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Take a class on machine learning first. I suspect once you know how the sausage is made, you'll understand how short sighted this question is. Also if you want to make the most money, get the heck out of CS and into finance.
People used to say that computers themselves were going to cause mass unemployment.
Not gonna lie, as an experienced engineer I'm also worried and anxious about ChatGPT (combined with the economy, tech layoffs, inflation...). But what else can I do? If my job disappears due to LLMs, I can't think of anything else I could do to pay the bills that wouldn't also be at risk.
So being pragmatic the best thing to do is to continue doing the best job I can. If that involves using LLMs to increase my productivity, so be it.
It's very hard to say what fields will be less affected or will be affected positively by AI. I will say some of the best programmers I've known didn't study CS.
All of which says: 1) you don't need a CS degree to work as a programmer 2) you aren't going to be able to predict the future well enough to know what's happening ten years from now anyway, but... 3) you don't need to, you just need to keep being able to learn new things and adapt
Many people who got physics degrees in the early noughties ended up working in finance. Many people who got engineering degrees ended up working as programmers. If you get a technical degree of some sort, it demonstrates that you can handle technical work, but you shouldn't expect it to turn out to be the "right" major, regardless of which specific one you pick. Things change too fast, and rarely in the predicted way.
We might end up using LLM's a lot in programming, although this sounds a lot like lots of previous hype, both around "AI" and around various other methods of programming without programmers. But I wouldn't advise choosing your major based on your ability to predict whether or not it will pan out, and if so whether or not that will increase or decrease demand for CS majors.
My advice as an older programmer who has a son in engineering school (who is asking similar questions) … stay in CS. The world will change as a result of LLMs, of course, but new opportunities emerging will be one of those changes, and a CS background will help you prepare for such opportunities. My $0.02.
Programming in the 2010s was nothing like programming in the 2000s, was nothing like programming in the 1990s, was nothing like programming in the 1980s , was nothing like programming in the 1970s... etc.. I personally experienced the paranoia of the "end of programming " when VisuslBasic was first released, and when UML code generation ('member Rational Rose?) Tools arrived. I'm still doing a good living with my pro…
oh boy I do. Had a whole course in engineering school on it. Never touched it since.
LLMs will just be another programming tool to help us be more productive, at most.
My advice as an older programmer who has a son in engineering school (who is asking similar questions) … stay in CS. The world will change as a result of LLMs, of course, but new opportunities emerging will be one of those changes, and a CS background will help you prepare for such opportunities. My $0.02.
Agreed. There will be even more need for humans who understand CS to direct the LLM-based systems.
From what I've seen, GPT isn't architecting systems. It writes code snippets--basically the stuff you can copy/paste off stack overflow. The only difference is now instead of Googling and searching for the code snippet, GPT will sometimes just give it to you. But once you need something unique, or something that's not just one little piece of the puzzle, it can't do it.