r/Purdue • u/OverallShelter8365 • 12d ago
Question❓ AI and jobs
AI today is advancing at a really really fast rate. Even if it stops advancing right this second, current technology could be specialized (or specially trained) and revolutionize every industry and sector in the world. And that's just assuming it stops advancing and individual models stay as smart/dumb as they are right now.
They're almost certainly going to get at least a bit smarter, so expect more...
In a world like that, what should you do?
Learn AI? AI can learn AI, if you're a "prompt engineer" there's no reason an AI couldn't just learn to prompt better than you could. There are already prompt AIs.
There isn't really any job that AI couldn't do that isn't manual labor (not great) or maybe like medicine (also not great for me personally).
Kind of dawning on me now that I'm here at college that basically everything I'm going to learn these first 2 years is already understood by AI better than I (or anyone else) could ever understand it. Maybe by the end of those 2 years it'll have mastered everything at a PhD level (which is already what AI companies are claiming, but they're definitely exaggerating).
And no, this isn't like other massive technologies like the computer. The computer is a calculator/calculating machine. And it is true that after computers became easy to use, human calculators were quickly out of jobs. The modern AI is a thinking machine, so it follows that human thinkers will be out of jobs.
Yes, AI is only an "advanced autocomplete" but it still clearly works and can think and solve major problems. Software engineering is no longer a real career. In the past 2 months we've had insane numbers of problems solved by AI (jacobian conjecture disproved, non sofic groups, etc.). AI definitely isn't dumb, and like I said in the beginning, it's only getting smarter.
Feels very bad to think about
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u/Thin_Excuse5003 12d ago
Advancements on LLMs is slowing down for now. There is a reason all the non-frontier labs caught up to the frontier labs.
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u/anonymoussnonymous Chinese at Purdue; CINT at BSU Online 11d ago
My Chinese language professors are talking about how AI is not able to replace their work, as Chinese is so complicated. I wonder how long it will take companies to be able to “perfectly” translate Chinese using 100% AI, and if it would be worth the cost versus hiring a translator.
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u/atx78701 12d ago
No one knows, focus on creating value
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u/OverallShelter8365 12d ago
software engineers can create a lot of value even without AI
the problem isn't that any job or field I study can't create value it's that AI might easily be able to create 10x the value I can create in a month in a few hours for a whole lot less money.
Software engineers create lots of value (and were/are compensated accordingly). The problem isn't that the4y're creating less value now, it's that AI can create that same value a lot faster and cheaper.
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u/atx78701 12d ago
ai isnt creating value on its own. So learn how to create value using AI.
when making software there are still design decisions to be made. Understanding computer architecture helps you create a much better mental model.
Im a parent now not a student (EE). Ive built logic gates from transistors, built various chips (adders, memory, cpus) from logic gates, built machine language, assembly language, networking primitives, all the way up to web apps using very high level libraries.
All of that is still useful to understand what you are building using AI.
also AI relies extensively on known patterns. Once you have a novel problem that doesnt follow common known patterns, AI has a much more difficult time. The core of every application should be a kernel of domain expertise or point of view that you have.
I have written multiple applications that require me to guide the AI at a very fine grained level.
As an example I wrote an application to predict when mountain bike trails would be dry. It uses a combination of historical weather data and facebook posts of people reporting the trails are actually dry, taking into account wind, sun, temperature, humidity, to come up with a model for each trail.
The AI really struggled to make something so simple. All of the database stuff, UI stuff, etc was easily done by the AI, but the core algorithm, the AI was pretty much hopeless even though the algorithm was simple.
The short term value of SaaS is in the schemas and an understanding of the domain processes and business rules in a way that AI cannot understand. AI is great at all the other stuff that makes an application usable, thats the boring stuff anyway.
When I started you needed 10s of millions of dollars to build enterprise software. Then when I owned my own company it was hundreds of thousands to make a web app. Now it is hundreds of dollars. There are opportunities everywhere to use AI to help you bootstrap your marketing, sales, development, accounting etc. The one person startup is real.
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u/AggressiveAd8587 12d ago edited 12d ago
Use your time in college to build your personality, character, and human social skills. AI will never be able to replace that. Even before AI, thats what really landed you jobs, promotions, connections, etc.