Without being able to comment on your specific situation, I would strongly discourage almost anyone who wants to have a highly impactful career from dropping out of college (assuming you don’t have an excellent outside option).
There is sometimes a tendency within EA and adjacent communities to critique the value of formal education, or to at least suggest that most of the value of a college education comes via its signaling power. I think this is mistaken, but I also suspect the signaling power of a college degree may increase—rather than decrease—as AI becomes more capable, and it may become harder to use things like, e.g., work tests to assess differences in applicants’ abilities (because the floor will be higher).
This isn’t to dismiss your concerns about the relevance of the skills you will cultivate in college to a world dominated by AI; as someone who has spent the last several years doing a PhD that I suspect will soon be able to be done by AI, I sympathize. Rather, a few quick thoughts:
Reading the new 80k career guide, which touches on this to some extent (and seeking 80k advising, as I suspect they are fielding these concerns a lot).
Identifying skills at the intersection of your interests, abilities, and things that seem harder for AI to replace. For instance, if you were considering medicine, it might make more sense to pursue surgery rather than radiology.
Taking classes where professors are explicitly thinking about and engaging with these concerns, and thoughtfully designing syllabi accordingly.
My concerns are oriented around CS specifically, as I literally feel I am currently worse at coding than Chat GPT, that AI will continue to improve at it in the near term, and that the CS job market will become hyper competitive due to the combination of an oversupply/ backlog of CS majors and a shrinking number of job entries.
Thanks for the recommendation about 80K advising, that seems like a good resource.
Without being able to comment on your specific situation, I would strongly discourage almost anyone who wants to have a highly impactful career from dropping out of college (assuming you don’t have an excellent outside option).
There is sometimes a tendency within EA and adjacent communities to critique the value of formal education, or to at least suggest that most of the value of a college education comes via its signaling power. I think this is mistaken, but I also suspect the signaling power of a college degree may increase—rather than decrease—as AI becomes more capable, and it may become harder to use things like, e.g., work tests to assess differences in applicants’ abilities (because the floor will be higher).
This isn’t to dismiss your concerns about the relevance of the skills you will cultivate in college to a world dominated by AI; as someone who has spent the last several years doing a PhD that I suspect will soon be able to be done by AI, I sympathize. Rather, a few quick thoughts:
Reading the new 80k career guide, which touches on this to some extent (and seeking 80k advising, as I suspect they are fielding these concerns a lot).
Identifying skills at the intersection of your interests, abilities, and things that seem harder for AI to replace. For instance, if you were considering medicine, it might make more sense to pursue surgery rather than radiology.
Taking classes where professors are explicitly thinking about and engaging with these concerns, and thoughtfully designing syllabi accordingly.
My concerns are oriented around CS specifically, as I literally feel I am currently worse at coding than Chat GPT, that AI will continue to improve at it in the near term, and that the CS job market will become hyper competitive due to the combination of an oversupply/ backlog of CS majors and a shrinking number of job entries.
Thanks for the recommendation about 80K advising, that seems like a good resource.