Looking at job postings and people around me, I am not too much less cynical than you. A lot of gambling, data centers, military tech, police, fossil fuel adjacent etc. companies hiring. Though it used to be realistic to be able to do something morally neutral, and have the job be at least somewhat interesting in a small scale. Like I didn't think making mobile internet 300mbps instead of 100mbps was solving any real problems 5+ years ago when I did my internship, but I don't think it was causing too many either.

I have what is basically a data scientist job in academia for some months still (can't be extended). A friend of mine who's a chemical engineer just got laid off. In general, unemployment is high in my country right now, and it's hitting many white collar jobs at a high rate.

I think at the point SWE and DS are solved problems

Do you mean this is an unknown point in the future?

I looked at Egoless Mathematics in the AI Era, and it was AI slop. BTW, his blog is full of guest posts now

How would one measure the efficacy of two different AI generated trading regimes (or however it is they work up there) when the people who understood what they were asking can’t understand any of the code?

Yeah this aligns with my intuition. In the things that are easy to verify (is the div centered, does the server crash) humans are quickly becoming obsolete, in the things that are difficult to verify, you still need a human to make sure the code is doing what you think it is.

I've heard from an anquintance that their electricity pricing company just uses black box AI things for pricing. Cool, until it sells 10M worth of electricity for 500k and the grid runs out of electricity. In use cases like that, complex evaluation is required and probably can't be fully automated anytime soon.

I still have an academic job for some months now (one that cannot be extended), so I will definitely wait and see. But I think it's time to start planning and preparing.

Getting another masters seems quite unwise too. Especially the things I could study (e.g. other types of engineering?) are not AI proof either.

"one mathematician" who happened to work at openAI, btw.

The Jevons paradox point is interesting. Maybe we'll finally get better software products, so far it seems like everything is as buggy and slow as as ever.

Even if unemployment isn't an issue, engineers would need to have the flexibility/freedom to do things by hand sometimes though I think. Go into details, understand the lower level work. Just like pilots occasionally hand-fly not to lose their skills. Otherwise, it's just too mind numbing to do long term, even if humans were involved in the big picture decisions.

What did you switch to?

Kerkesin jo luulla että joko on Brennerin tunneli tullut valmiiksi, mutta ei sentään. Hienoa joka tapauksessa.