Posted on 04/27/2026 9:13:23 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
Plenty of people are concerned about the rise of artificial intelligence, or AI. Two of our four kids are freelance graphic artists, and they are (legitimately) worried about their incomes being yanked as more people use AI for simple graphics chores like designing logos, and increasingly for more complicated work, like graphics for television programming and websites. It's a fair thing to be worried about, but as I have advised them both, that genie ain't going back in the bottle, so they'd best figure out how to work with it - or find another line of work.
These kinds of worries are, increasingly, spreading through the younger generations, and at least one report informs us that young college kids are seeking out AI-proof lines of study.
Two years ago, Josephine Timperman arrived at college with a plan. She declared a major in business analytics, figuring she’d learn niche skills that would stand out on a resume and help land a good job after college.
But the rise of artificial intelligence has scrambled those calculations. The basic skills she was learning in things like statistical analysis and coding can now easily be automated. “Everyone has a fear that entry-level jobs will be taken by AI,” said the 20-year-old at Miami University in Ohio.
A few weeks ago, Timperman switched her major to marketing. Her new strategy is to use her undergraduate studies to build critical thinking and interpersonal skills — areas where humans still have an edge.
“You don’t just want to be able to code. You want to be able to have a conversation, form relationships and be able to think critically, because at the end of the day, that’s the thing that AI can’t replace,” said Timperman, who is keeping analytics as a minor and plans to dive deeper into the subject for a one-year master’s program.
That seems a little fuzzy. Who says AI won't one day take over a variety of tasks like marketing? It may be hard to imagine now, but the capabilities AI has today would have been hard to imagine ten years from now - and these are young people, with 40 or 50 years of career ahead of them.
At least some of these young students are aware of the trend and are trying to react. And, there are still disciplines taught in the universities that won't be replaced by AI, or at least, not completely.
There's another consideration, though, that doesn't involve six figures of student debt. There's a possibility that the kids in this article have, apparently, not considered, and it's a possibility that isn't likely to be taken over by AI any time soon: The trades.
Unless there is some startling and sudden improvement in robotics in the near future, then professions like carpentry, plumbing, electrical work, and so forth will be safe from the AI revolution. An AI may be able to write code, but for now, at least, it can't drive a nail or replace a fuse box. A computer hooked to your car or truck may be able to run a diagnostic and tell you that your alternator is failing, but it can't replace the alternator.
All of this seems part and parcel of this notion of "every kid should go to college." Not only is that patently untrue; many kids, in fact, should not go to college, but it's caused our nation's young skulls full of mush to neglect careers which are honest, honorable, and lucrative. We need more welders, mechanics, electricians, and carpenters, and we always will. And AI won't be taking those jobs, not anytime soon.
You really do not understand the trades, the skill required and where automaton technology is at, to think they will be replacing workers.
It will be way longer than 5 to 10 years.
The better play is to learn to use the robots that are designed to aid those trades.
Hajnen is curating and posting news about the AI rollout
https://drivegrowthhq.com/resources/ai-news/
I’m in the marketing department at my job, although my job is more customer facing than they are.
A few weeks ago we had a two day AI assisted product idea session. (The marketing geeks call it “Ideation” because they seem to like made up words)
The company paid some AI clowns to come in and tell us how we can input a germ of an idea and the AI thing (it had a human name which I immediately forgot because I refuse to call a machine by its name) which was supposed to fill in everything else.
For the most part it was useless. Most of what it filled in was nothing but fluff with no basis in fact behind it. We had some of the company science people in the room and I’m sure they were cringing at some of the impossibilities this expensive toy recommended.
Yea, it’s here to stay but if that’s all it can do, count me as not impressed.
The Ukraine is low on soldiers
Answer, land drones
In a move toward fully autonomous warfare, Ukraine’s Defense Ministry plans to procure 25,000 unmanned ground vehicles by mid-2026.
This initiative aims to replace human soldiers with robotic systems for all frontline logistics and double the 2025 deployment rate.
I am amazed nobody has started offering retro tech free cars yet.
...and do not be reading any woke nonsense published in the last thirty years
No, CS majors are plunging. 8% in one year. I’ve argued for a while that colleges should diversify computing offerings so that not everyone needs to go through computer architecture and algorithms. (These are very useful for SOME people to be taking, but there have been a lot of careers where programming and database knowledge would be very helpful, and modern coding doesn’t have to worry about trash collecting and data pointers.) But I wouldn’t suggest coding ANYMORE.
“An AI may be able to write code ...
To paraphrase R. W. Emerson, code is not programming language statements; it’s a code-making idea.
Emerson said that music is not rhyme and meter; it’s a music-making idea.
Hillsdale.
Citizens Eric Schmidt , one of the Google oligarchs wanted human like killer drones developed for the Ukraine /Russia war.
Schmidt, in the same interview told tech students that stealing your coworkers work is acceptable in the scramble to the top of Tech Bro culture.
I would add, look into the work required to support the AI
Source: Tom’s Hardware
The Insight: Utah’s Military Installation Development Authority (MIDA) on Friday approved a development agreement for a hyperscale data center campus in Box Elder County that could eventually consume 9 GW of power, more than double the state’s current average electricity use of roughly 4 GW, according to the Salt Lake Tribune.
The project, dubbed Stratos, is being developed by O’Leary Digital, the infrastructure arm of Shark Tank investor Kevin O’Leary, and would span 40,000 acres of private land plus 1,200 acres of military and state-owned property. Phase 1 alone calls for approximately 3 GW of generation capacity. At full buildout, the campus would reach 9 GW, all produced on-site through a connection to the Ruby Pipeline, a 680-mile interstate natural gas line that crosses northern Utah on its route from Wyoming to Oregon.
They can barely read anyway.
“Haven’t seen any H1B welding fabricators of late......”
OSHA won’t let them weld in sandals.
My daughter with a computer science degree is going to learn how to repair sewing machines. She’s so disappointed in corporate life after her whole department got laid off twice at different places.
Her hubby who is a mechanical engineer seems to have an AI proof job in AC.
I still believe my high school computer science teachers advice.
Computers are very fast and very dumb.
I maintain GIGO remains a big problem with AI
I look for the three C’s: Curiosity, Conceptual Thinking and Creativity.
I hire them when I find them.
The giveaway, which seemed to be apparent around 2012, was how new "data scientists" knew far less than their predecessors, which points toward smarter people avoiding such programs.
I've witnessed massive failures based on flawed data and analyses. "But the report said..." "But the analysis showed..." Sadly, a quick back-of-the-envelope number crunch would have shown the flaws.
It quickly reached the point where we would not perform any analyses unless we were given the raw data. Korporate directors do not like that stance so it got ugly and kept getting uglier.
It's not a surprise to meet a lot of former "data scientists". I suspect many were fired after missing something critical, but some were fired in a larger sweep to get rid of people who could testify against the korporation. The first rule of metrics is "Don't measure anything you don't want to know."
And data scientists are at constant risk of korporate bosses deciding to "shoot the messenger". Any data scientist who thinks otherwise is a naive fool.
For those who weren't fired but departed on their own terms, they realized the job grossly underpays for the amount of skill, effort, and responsibility.
There's also the issue the almost complete absence of any quality control because korporate bosses don't want to pay for it. The same team analyzing the data are responsible for their own quality control.
“At Google, our TPU design philosophy has always been centered on three pillars: scalability, reliability, and efficiency. As AI models evolve from dense large language models (LLMs) to massive Mixture-of-Experts (MoEs) and reasoning-heavy architectures, the hardware must do more than just add floating point operations per second (FLOPS); it must evolve to meet the specific operational intensities of the latest workloads.
“The rise of agentic AI requires infrastructure that can handle long context windows and complex sequential logic. At the same time, world models have emerged as a necessary evolution from current next-sequence-of-data architectures, which means newer agents are simulating future scenarios, anticipating consequences, and learning through “imagination” rather than risky trial-and-error. The eighth-generation TPUs (TPU 8t and TPU 8i) are our answer to these challenges, ensuring that every workload, from the first token of training to the final step of a multi-turn reasoning chain, is running on the most efficient path possible. They are built to efficiently train and serve world models like Google DeepMind’s Genie 3, enabling millions of agents to practice and refine their reasoning in diverse simulated environments.”
https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/compute/tpu-8t-and-tpu-8i-technical-deep-dive
Spot on!! Life is full of challenges, and the ability to think rationally, form your own well-informed opinions, and to not fall victim to fears and indoctrination is crucial.
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