Choosing your Major in the Age of AI

More and more students today face the same question: should I choose to study what I love, or go into a field that AI can’t replace?

My sister started college this year, and asked me this exact question. She was worried that the major she had long sought to study (Computer Science) might be totally moot in a few years once AI “takes over.”

She’s always enjoyed programming and is a brilliant student, but she said her school counselor told her “AI can write code these days, software engineering roles won’t exist a few years from now.” This very same claim is often made about other majors as well, such as graphic design, now that AI can generate images and videos.

That kind of thinking isn’t uncommon; I hear it often, usually from people outside the fields they’re worried about. For example, in the case of software engineering, the confusion often comes from a lack of understanding of what exactly it is that software engineers do. Is it writing code? Well, yes, but that’s only a small part of the role. The hardest part of being a software engineer is understanding a problem, coming up with a solution, and figuring out what exactly needs to be done. Once you know “I need a function that takes X and returns Y,” the code pretty much writes itself. That’s the easy part. Software engineers get big salaries to figure out solutions to difficult problems, not to write code.

The same goes for creative roles. When I work with artists, what matters most isn’t their ability to draw but their ability to imagine, to turn an abstract idea into something that makes people feel. AI can regurgitate variations of images that already exist, or blend existing concepts if a user asks it to do so, but real, true art comes from humans’ ability to come up with completely original ideas. This sort of vision is something that AI does not and will not have for the foreseeable future.

And this is the core concept that I want you to understand. AI is excellent at replicating things that already exist, because that’s what AI models were trained on. Writing simple emails, generating basic images to use on personal websites, coding basic functions that do simple database operations, all of these things are areas where AI is already taking over. But the consequence of this is that it is freeing up human cognition to focus on bigger problems. The modern professional–whether a software engineer, graphic artist, or email marketing consultant–is there to solve problems that haven’t been solved yet. AI is a wonderful tool in the toolbox of things that can help them solve those problems, but AI by itself is not going to get all these things done.

AI can and will replace more entry-level roles where the nature of the work is heavily reliant on copying and pasting solutions to problems that have long since been solved, like a marketing assistant that is reusing old email copy rather than writing something new, a developer copying code from StackOverflow rather than coding something original, or a graphic designer recycling old Illustrator files rather than creating fresh new designs. Getting a job after you graduate will get harder and harder because all jobs are going to begin indexing more and more toward full utilization of human cognition, the part of us that AI does not have. It used to be that a degree was a one way ticket to a good job out of college, but that’s barely the price of entry these days. To succeed, you need to put more effort into building your resume while you’re still in college.

So is Computer Science dead? No, far from it. In fact, I believe that there’s an unbelievably bright future for young people deciding to go into software engineering. In the end, you should choose a major you really love, and get really, really good at it. If you can demonstrate that you’re capable of creating things that are truly novel and useful, I promise that you will never have to worry about AI taking your job. The future belongs to the ones who think, imagine, and solve problems. I believe in you!