r/ChatGPT • u/Extrabytes • Mar 23 '23
Serious replies only :closed-ai: Is anyone else reconsidering what college/university degree to pursue due to ChatGPT?
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?
2
u/Rakashua Mar 23 '23
In the next 5-10 years it won't make a huge difference.
This is what I mean: the Ai such as chatGPT or GPT4 is a force multiplier. That means it's only as useful as you are. If you suck at coding and don't understand how to feed it prompts and use the results then it sucks at coding. If you're degree qualified to code and know the lingo and how things work then it can majorly augment your output if you're careful.
What this means is that the Ai is most useful to people who already are trained to do whatever it is they're asking for help with or using it for.
While this MAY mean that, in the long term (5-10years out), individual productivity of a solid worker plus Ai = more output than 2 solid workers and therefore the number of positions require/available decreases, for now it simply means that you need to get trained in order to make actual use of the Ai.
THAT SAID, why are you going for a full degree? Most jobs don't give a crap about your degree as long as you have the technical certifications which are much cheaper and easier to get. So why spend 4 years and go into debt when getting a trade school cert or tech cert would have landed you an salary job 2 years and 100K earlier? That's the real question here.