Ask HN: Is ML/AI a good long-term career path?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21124355

by drumttocs8 • 7 years ago

23 9 7 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

ML/AI careers are perhaps the sexiest jobs in tech now, offering high salaries and great job satisfaction. How good of careers are they long term, though? It seems like it's very possible that those very jobs would be the first to be automated away. Or will they always be required, and low-skill jobs will be automated away instead?

sova• 7 years ago

It's very easy to write yourself out of a job, but if you have specific domain knowledge (art and creativity for the field) then you have a huge advantage. I think ML/AI are incredibly useful tools that still need the guiding hand of human creativity. I suppose it depends on how much entrepreneurs are aware of the benefit of AI (and how realistic that expectation is). You could make a career out of improving existing platforms with AI/ML but also Apple just released some powerful stuff to all App makers that can utilize a Neural Net for recommendations and learning gestures without the need for any complex coding. So, I think an AI/ML expert is like someone with really long arms able to reach fruit at the top of the tree. We can sometimes just bend the whole tree down, tie it, and call it a day. You may have to spend your whole career moving from forest to forest to find more trees to pick fruit off. Ideally, you can turn these skills into some sort of passive income stream and then you can pursue your passion projects full force.

alltakendamned• 7 years ago

I think when it comes to any technology, it is important to keep the Hype Cycle in mind (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hype_cycle).

Will there be long term career options in ML/AI? Maybe. Most probably for a while. Long term, probably few.

Will those skills be transferable to other technologies? Who knows.

frankbreetz• 7 years ago

It depends on what you focus on if you think taking a 4-month bootcamp is going to give a good long term career you are mistaken. BLS claims that mathematicians and statistician jobs are growing faster than any other area: https://www.bls.gov/ooh/math/mathematicians-and-statistician...

I take this to mean if you focus on the fundamentals of AI/ML instead of just learning how to use the newest framework you will always be able to find work.

Even if this area does become highly automated you will need to be people who understand how the tools work, what sort of problems they solve, and how to identify these problems.

No one knows for sure, but I would be surprised to see people who understand AI/ML fundamentals not being highly useful in the future.

codingslave• 7 years ago

You need to be in and stay in the top 5-10% of ML practitioners

methusala8• 7 years ago

Can you please elaborate on the skills needed to be in the top 10 percent in this field? Thanks

psv12• 7 years ago

It's software engineering with a lot of statistics. Even if the titles and hype-cycles change, the core skills will be in-demand for a while.

kiterunner2346• 7 years ago

No, b/c there is no "long-term" for ML/AI. Look at what brought the current ML explosion: Moore's law held just long enough to make ML work reasonably well w/in the human attention span. Nobody anticipated this. It overrode other interests and now dominates AI (for the moment).

The same thing could happen again and another technology could sweep ML/AI aside. ML/AI itself is not a predictable "career path" like chemical, electrical/petroleum, or mechanical engineering are. ML/AI is more like the Wild West: maybe you're a wildcatter who has a new idea, thinks he can find oil and strike it rich.

If you want a predictable career path that covers most of the same subject area then choose statistics, mathematics or data science.

psv12• 7 years ago

Considering how murky the definitions are, it's ridiculous to say that ML has no future but data science is a predictable career path.

dlphn___xyz• 7 years ago

tech is general isnt a good long term career path

Ask HN: Is ML/AI a good long-term career path?

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