Comment by hyperbovine

> Who knows, in the end maybe this will kill off the group of students who enroll in CS courses “because mom and dad think it’s a good job,”

I see this so much. “Data science major” became the 2020s version of law school. It’s such a double edged sword. It’s led to a huge increase in enrollment and the creation of multiple professional masters programs, so the college loves us. We hire every year and there’s always money for just about anything. On the other hand, class sizes are huge, which is not fun, and worse a large fraction of the students appear to have minimal intrinsic interest in coding or analyzing data. They’re there because it’s where the jobs are. I totally get that, in some sense college has always been that way, but it does make me look back fondly on the days when classes were 1/4 as big and filled with people who were genuinely interested in the subject.

Unfortunately I think I may get my wish. AI is going to eliminate a lot of those jobs and so the future of our field looks a bit bleak. Worse, it’s the very students who are going to become redundant the quickest that are the least willing to learn. I’d be happy to teach them basic analysis and coding skills, but they are dead set on punching everything into ChatGPT.