So, he’s not putting money away in his 401(k). And there’s no Vanguard fund that targets the Singularity as a retirement date. He doesn’t think an army of Terminators is coming now or really ever, for that matter.īut he does want to be financially prepared in the event of an AI-enabled armed conflict or other disaster. I think as the year goes on, they might be, like, at the level of a junior coding employee.” Dan Hendrycks, director of the Center for AI Safety, said computer science students are looking at what ChatGPT can already do with programming languages, and they’re seeing the writing - or coding - on the wall.ĪI large language models “got a lot of the basics down for coding,” Hendrycks said, “and are around the level of a late-stage undergraduate in coding.
That early 21st century career arc of get your computer science degree at a good school, then make a good salary at Google or Meta or another big tech company? That notion may be receding.
Even if you think it’s all a bit overblown, some people in the AI industry are already making preparations for a world, and an economy, that look radically different from the ones you’re used to.Ĭlymer’s officemate at the Center for AI Safety was a computer science major at Stanford who also left his program because AI was developing so rapidly. And we’re just living in a different world now,” Clymer said.Īfter ChatGPT made its debut last year, AI has often been compared to other revolutionary technologies: social media, the internet, the printing press. “Get your degree - that’s good advice 10 years ago, five years ago even. So he figures, why waste two more years on a diploma? He wants to work in AI safety now, while he can help prevent catastrophe - and while the job still exists.
“Just last week, I told my friend, ‘What the hell are you doing? Did you see GPT-4? You’re not going to have a computer science job,'” Clymer said.Ĭlymer is spending part of his gap year at the Center for AI Safety, a nonprofit that tries to address your typical nightmare artificial intelligence scenarios: AI-enabled weaponry, the death of truth, that sort of thing.Īside from the possible threat of human extinction, Clymer believes there’s a very high chance that in the next two decades, most jobs are going to be replaced by AI.
He doesn’t think he’s going back.Īs he told a former classmate, he doesn’t see much of a point. Last fall, he decided to take a gap year. Joshua Clymer was a sophomore at Columbia University majoring in math and computer science.
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