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If computer science is worthless, the rest of the jobs will be as well. CS is about solving problems in (almost) its purest form. If AI can do that, humans are done.
Yeah, not much good content here, but it is probably useful to know what people like him are thinking (the new American oligarchs?). If, in fact, he is saying what he actually thinks. The only thing we can be sure of, is that he and his people are scared of AI.
"There have been some theories on this phenomenon, with the most prevalent being the tendency for Wikipedia pages to move up a "classification chain." According to this theory, the Wikipedia Manual of Style guidelines on how to write the lead section of an article recommend that the article should start by defining the topic of the article, so that the first link of each page will naturally take the reader into a broader subject, eventually ending in wide-reaching pages such as Mathematics, Science, Language, and of course, Philosophy, nicknamed the "mother of all sciences"."
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Getting_to_Philosoph...
I don't know how much substance there is to discuss here. It pretty much hinges on how you think AI will develop over the coming decades. I am skeptical that software development will be automated away anytime soon, especially since the actual writing of code is just one part of the job. I recall an Economist article several years back arguing that jobs are less automatable the more varied they are. For this reason custodians should be among the last to go, the logic being that a given custodian does so many different maintenance tasks that it would be impractical for a bot to replace them.
Software development seems similar. You're constantly pivoting between different and shifting problems. Most of the impressive AI demonstrations like image recognition or playing Go are really about getting good at a single well-defined task. We seem to be very far away from the kind of adaptibility required to automate away developers (though perhaps the CS degree will devalue as more people pursue it).
It's also unclear to me how exactly philosophy is better preparation. My own experience with academic philosophy is limited, but from what I can tell its main selling point is that it teaches you to examine things in a critical way that's very aware of the argument in question, the assumptions made, and the structure the argument sits in. My experience in math (which I pursued much more) was similar, and I imagine that most good CS programs teach similar skills?
"Study philosophy" here seems like a catchy (and perhaps poor) proxy for "make sure you can reason about stuff outside a narrow programming bubble". But that's always been good advice.
I studied philosophy in College but got my CS degree. I think some guy called Paul Graham did so too. I think philosophy is useful for detecting if someone is lying to you or doesn't know what they are talking about. It does stress critical thinking in different ways than say studying math (I also studied math also). I can't really take what he is saying though at any serious level though and I don't believe what he…
What do you mean? What did philosophy teach you about lie detection?
For some reason, despite him being extremely well-accomplished, I just can't take any advice he gives seriously, compared to Bill Gates or even Ray Dalio.
I won't rule out that we may build an AGI by just throwing enough computing power at it and simply simulating brains with enough fidelity but without actually understanding how it works, at least not at first, but I really don't see much - if any - progress towards building an AGI because we know what we have to do. Maybe the secret of general intelligence is just curve fitting and searching at massive scale and we fail to find the secret behind it because there is none, but we really don't know.
That of course doesn't mean that the recent developments are not interesting or don't have useful applications, they are just not as groundbreaking as often portrayed and we probably still have a rather long way to go.
With regards to big picture thinking and general problem solving ability, I don't think you are in a particularly bad spot as a software developer or hacker. Especially not if you are doing project work or frequently change jobs and regularly have to get familiar with new business domains. Also if your focus is more at the design and architecture end of the spectrum as compared to coming up with beautiful looking CSS.
But I would certainly agree that philosophers have some ways of thinking that are at least to some degree unlike what you find in software developers, but I can't really pin it down. I only know it exists because I am frequently somewhat surprised by the thoughts and ideas that come up in philosophy and they seem not like things I would think of. Maybe it is just the level to which philosophers dissect things and which goes beyond what is required in software development but I really can't tell for sure.