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.
Pretty much agree! Let me just at first say using statistics and understanding the results, and presenting them cogently is hard!
Every “newly minted” data scientist I have met is inadequately trained in math & statistics* even the “sciences”. They are educated enough in these disciplines to have a vague idea of it being the foundations. They can run all the packages with confidence. However if anything happens that forces them to go below the surface of the “results” they have problems. Nine times out of ten the problems are GIGO - garbage in garbage out, i.e. bad data which quite often they don’t have the education\training\experience to recognize. If they do often this means as you pointed out they have to butt heads with their employer\manager. Bad data collected badly often reflects back on the previous actions or lack of them on the employer\manager.
* Data science is like neuroscience neither disciplines should exist at the undergraduate level. Too many compromises are made in the basic sciences\math to cram the program into the undergraduate hours limit**. The result is someone a veneer understanding of the field. Anyway data science is applied statistics with some presentation training why not call it that!
** Yes the undergraduate hours limit has a lot of non-STEM nonsense taking up time and space!
Forget the coding crappola. AI has been used in drafting court briefs and always makes up precedents — until a judge who actually reads the brief spots the deception and has a hissy fit in a courtroom.
Using AI on anything creative will miss the trademark/patent/creativity aspect; namely, has this representation been used by someone else earlier? If you push out something that did not pass that test that a jusge will spot you will be sued into oblivion. AI is very good at looking at loads of stuff and then “summarizing” it. But, it is crap at spotting exceptions — only a human mind can do that and the clowns coding this crappola in SiliconValley are also crap at that.
Your job is safe so long as you produce excellence. OTOHand, if all you do is “good enough”, any AI will eat you for lunch.
Fixing AI models, sounds like a good job. Being a lawyer who sue AI makers, and companies which depend on AI and do horrible, damaging things to humans, animals, etc. sounds lucrative to me
AI “trackers”, develop data base of AI failures, programmers who “vet AI developed” code, write programs which identify AI code or contributions in order to block or allow the code to be used. Develop AI code to ELIMINATE clickbait, Develop AI code to track hackers, and automatically report them to a database for any, and I mean, any, further action.
I am sure there are other jobs.
Univ. Of Southern Cal. offers degrees in regulatory science...scary.... talk about a Trojan Horse...
AI takeover is not the only factor to consider. Future gluts that will result from people swarming into professions perceived to be safe from that takeover should be kept in mind as well.
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Where? There hasn't been enough teachers for such a classic liberal arts education since before education became compulsory. You're on your own. Look inward.
And worse than not having such a classic education, we've instead been given indoctrination and outright falsehoods.
To be retentive, the technical term is “garbage collection”, or “GC”, not trash collection. For non-techies, this is the deallocation of instantiated objects in memory at the leisure of an autonomous “garbage collector” process in the underlying framework (.NET, Java runtime engine).
Yeah, I just always think of “trash” as leftover bits of no longer useful stuff, and “garbage” as food waste and associated other stuff.
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