I'm a PhD student in CS. While I think these results are rather cool, it makes me terrified that the skills developed by the PhD will ultimately be worthless. I'm not quite sure what to do. Any thoughts from people in similar positions?
(That said, this is not fun, and I sympathise! I'm still a student and would like to avoid finance if at all possible. Just suggesting not to drop everything if you feel like you're learning in the process.)
(I'm now personally in the position of having to choose a PhD project, and this rapid change is interacting with making long-term plans really badly. Guidance welcome!)
Almost every single person who earns money for labor is, or will very soon be, in exactly the same position as you, many are just either unaware of how fast the change is coming or are deep in denial about it.
None of us know what to do about it other than hope that we find a peaceful political solution prior to the economic collapse.
Unfortunately, the current world is not set up for that, and until we get there, yeah things are gonna get pretty hairy. But if and when we get to the other side, I think the future will be glorious.
I studied CS, I have been a software engineer for 15 years. The one thing AI cannot take from me is my understanding, my experience, my intuition. An AI will gladly do whatever you tell it to do, and it is getting really good at it. But I regularly have to steer the AI to the right direction. Not because its default wouldn't have worked at all, but because I knew better.
If I task an AI to build something I don't understand myself, I can get further than without an AI, but I am limited. But when I use an AI to build something I am an expert at... I see that it is better than what non-experts get AIs to do.
You lose when you stop learning. You are a PhD student, you have learned to learn. Keep that. Keep learning actively. It was never about the PhD anyway: when you go to the industry, nobody cares about your PhD. What you have is what you know.