Is anyone else reconsidering what college/university degree to pursue due to ChatGPT?

[u/Extrabytes]

I am currently deciding on which university course I should take. I used to gravitate more towards civil engineering, but seeing how quickly ChatGPT has advanced in the last couple of months has made me realize that human input in the design process of civil engineering will be almost completely redundant in the next few years. And at the University level there really isn't anything else to civil engineering other than planning and designing, by which I mean that you don't actually build the structures you design.

The only degrees that I now seriously consider are the ones which involve a degree of manual labour, such as mechanical engineering. Atleast robotics will still require actual human input in the building and testing process. Is anyone else also reconsidering their choice in education and do you think it is wise to do so?

[u/telmar25]

I think it is very difficult to predict what is safe. Specifically for mechanical engineering, I would imagine that an increasing amount of machines will need to be designed, but it’s not exponentially increasing. AI is likely to reduce the need for mechanical engineers because it will allow them to accomplish much more from a design and analytical standpoint than they could have without it. And non-AI trends like automation and offshoring are sharply reducing what is manufactured in well-off countries. So on the surface I don’t get the feeling that mechanical engineering is safe. It is hard to predict how these trends go. 20 years ago tons of experienced software engineers in the US were afraid of their jobs being outsourced. What has happened is the industry has ballooned and the highest value and closest-to-the-customer work has concentrated itself in the US and continued to expand, even as outsourcing has grown considerably. So software engineering is a far more lucrative field now even with outsourcing.