I think the unhappiness we experience from AI is not because of AI, but a symptom of a society that lacks more humanism. I currently like to define AI's level of intelligence as its ability to reduce human suffering. By this definition, if AI failed to keep you and society happy for whatever reason, then it is stupid. If you or people around you feeling worthless, anxious, depressed, starving, because of AI, it is stupid! And society needs you to fix it!
I think one can do an engineering job as easily with or without a degree.
I think attending college may have value in terms of social life.
I think degrees are used today as a mean to filter job candidates in the absence of better ways to assess candidates. So degrees are inflationary in the sense that if everyone had X degrees, jobs would require X+1 degrees as they have to filter out candidates if they are saturated with applications.
As an engineer myself that studied in Europe I do not believe you can replicate the education without going to University, like having practice with real machinery and laboratories.
Having said that, education in the US is too expensive. It is captured by an olygopoly and it needs competition.
>I think attending college may have value in terms of social life.
College has a monopoly on social life if you're in the late teens/early 20s. I believe this is part of the reason it is still such a popular option, to the point that people will pay extortionate amounts to do useless degrees.
If you're thrust straight into work that isn't stocking shelves or being a fry cook you won't be around people your own age and it's very alienating. I'm in my early 20s and have considered changing course despite having a successful SWE career to go back to university just so I can have a social life.
I absolutely loved college and can understand the dilemma.
Most the social aspect for me though came from living near the college and not the actual classes.
If I was in this situation, I would just move as physically close to a major university as I could. Most of my social interaction at college came from eating lunch and all the people I met during lunch.
Actually paying tuition though for this reason is as bad an investment as I can think of.
I disagree, I did a lot of lab experiments I'd never be able to do by myself. Also used a lot of industrial software that I would never afford licenses for. Plus even knowing what to look into would require so much self discipline that it'd be very hard to replicate.
Who is going to sit down for 2-3 years (assuming you're faster by yourself to help your argument) and self learn with the same intensity, giving themselves the same amount of homework and projects?
No, specially vs €1k/yr which is what I paid. Just the electronics software related licenses I had access to with Cadence and Xillinx would be over €10k per MONTH.
not really, especially when you add them all up and hardware to run them on. Sure, you can find some cheaper open-source alternatives for some things, but the lack of exposure to the more commercially available ones can be difficult to overcome.
I personally don't think one can do an engineering job properly without a degree, especially those that required a chartership like civil engineering.
What I agree, however, would be to break down the learning into smaller steps and going back to the apprentice where one learn and earn at the same time.
> I think one can do an engineering job as easily with or without a degree.
In theory. In practice, few people have the intelligence and discipline to self-study engineering subjects for a couple of years - that's what higher ed schools are for. I sure as shit wouldn't end up in software engineering (by far the easiest branch of engineering to self-study and get a job in) without doing my CS degree - my motivation and tenacity when I was 20 years old weren't nearly on the level required.
> I think one can do an engineering job as easily with or without a degree.
What is missing from that thought is: can everyone learn online what's required to do an engineering job? No.
There is something fundamentally wrong with the education system, but I don't think that promoting it as a scam is a good thing. Nor do I think that saying "anyone with internet can learn X to do Y" is fair - because while it's true anyone can, but the missing detail is that not everyone can.
My anecdote is that I enjoyed both systems - college and learning on my own, and I think they complement each other.
> They wrote mega defensive and very boring code
How I love boring code, and I am getting more defensive. Good-sleep-oriented-programming.
For much of my career I took technical debt on myself because I felt uncomfortable giving generous time estimations with ample buffers. I am ashamed. But now I learn to push the breaks, ask for help and escalate unexpected problems as early as possible in the project. I don't need the trendiest tech on my resume as long as the team is happy and sleep well.
I feel like the important skill to learn is learning itself, and it becomes more and more pronounced.
I think the idea of learning and adjusting to each and every company you are about to apply can be intimidating at first. The world is changing fast. Skills and tools deprecate quickly – and it is getting even faster now. It only make sense the recruiter will pay more attention to core traits such as motivation, communication, creativity and ability to learn – vs technical knowledge which is still necessary but has less weight. So having an applicant learned about your company and demonstrating why this particular match could work, could hint about the traits aforementioned.
I like experimenting with different lifestyles to see how I feel. Most of the times there are too many variables to make conclusions. Anyway, I tried going vegetarian for few weeks, then introduced fish to diet and felt noticeably better. Then, I tried remove fish and take fish oil instead. Felt absolutely no benefits. At-least feeling wise. I repeated this experiment multiple times so I am sure it isn't coincidence
Or in other words: if you're affected, you don't mind.
(I'm not even joking. If you're researching a substance to use it for others, you definitely need it to control for placebo. But if you're doing it just for yourself, you only need it to work, no matter why. Another story is if it stops working)
Placebo is a baseline effect. It's a hurdle to clear to show efficacy above the minimum any substance can meet.
I've heard this argument before, i.e., placebo is an effect therefore why not, but I cannot understand why time and money would be committed to an activity or substance that is only as good as any other activity or substance.
Placebo should signal: move along, nothing to see here!
I can relate to the career anxiety aspect. The way I want to look at it is, if AI is smart enough to occupy creative jobs such as engineers, the world could be heaven. The "only" problem left is politics. Humans will spend the rest of their unoccupied time negotiating distribution of all resources produced by robots.
> Humans will spend the rest of their unoccupied time negotiating distribution of all resources produced by robots.
I can't see a reason for the dynamics to change from what we have now - those who own the means of production will hoard the new power and those who don't will find their slice of the pie become comparatively even smaller, just as with every increase in efficiency.
And those with power will blame the Other for society’s problems and convince enough of them through media propaganda to vote against their own self interest.
Indeed. But the feeling of well-being is not absolute, but relative to you socio-economic context. The average American is manitudes better off now than 200 years ago, in absolute terms. But are they just as many magnitudes more happy? No. Depending on study, happiness is significantly less.
It's not at all clear that maximizing absolute quality of life is the best ultimate goal.
