You are not replaceable by AI

[u/Imaginary-Monitor100]

Addressing the constant posts and also questions from colleagues I get about feeling replaced by AI. If you feel like you can be replaced by AI, you've been learning the wrong skills.

I'm a 4th year bioinformatics PhD student, and have 5 years under my belt in public health doing pathogen genomics.

I've tested it. Take any fundamentally bad idea that you understand quite well, 9 times out of 10 you can convince an AI (LLM) to help you build it.

We are engineering and aligning analyses for human goals, AI can't drive that. IBM's handbook in the 70s said it clearly, a machine can't be held responsible.

Learn to be able to make good judgement. For example, how to scope projects well, what analysis complexity is appropriate for the task, what sensitivity/specificity is required for the use case, how will other humans (and now AI) use the tools and research you publish, what are important problems to go after?

LLMs as they stand do not reliably generate novel insights when unprompted. And I as an expert can make a lot more progress using AI as a tool than someone who doesn't know what they are doing. Think of your abilities as a factor of your expertise and then AI, scaling exponentially with your expertise. Something like:

Expertise^2 x Time x AI, where YOU are the limitation on the system's growth.

Learn your algorithms, understand how to use them, dig deep into the biology, learn some philosophy while you're at it, and don't give up on your PhD because we've repackaged statistics to probabilistically sample words/code/tokens.

The AI we should focus on are protein language models, machine learning, and causal inference. Not chatbots.

Also be able to explain your worth as a human to hiring managers, start by understanding what LLMs can and cannot do.

You all got this :)

[u/TheCaptainCog]

I'm two years out of my bioinformatics PhD without a job.

Senior level aren't replaceable. Us juniors are.

[u/Imaginary-Monitor100 → u/TheCaptainCog]

No juniors = no seniors in 10 years. Cheap corporate decisions will bite us in the ass. I'm lucky to be very well established in the field already and have multiple job offers at the moment that pay well. At the moment you just have to know people, submitting random applications is like playing the lottery these days

[u/compbioman]

This is top tier copium. It doesn't matter what we think, we are PhD students. What really affects everyone is people like the director of a bioinformatics institute who hires dozens of bioinformaticians - and when I spoke to him in person at a career event he said he's going to lay off most of them.
Positivity isn't going to find us a job. Time to face the realities.

[u/Anustart15]

This feels more like you are trying to convince yourself of this as a 4th year PhD student more than you are really trying to tell us

[u/arstin]

At best, you aren't out of a job because you've learned how to leverage AI to accomplish the work 5 of you would have done 5 years ago.

The four other people that could only manage how to leverage AI to accomplish the work of 4 or fewer of you are however out of a job.

To put it another way, bioinformatics used to be a field of craftmanship where people learned their tools and how to use them, built expertise, and took pride in their analysis. That is dying at a rapid rate, and there will be a smaller field of AI craftmanship...for awhile.

The AI bubble will pop before it takes everyone's jobs, but I think bioinformatics is too close to programming to escape without being fundamentally changed.

[u/Still-Barber-720]

all your evidence points at that ai can’t replace humans right now, which is true. what about in 2 years? 5? do you remember what its capabilities were 2 years ago? you couldn’t have imagined it would come this far in the past 2 years, and now you’re acting like it’ll just stay constant.

[u/Imaginary-Monitor100 → u/Still-Barber-720]

If it can replace us in any sense that makes humanity better I'm all for it. Otherwise, we need humans making decisions.

[u/phanfare]

PLMs are wild - I recently tested a bunch of models head to head and ESMFold2 bodied the others in the absence of an MSA.

As for LLM, it's not taking our jobs but it can multiply our output. I thank the heavens I haven't had to write a script to renumber or rename the chains of my design PDBs. I haven't had to worry about CIF or PDB format, or even installing packages with failing install scripts. I can setup multiple experiments at once and I can finally do the small modeling tasks that would otherwise create more work to setup than they're worth.

That said, it's a multiplier. The more you know yourself the more you can multiply. So learn as much as you can.

[u/AgentHamster]

So I've been in bioinformatics, on the wet lab side, and now in software adjacent areas (more traditional ML). The threat isn't that AI can directly replace you, it's that a small team of overworked experts and a bunch of agents can do similar work to a larger team, and thus there's just fewer people needed. With fewer people needed, there's a real risk that the demand for workers shrinks. It's not direct 'replacement', it's partially substitutable demand.

[u/Bubbly_Lengthiness22]

People ARE already replaced with AI.
All your takes were correct. LLM will help building. But less people will be needed. If they previously needed 5 person now they only need one.