction is important. Skills can be learned quickly, but they can also become outdated; judgment requires long-term accumulation, and the stronger the machine is, the more valuable humans’ judgment becomes. Related reports Musk boasts that SpaceX’s AI will “overtake within half a year”! Anthropic and OpenAI! Forbes criticizes: just listen and don’t do too much 4 seconds earn a year’s salary! Musk 2025 makes a wild haul of $158.3 billion in compensation — 2.5 million times the salary of a Tesla employee Anthropic IPO prospectus revealed! Valuation may reach $2 trillion—shocking speed of burning cash and full disclosure of “AI control warning” “How to choose a university major in the AI era?” Musk says this… This article was first published on BlockTempo (Dongqu/Dongqu Trends—most influential blockchain news media).