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Education Technology

Nobel Prize Winner Cautions on Rush Into STEM (bloomberg.com) 113

A Nobel Prize-winning labor market economist has cautioned younger generations against piling into studying science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) subjects, saying as "empathetic" and creative skills may thrive in a world dominated by artificial intelligence. From a report: Christopher Pissarides, professor of economics at the London School of Economics, said that workers in certain IT jobs risk sowing their "own seeds of self-destruction" by advancing AI that will eventually take the same jobs in the future. While Pissarides is an optimist on AI's overall impact on the jobs market, he raised concerns for those taking STEM subjects hoping to ride the coattails of the technological advances.

He said that despite rapid growth in the demand for STEM skills currently, jobs requiring more traditional face-to-face skills, such as in hospitality and healthcare, will still dominate the jobs market. "The skills that are needed now -- to collect the data, collate it, develop it, and use it to develop the next phase of AI or more to the point make AI more applicable for jobs -- will make the skills that are needed now obsolete because it will be doing the job," he said in an interview. "Despite the fact that you see growth, they're still not as numerous as might be required to have jobs for all those graduates coming out with STEM because that's what they want to do." He added, "This demand for these new IT skills, they contain their own seeds of self destruction."

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Nobel Prize Winner Cautions on Rush Into STEM

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  • For example (Score:5, Insightful)

    by dargaud ( 518470 ) <[ten.duagradg] [ta] [2todhsals]> on Tuesday January 02, 2024 @07:08AM (#64123947) Homepage
    I have one very sharp example: weather forecast. I worked in that field (and atmospheric science / climatology) for 15 years. It used to be you needed to study thermodynamics, atmospheric chemistry and a whole range of related fields to be able to write a halfway decent prediction model.
    Nowadays you take your century of pressure/temperature/rain/etc measurements, feed them to an AI with no physics knowledge, and ask it to predict the next hour / 6 hour / day / week / etc. Add some feedback to improve the results as time go along.
    This kind of 'model' already gives better predictions than those based on physics. So I guess it's 'good'. But also no need to study physics anymore. Idiocracy here we come again.
    • Just say the weather stays the way it is. 50% success rate.

      • by dargaud ( 518470 )
        That is true, but what is actually interesting is the ability to predict changes with more than 50%.
      • by Anonymous Coward

        Just say the weather stays the way it is. 50% success rate.

        Er, no.

    • I think in a lot of these cases, the old data was pretty good, but it never occurred to people to take an ML.approach, or possibly just wrangling that quantity of data was kind of infeasible.

      If you took the same dataset and used a nearest neighbor model (I.e. Finding the closest match in historic data and just using what happened next back then as your prediction) how well would it work?

      • by dargaud ( 518470 )
        Well, I was never into modelizations (I was the guy on the ground designing data acquisition systems), but I think the most basic methods already gave better than 50%, which is good, but what most people are interested in are changes (when will I be able to plant my potatoes, or go skiing, or go to work without an umbrella, etc)
        • Re:For example (Score:5, Interesting)

          by serviscope_minor ( 664417 ) on Tuesday January 02, 2024 @08:29AM (#64124049) Journal

          Oh sure, that's what I meant. Today's weather is a surprisingly good predictor at tomorrows. What I meant was explicitly searching through all the historic data to find a day which matches today's measured data as well as possible. Say for sake of argument the best match is the 10th of Feb, 1937. Then to know what the weather would be like on the (say) 4th of January, look up the weather for the 12th Feb 1937.

          Nearest neighbour regression is essentially a baseline in ML. It's debatable whether it's machine Learning, since it requires all the data to be kept so it's not learning a representation as such, but semantic pedantry aside, it's considered ML.

          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

          Basically it's asking "have we seen weather like today before?" and then saying "well last time it progressed like that so it probably will progress like that this time too".

          That's not entirely different from what deep learning (well most ML) does anyway, though they can provide more elaborate methods of interpolating and be much more efficient.

          With that said, I'd expect that ML models would excel at normal weather, but do much worse for extreme weather events where there are very few examples to train from.

      • by elvinz ( 2920215 )
        The problem with nearest neighbour models is that they are not efficient in high dimensional spaces, because of the "curse of dimensionality". Basically it means that when a space has a lot of dimensions (features), your data points become very sparse and distant from one another. So when you input today weather into the system, it is far from every other previous points, because there are too many variables. Statistical models, or deep learning, will find invariants, regularities, etc... to fill that void
        • Ah true, but they're usually used with something like PCA.

          it would be pretty interesting to see a PCA decomposition and what the major modes are.

    • Perhaps this means we need more ML people and fewer physicists? Both are STEM fields. I'll bet that to make a good ML predictor of the weather you need to design a NN topology that can efficiently compute some of what the physics needs. Weather prediction has gotten better, but it's a field that can always get even better. When I was a kid it was hard to know whether or not to wear a rain jacket to school that day. Now I'd like to plan whether I should see friends in the city on Saturday or Sunday a we
    • Just as long as the model never needs to be changed

    • Yes, for the operational side of forecasting, ML may be able to do the trick. However, from the scientific side, an ML model cannot answer the question that drives scientists: "Why"? Reaching a deeper understanding of the physical processes that define and drive our atmosphere will still require careful study by humans.

    • I worked in that field (and atmospheric science / climatology) for 15 years. It used to be you needed to study thermodynamics, atmospheric chemistry and a whole range of related fields to be able to write a halfway decent prediction model.

      Sounds like you are out of the field. Just because people are doing it differently than you did doesn't make them idiots. People will now have to study ML, math, and physics to understand how to improve ML generalization in the face of chaotic behavior. I'm sure many

  • You probably don't want people who have an affinity for STEM fields to work in the hospitality industry.

    Or in healthcare.

    Unless of course you're a relative and want to inherit some of the dough before the geezer can burn it to prolong his life.

    • by TuringTest ( 533084 ) on Tuesday January 02, 2024 @08:32AM (#64124055) Journal

      People with affinity for STEM will be fine; even if AIs are very good at making new discoveries, the most important part of any new field of knowledge is realizing what areas are worth exploring; and AI will need to be lead to those areas for quite a long time. Boffins will continue to thrive in such an environment.

      What worries me is what will happen to people who are not able to do science. Hospitality and healthcare may indeed thrive, but not everybody is capable of those; and artistic, creative types will suffer when their jobs can be almost equaled at 100x times the rate of production. What will happen to people without any remarkable skill, when their work can be made cheaper and faster by a skilled worker controlling an AI?

    • Or in healthcare.

      What? I absolutely want the people providing me with medical care to have a solid background in biology/chemistry.

      • I know someone who has a chemistry background. I wouldn't want him NEAR me if I was sick or needed care. He sure has bedside manners that make Dr. House look compassionate.

    • Economists are quite good at explaining why some economic boom or bust happened. But predicting such things reliably and accurately eludes them still.

      At present, there is still high demand for STEM workers, and the rise of AI (such as it is) has only increased demand. This prediction is coming from imagination: we are imagining what AI will be able to do "someday" and imagining that this will result in a loss of STEM jobs (but not a correspondent loss in other jobs). This narrative is nothing more than c

      • I think it's pretty safe to say that the loss of STEM jobs will be rather low. What we might lose is jobs in areas that consist mostly of StackExchange copy/paste "programming", but it's unlikely that real engineers will be affected. What AI can do is collect existing data and combine it. That's it. It's not exactly capable of solving new problems. It can do what the copy/paste "programmers" do: Search the web for a solution to their problem, adapt the code found slightly to match the particular problem the

    • by ranton ( 36917 )

      I doubt these suggestions are targeted at people with an affinity for STEM fields. This economist would probably agree they should focus on STEM education and STEM careers. My impression is this advice is for those without an affinity for STEM who are pushing themselves into STEM fields for purely economic reasons. These individuals would be better served by focusing their studies elsewhere. Or at least that is what I believe this economist is advising.

      • If you plan to go into a field purely for economic reasons and not because you are interested in it, don't. Just don't. You will not reach the economic reasons you aim for because to get the economic goals you're aiming at, you would have to want to do it. The big bucks are reserved for the people who have a drive to be good at it. Everyone else is just doing grunt work. At best, you'll be plodding along for a couple years in a dead end job that you'll never get out of because you don't have the drive to be

    • by GuB-42 ( 2483988 )

      You also don't want people who have an affinity for hospitality to go into STEM.

      And this is the problem. People are told to go to STEM because it is supposedly what will make them successful. The warning is that it may be true today, but maybe not in the future, so it may be a good idea not to force push people into STEM.

      I mean, why do we see so many more "women into STEM" programs than "men into nursing" programs? Maybe we should stop skewing the balance towards STEM. Personally, I think we need more male

      • Some years ago it was the medical profession. Before that it was law. Before that management.

        And in the end, the only people who were REALLY successful, in any field, were the ones with an affinity for it. The ones that don't treat it like a 9 to 5 job. The ones that actually want to do it. Take Gordon Ramsay. He's basically a cook. But he is passionate about it so he's a millionaire with TV shows and Michelin star restaurants and whatever else you could want if you're a cook. Could I be the same as a cook?

  • by Anonymous Coward

    Where should we go then? Should we go and be lawyers? At least a J. D. and a bar membership means a ticket to a high paying job for life, as there is no such thing as an unemployed lawyer, and even ones fresh out of law school earn $120,000 a year minimum.

    Trades? Doing plumbing is great, but that's not for everyone, and the pay rates tend to be low until you hit master.

    Retail/food service? Hah.

    Which leaves IT, development, and STEM. All of which are either offshored, outsourced, or being replaced with

    • by Entrope ( 68843 )

      To the contrary, lawyers are some of the first in line to be replaced, at least once the AI people figure out how to get generative AIs to stop hallucinating precedential cases. You might have seen the opinion piece by Chief Justice John Roberts contrasting that with the work of judges, and worrying about what the impending dominance of AI will mean for the judiciary.

      TFA suggests healthcare, although that's also ripe for automation over robots get a bit more mobile and dextrous. Japan has been researching

      • by Rei ( 128717 )

        To the contrary, lawyers are some of the first in line to be replaced, at least once the AI people figure out how to get generative AIs to stop hallucinating precedential cases.

        This is actually easy - you just incorporate case search tools into the LLM, and ideally have a LLM specialized for legal use cases.

        The problem is that people were asking for cases in a low-end generalist no-integrated-search LLM (ChatGPT / GPT 3.5).

      • by jmccue ( 834797 )

        To the contrary, lawyers are some of the first in line to be replaced

        You realize Lawyers write laws ? Eventually AI will be illegal for Law related activities. Already Cohen got in trouble for using AI for some briefs.

    • by JaredOfEuropa ( 526365 ) on Tuesday January 02, 2024 @07:35AM (#64123981) Journal
      For tradesmen, now is a good time to start your own business or go freelance, at good hourly rates. Some of the rates being charged even for semi-skilled work are beginning to approach those for entry-level IT work here. There's a real shortage of qualified workers that is not going to be replaced with AI anytime soon, and with the coming energy transition the available work is only going to pile up even more.

      If you're in IT... I highly recommend you start learning how to work with AI rather than against it. People who understand both the limitations and pitfalls as well as the possibilities are in rather short supply.

      As for lawyers... Stuff that relies mostly on having knowledge at the ready and knowing where to find whatever you're missing, that is the stuff that AI is going to replace. Top tier lawyers doing clever interpretations of the law, who negotiate hard at plea deals, and have a silver tongue to sway judge or jury, will still be in demand. But the low level lawyers and paralegals have cause to worry too... You will still want a lawyer to represent yourself in court, but the expensive research and prep work can be done just fine by an AI.
      • And this is also true for medicine. Most of the questions I have for my doc are followed but minute of keyboard use (by him) and next comes an answer...so do nurser on the phone service.

    • There is lots of advance "tradesman" type work associated with science that is pretty well protected from AI invasion. I'm referring specifically to service engineer type positions, which takes people who understand the science and has them do installation, repair, qualification, etc on high end lab equipment. I moved into this field a while back now and it's been a great fit for me in particular, and while AI could help us with the diagnostics there are zero robots that I have ever seen with the dexterit
    • The long-term goal is that people will not find work. AI and robots will do it all. There will be no jobs for anyone.

      We will get the work-free utopia that we have dreamed of.

      There will be economic upheaval during the transition, of course. And we will have new problems of widespread existential crisis to deal with (it turns out most people have a hard time handling the sense of meaninglessness and uselessness that comes of being unemployed). But we can figure out how to adapt to that once we get there.

      O

      • And the work free utopia will be utter poverty for most of the population, completely dependent on handouts. Folks seem to think they'll be living like kinds with robotic servants of various types. Based on what we've seen in the 20th century, this is totally a fantasy and absolutely untrue. We're going to have billions of people scrambling to get enough to eat and it's not going to be pleasant.
        • We would be going back to something like feudalism. The people who already have money will have the means to set up a system that will do the work for free. But eventually they will run out of customers. The peasants can do very little on their own in such a society.

          • Yes, I agree, and I guess my vision was probably close to fudalism - a whole bunch of peasants throughout history have starved.
          • Those with the resources to buy robots and AI systems will just have those systems make them stuff. Skip the whole sales part. You got your robot farmer that takes care of the land and feeds you. Robots cleaning your home and cooking your meals. Robot doctors, etc. Those with that much money won't need the rest of us.

            I imagine the rest of us are likely to destroy society since we'll have no future anyway. The same rich folk may also have AI drones that can keep them safe and sound from the rest of us.

            Hopefu

        • Nah. The whole "greedy person makes everyone else starve" situation is largely a consequence of limited supply. Once the robots are making everything that everybody needs, the supplies will (effectively) be unlimited. There won't be anything worth hoarding. And getting more than one needs won't block others from getting what they need.

          The incentives for traditional poverty-inducing greed will simply vanish.

          Humans won't share out of moral superiority or anything...there just won't be any point in blockin

          • You're assuming rational thought occurs. The folks who the means of production - whether it's a socialist/communist dictator or head of Earth, Inc. merely want to revel in the fact that they hold the power of life and death over others. Personally when it comes to the galactic federation, the best thing we could hope for was for Earth to become an outsourcing destination for other plants. "Oh this call center can be moved to Earth. It's a lot cheaper to pay people there then on Beta Antares 4."
    • by ranton ( 36917 )

      there is no such thing as an unemployed lawyer, and even ones fresh out of law school earn $120,000 a year minimum.

      There are plenty of unemployed lawyers, or at least those employed in professions which don't require a law degree. Law graduate salaries are considered bimodal, which means there are two very different peaks in the salary distribution. A majority of all law graduates earn between $50k-$75k after graduation. But a significant fraction, about 25%, make between $175-$200 after graduation. There aren't that many people in between these two peaks. The mean salary may be around $100k, but not many new lawyers ar

    • by HiThere ( 15173 )

      Plumber and electrician (etc.) are currently the best options. For the longer term it's anyone's guess at this point.

  • I have been working with AI for a while now and find that I spend more and more time reading and refusing wrong propositions than actually working. It is good for simple tasks that have been done over and over but for more complex stuff it's quite bad.

    • by HiThere ( 15173 )

      The problem with current AI is both obvious and difficult. You need to close the feedback loops. I'm expecting automated factories to become plausible, though I'm not sure how automated. Perhaps it will just be the middle management that's automated. But in that scenario it's relatively easy to close the loop. That gearwheel has either been installed or not. It's the right part number or it isn't. Etc. It takes a lot of monitoring, but it should be quite doable, and a natural language interface woul

  • by Sique ( 173459 ) on Tuesday January 02, 2024 @07:32AM (#64123975) Homepage
    In general, every problem solving skill and every problem solving job is working to make itself obsolete. That's what problem solving means: the problem is solved and no longer exists.

    Economics in general has the problem that you can't store work, e.g. pre-work and keep it for future use, as everyone who has ever cleaned a room can tell you. Most work has to be done in the very moment the result is needed. You can't even refill your car before the gas tank is emptied enough to accept new gas.

    But STEM jobs are a way to actually pre-work. Once you automate something, you will not have to do exactly that work again. Once you have mathematical proof of some equivalence, you can always take it and use one side of the equivalence to calculate the other. Once you find the right catalyst to accelerate a chemical reaction, you can produce large amounts of the chemical product with ease. STEM is the way to save work in both meanings of the word, working today for use tomorrow and having to work less than before for the same results.

    Thus STEM works always on making itself obsolete. Differently than a cleaned room, which does not stay clean, a proven theorem stays proven, and differently Thomas Savery, Thomas Newcomen and James Watt, we do no longer have to figure out by ourself how to build an efficient steam engine. We just download the plan and upload them in our CNC machine.

    • Economics in general has the problem that you can't store work, e.g. pre-work and keep it for future use, as everyone who has ever cleaned a room can tell you. Most work has to be done in the very moment the result is needed. You can't even refill your car before the gas tank is emptied enough to accept new gas.

      But STEM jobs are a way to actually pre-work. Once you automate something, you will not have to do exactly that work again.

      You hit the nail on the head. Throughout human history, every day we have needed to provide for food and shelter. Our brain evolved to make us better at anticipating where we would get them and create ways to secure those needs.

      The thing is, we now have a new technology - computing - that allows to delay all kinds of work, and we still don't know what all the implications to human society will be.

      Before the printing press we had ways to store language in physical form and store ideas; but efficient printing

      • The thing is, we now have a new technology - computing - that allows to delay all kinds of work, and we still don't know what all the implications to human society will be.

        I agree with everything you said. But the part I just quoted reminds me a lot of Just In Time supply chain management, and the trouble that has caused us on numerous occasions. One of those implications you mention may be that we abuse tech's advantages until they become active disadvantages. Heck, that tendency of ours could well lead to the fall of civilization.

        • But the part I just quoted reminds me a lot of Just In Time supply chain management, and the trouble that has caused us on numerous occasions. One of those implications you mention may be that we abuse tech's advantages until they become active disadvantages. Heck, that tendency of ours could well lead to the fall of civilization.

          Surely we wouldn't be the first civilization to fall into oblivion after dominating the known world.

          However, I'd say over-reliance on any single technology doesn't seem to be the cause of such downfalls, but the inability to adapt to new ones when the old ones no longer work. This happens when the system is so complex or fragile that the operational regions and organisms don't obey orders from the effective control center, and this center is no longer capable of forcing them into compliance. The society the

          • Surely we wouldn't be the first civilization to fall into oblivion after dominating the known world.

            True. But it strikes me that there was more centralization and homogeneity in Rome's control than there is anywhere in today's world. Now we have the US and China, and possibly India as well, as separate 'control centres'. I haven't given it a lot of thought, and I'm nobody's idea of an historian; but I'm guessing a modern devolution of civilization would look very different from anything that's gone before.

            However, I'd say over-reliance on any single technology doesn't seem to be the cause of such downfalls, but the inability to adapt to new ones when the old ones no longer work. This happens when the system is so complex or fragile that the operational regions and organisms don't obey orders from the effective control center, and this center is no longer capable of forcing them into compliance.

            I'm thinking now of the internet and the infrastructure that supports it. If we were to lose that sin

    • In general, every problem solving skill and every problem solving job is working to make itself obsolete. That's what problem solving means: the problem is solved and no longer exists.

      For intellectual problems, yes. But AI is never going to replace your plumber. There will always be a market for, and good pay for, that guy that can take a wrench and fix the shitter.

      So the advice to young men should be "learn a skilled trade", right? Except that young men don't want to do that kind of work anymore. That's nasty and low class and beneath them. They want to be in a nice office with a coffee bar. And THOSE are the kind of jobs that are increasingly going bye-bye. Meanwhile, your skilled bric

      • by ranton ( 36917 )

        But AI is never going to replace your plumber. There will always be a market for, and good pay for, that guy that can take a wrench and fix the shitter.

        This won't be true if those good paying white collar jobs go away. There is no such thing as a job which is safe if automation really starts to accelerate the way people are fearing. Those displaced workers will flood into those blue collar jobs, and there are only so many toilets to fix. If there were suddenly twice as many people training to become plumbers, salaries would drop significantly.

        If some significant percentage of the population became unemployed in their chosen profession, the "safe" careers w

      • While I agree that trades can be a great path to a good income, you have to take into consideration that you cannot do those jobs into your golden years. Many traders folk have told me the damage it did to their bodies.

        So clearly, it comes at a cost to ones body that a white collar worker doesn't have to deal with. AI is gradually improving and will eventually reduce the amount of white collar jobs we need by making one person able to do 3 people's job. We're already seeing these gain in efficiency.

        What we'

    • Ah, so what's the timeline on "all STEM problems solved?"

      • by Sique ( 173459 )
        I didn't claim that one time, all problems would be solved.

        I just said that the whole idea behind STEM is to solve problems for good, not that the number of problems needing a solution is finite. And the most interesting problems will be the ones we don't even know about right now, the unknown unknowns, as a former Secretary of Defense inadvertently aptly once put it.

  • ...or not at all. My guess is that the gainful professional employment future of AI is & will be in knowing how to design & program the systems that generate the models in the first place, as well as having the background knowledge, e.g. in complexity theory, linguistics, cognitive psychology, & neuroscience.

    As far as I understand it, we're still at the stage of learning stuff from biological brains to adapt & apply to digital models of brains in order to make them work more like human b
    • I think that perhaps one day they may even reproduce a model that illustrates Doug Hoffstaedter's hypothesis, "analogy as the core of cognition."

      I haven't read Hoffstaedter, but now I have to. That "analogy as the core of cognition" rang a bell so hard that it's still echoing in my head. The thought that 'power of abstraction' effectively equals 'intelligence' is something that occurs to me several times a day, and drawing analogies is pure abstraction.

      • He gave a presentation years back that they recorded & uploaded to Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com] You can also find a book chapters, op-eds, & position pieces on this hypothesis if you search around for them.

        Just as I was looking for that old presentation, I came across this, which I haven't had a chance to watch yet, but it might be good: Gödel, Escher, Bach author Doug Hofstadter on the state of AI today https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
        • Thanks! I later realized that I had started to read 'I Am A Strange Loop' but never finished it. I'll give it another try, and I'll also watch the videos you linked.

  • by bloodhawk ( 813939 ) on Tuesday January 02, 2024 @08:19AM (#64124037)
    funnily enough the area AI is making the biggest impact is the creative skills and arts area. My wife is an artist and it is getting harder and harder for her to make a living as the market is flooded with AI generated art which is good enough for most buyers.
    • I agree. What are large language models really good at? Spewing well written fact free copy. I've used it occasionally to re-write text for me, something an English major might be better at than I am, where I provide the STEM content. LLMs are getting better at answering simple math problems, but where they really shine is well composed, but possibly nonsensical prose. What else is AI good at? Anything that's pattern recognition that can be trained on a very large corpus. Some parts of health care fi
    • by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Give it a while. A lot (all?) of AI "art" is looking pretty generic and somehow similar. I predict that all this will become in a while is a new "even worse quality" level that most people will immediately ignore, hence making it not even suitable for low-cost ads.

      • the quality is suprisingly good and the generators can pretty much create anything you can describe. While the outputs definitely aren't as precise and detailed as what my wife or any top end artist produces an AI can produce a good enough quality art work for the majority of people in a few seconds. My wifes last painting took her just over 1000 hours. She has even had to start using AI generators to create some of the base images which she then enhances to cut down on time spent as fewer and fewer people
    • That's interesting. Would you say that it's the ability of the AI to recompose existing concepts quickly into new art, sort of a collage but in composition sense, and hence for human artist bypassing the mundane part of art production (detailing vs concepts). The concepts though are still human's. I saw how Dall-e can create detailed pictures of say Mario in an unusual composition. But could it create Mario itself? The same seems to be going for language. It's able to write a poem on anything in Dr.Sues sty

  • STEM done wisely will always have employment options and the purpose of education for anyone not independently wealthy is employment not wank.

    Freedom is unusable without prosperity. There won't be jobs for everyone because life like the rest of nature is competitive, but STEM skills permit entry into a vast number of jobs. For example one may not become an engineer but that knowledge enables other jobs in industry.

  • by nothinginparticular ( 6181282 ) on Tuesday January 02, 2024 @08:33AM (#64124057)
    Not because you think you'll get rich from it. When viewed in that context I think he's right. If you're academically smart, and primarily want to be rich, STEM has always been a poor choice (at least for the past few decades). If you find STEM fascinating and you're ok at it you'll probably be able to make a reasonable living from it.
    • by Junta ( 36770 )

      STEM has been a rather fantastic choice for a profession where you are likely to be lucrative compared to how much you put in.

      Lawyers have to go through a much more rigorous education, and are frequently earning less than someone in computing with a random four year degree.

      Similar with doctors, who have the problem above plus crazy malpractice insurance premiums largely eating up those nominally high salaries.

      Various other paths to being rich are very heavily dependent on already being born into the right c

      • by djinn6 ( 1868030 )

        STEM has been a rather fantastic choice for a profession where you are likely to be lucrative compared to how much you put in.

        ...if you're already gifted with STEM talent. You don't get to bullshit your way to success in STEM, so if it doesn't come naturally, then you'll be pulling your hair out all the time and banging your head against the wall while your more gifted peers finished their project days ago and are now goofing off.

        Not to mention 60 hour weeks are pretty common, at least in tech.

  • "The world needs ditch diggers too," he added.
  • I keep saying it often on Slashdot. Stimulate the housing market and flood the world with affordable homes. This also means urban planning and construction majors which are stem and other YIMBY friendly careers.
    • Learn to build. [...]I keep saying it often on Slashdot. Stimulate the housing market and flood the world with affordable homes.

      Availability of builders is not the big problem where affordable homes are concerned. It's laws, especially concerning fees.

      It can easily cost more today in permits and fees (including mandatory connection fees) than materials or labor to build a starter home. End result, nobody builds them.

      Some localities are now playing with permits for tiny home add-on units as a way to increase the low end housing stock, but none of them seem to be trying the radical approach of reducing their usurious fee structures to

      • you run into the fact that it's more profitable to build office space than housing.

        Looks like Covid and its aftermath are solving that problem.

        • Looks like Covid and its aftermath are solving that problem.

          Very slowly, and only after tons of office space was built that was unnecessary even before Covid. As individuals we might be smart, but as groups we can be very stupid and short-sighted, and as a species we are doomed.

  • by Qbertino ( 265505 ) <moiraNO@SPAMmodparlor.com> on Tuesday January 02, 2024 @08:54AM (#64124085)

    ... to think. And to train that. It's not only about becoming a scientist.

    STEM is a perfect foundation for just about anything else in life. Yes, Arts are too, but so is STEM.

    Actually, if you want to be best prepare for life, get degrees in physics, medicine and performing arts. Add in a little MMA on the side and you're unstoppable.

    In the end you should do what interests you and actually requires a degree to practice correctly.

  • From what I understand it's much easier to get an LLM to make a painting or a novel than it is to get it to make a useful, working computer application of any reasonable size.

    • by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Actually, while it is easy to get them to make a novel, the quality will be so bad that nobody wants to read it. As replacements for actual authors, LLMs are unsuitable. The same applies to that painting. They all look kind of similar and generic. Which, to be fair, they are by construction.

      • by pr100 ( 653298 )

        We seem to be saying that nobody is about to be replaced by an AI...

        • Sounds about right. In the same way that no one was replaced by power tools. AI is just another tool.

          • No one is replaced but people currently in positions will see their productivity increased. This increase in productivity will likely bring forth a hiring freeze. You may not fire someone but if they leave the position, you very well may not replace them either.

        • by gweihir ( 88907 )

          Not quite. There are people that cannot produce quality better than LLMs. They will get replaced. But how large of a population is that actually? These people did not do good work either and may well have had negative productivity. Think below IQ 83, where the military thinks they cannot be qualified to do any useful job. There may also be a reduction in numbers, like where you needed 10 translators before, you can now do with 6 or 7.

          But any type of "revolution" is not to be expected and the people that pus

      • by Junta ( 36770 )

        Question is how much of writing is creating profitable quality fiction versus copywriting marketing material for a random corporation. How much art design is creating creative work to be enjoyed versus creating filler content or stuff like logos, or backdrops that are barely noticed?

        Also, I've seen "pay by the chapter" platforms where I'm convinced most of the time an "author" wrote two sentences and asked an AI to spit out a chapter. Those platforms seem to rake it in, much like crap "pay as you go" mobi

        • by gweihir ( 88907 )

          You still want people to read it and you still want people to look at it. If that is not the case anymore, /dev/urandom would serve as well and be a lot cheaper. Of course, it always takes some time for people to realize that "AI" does not cut it.

          • by Junta ( 36770 )

            In those contexts, it's not that you want them to specifically read/look at, but you want them to not be unimpressed by the lack of it if it were not there.

            You could have the exact same animation with and without a backdrop and the creative content is similar, but the lack of a backdrop is jarring versus some generic backdrop that wouldn't be interesting, but having *something* avoids the distraction.

            For marketing material, you may want it to be read, but as near as I can tell, marketing material is general

            • by gweihir ( 88907 )

              They want their works to look as if it were worked on, but the details are unimportant.

              That will work with AI at least for a time. As soon as everybody immediately sees that something is AI generated, then it does not cut it anymore.

  • Economics? (Score:5, Informative)

    by Luthair ( 847766 ) on Tuesday January 02, 2024 @09:29AM (#64124151)
    So he's not a nobel prize winner then, he won the banking prize.
    • pretty much all the Nobel Prize categories (including economics) have been made a joke through various political or ideological winners over the years, the peace prize being the biggest joke of all.
  • There is no "AI" that could make STEM graduates redundant. The current hype may make some of their work a bit easier but that is it. Not surprising that an economist makes grand sweeping statements about a technology he does not understand though, Nobel prize or not.

    The dust will still need a while to settle, but when it does we will see some gradual advances, but nothing of the promised "revolution" will be left. Not the first time the AI field has disgraced itself in this manner. Will not be the last time

  • Too many higher ups are pouncing on AI as a solution to pretty much every problem, not considering that current AI isn't really very intelligent and is only as good as the data it's trained on. Any ML or LLM system will most likely need some continuous training / tweaking on new data. In situations where the details are important I would hope that there is no real reliance on current AI or at the very least the results are reviewed by someone with a real understanding of the subject.
  • I guess the *certain* IT workers that are going to be replaced by AI are going to be incapable of retooling to do something else -- what a slight to anyone who's actually ever worked (which IMHO, does not include most Economists). I think it's still true that STEM != AI, and I take offense with anyone that discourages the one thing that makes life possible in this amazing world we live in, which is STEM. Many excellent points already made here, particularly that STEM is a foundation for just about anythin
  • We'll need service workers to wait on our oligarch overlords in their bunkers in Hawaii.

  • The article is paywalled, but available here;
    https://archive.ph/98viM [archive.ph]

    “When you say the majority of jobs will be jobs that will involve personal care, communication, good social relationships, people might say ‘Oh, God, is that what we have to look forward to in the future’,” Pissarides said. “We shouldn’t be looking down at these jobs. They’re better than the jobs that school leavers used to do.”

    I'm not clear on what these jobs would be. Makeup artist? Hairsty

  • An economist saying something about science? I wouldn't bother.

  • This is your reminder that there's no such thing as a Nobel Prize in economics. The Nobel Prize has five categories: medicine, chemistry, physics, literature, and peace. The "Nobel Prize" in economics was invented in the 1970s by Austrian economists to provide prestige for the roundly disproven supply-side economics. It has no relation to the Nobel estate or the Nobel Prize.

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