I think an important thing to remember is that drastic change both obsoletes and creates jobs. I know that AI is not the same as prior technologies, but we’ve had very similar situations before with the first, second, and third industrial revolutions—with mass production and computing in particular. Many of the jobs we know of today will disappear, though new ones will appear (some are already starting to).
I think AI will struggle with a lot of the soft skills of academia, but I do agree that the field will be extensively changed. This isn’t always a bad thing—I think the LLM and automation aspect will make scientific participation and discover much easier for large sections of society. My father is one of the most intelligent and driven men I know, but is mostly illiterate (and I mean this literally) for a variety of reasons, so I think for people like that AI will be useful.
To most directly answer your question, I’d say do what you love. Yes, that’s really annoying and something you’d find on a motivational poster but if you genuinely love psychology academia then stick with it but keep an agile scout mindset to roll with the punches. If it was always just a job, play to very human strengths—look for roles which require a very human understanding of the world. Roles in HCI fit this, but there are a lot of roles in engineering and frontline science that are also almost impossible to automate within the next 20 years. Project management and people management roles also fit into this category.
Lots of this answer is opinion-based (and will be, naturally, given the request for opinions!) so others may disagree—but this is how I see it.
I think an important thing to remember is that drastic change both obsoletes and creates jobs. I know that AI is not the same as prior technologies, but we’ve had very similar situations before with the first, second, and third industrial revolutions—with mass production and computing in particular. Many of the jobs we know of today will disappear, though new ones will appear (some are already starting to).
I think AI will struggle with a lot of the soft skills of academia, but I do agree that the field will be extensively changed. This isn’t always a bad thing—I think the LLM and automation aspect will make scientific participation and discover much easier for large sections of society. My father is one of the most intelligent and driven men I know, but is mostly illiterate (and I mean this literally) for a variety of reasons, so I think for people like that AI will be useful.
To most directly answer your question, I’d say do what you love. Yes, that’s really annoying and something you’d find on a motivational poster but if you genuinely love psychology academia then stick with it but keep an agile scout mindset to roll with the punches. If it was always just a job, play to very human strengths—look for roles which require a very human understanding of the world. Roles in HCI fit this, but there are a lot of roles in engineering and frontline science that are also almost impossible to automate within the next 20 years. Project management and people management roles also fit into this category.
Lots of this answer is opinion-based (and will be, naturally, given the request for opinions!) so others may disagree—but this is how I see it.