Artificial intelligence has rapidly become a part of American’s lives. What once was a fringe concept a few years ago is now an everyday tool.

Its expansive reach affects what and how students study, as well as the job sector, prompting some to question how students and higher education at large should respond.

The best way an undergrad can prepare for an AI-altered workforce is to develop human qualities that machines cannot replicate, such as critical thinking, creativity, and social intelligence, some experts told The College Fix.

While the value of specific majors may diminish, careers in mental health, healthcare, and fields requiring high-level decision-making and management will remain viable, they said.

But make no mistake, the role of humans will increasingly center on collaboration with AI.

AI will be a job killer. It will also be a job creator.

While some jobs will be eliminated, others will be created.

“The amount of work that’s being created and the opportunities to both create and contribute are going to be expanded exponentially,” said corporate advisor Jack Myers, a University of Arizona lecturer in its School of Information Science.

Forecasts predicting the coming obsolescence of countless careers should be viewed “through the prism of not only what’s going to be eliminated, but what’s going to be created,” he told The College Fix in a telephone interview.

Jobs in coding, basic processing, routine bookkeeping, low-complexity customer service and translation will all soon be eliminated, Myers said.

But the opportunities ushered in by AI are going to be exceptional, said Myers, author of the book “The Tao of Leadership: Harmonizing Technological Innovation and Human Creativity in the AI Era.”

“If you look at almost any area of human creation,” Myers said, “it will be enhanced through the same type of collaborative partnership as if the creator was hiring an expert to assist and support in the process.”

Joey Kim, chair of the Department of Engineering and Computer Science at Master’s University, described AI as “simply a tool.”

“With the advent of new tools, careers do disappear,” Kim said in a telephone interview with The Fix. “There’s also careers that get modified…. It’s not simply binary and careers [either] remain unaffected or [become] obsolete. There is a spectrum.”

But like it or not, AI will be part of many jobs, said Michael Pavlin, an associate professor in the School of Business and Economics at Wilfrid Laurier University, who has been involved in AI research since the early 2000s and serves as the chair of his school’s management analytics program.

“It’s hard to imagine a white collar job where you’re not going to be interacting with AI at some level,” he said in a telephone interview.

However, despite recent AI advances, he said he remains “more on the skeptical side,” later adding he believes “we’re being a little bit oversold.”

Reva Freedman, an associate professor of computer science at Northern Illinois University with expertise in computational linguistics, said AI “is going to have a huge impact on the job market, but not different in kind to the effect that computerization had with the invention of the PC in 1983.”

“In offices, [b]efore the invention of the PC, lots of people had jobs as secretaries and clerks. Secretaries typed memos that other people wrote. Those jobs have been largely replaced by people using word processors themselves,” she said via email. “Clerks did a variety of jobs that have been automated by use of Excel and other software.”

The jobs that will survive require high-level thinking, management skills, or require hands-on work, such as medicine, Freedman said.

Gary Clemenceau, a “deep geek” turned chaplain and author, who claims 30 years of experience in tech, agrees. He told The Fix that “mental health and healthcare jobs, and anything that requires dealing with humans and higher-order thinking, will still be viable.”

AI and the dumbing-down of higher education

But will there be any higher-order thinking left?

“For teachers, it’s absolutely impossible to give a writing [assignment] today that students can’t cheat on,” Freedman said. “Even for an in-class assignment, you can now get glasses that allow you to look up stuff on the web during an exam.”

Kim said the misuse of AI in the classroom devalues a degree’s representation of how well one has been trained in a program and successfully met its requirements.

Freedman also expressed concerns over the misuse of AI in other segments of society, citing allegations it was used to write a recent MAHA report said to contain made-up citations.

Pavlin told The Fix he is more concerned about less obvious errors that require a greater level of expertise to detect. For example, when querying AI about esoteric subjects related to his research, he tends to find deeper ways in which AI makes mistakes than he would if he similarly asked AI a question about general relativity.

In that sense, AI is not bulletproof. Kim echoed similar sentiments: “When big important decisions must be made where it’s either life-or-death or costing millions and millions of dollars, you’re going to need something more than ChatGPT.”

Yet, as some of the scholars interviewed by The Fix noted, the increasing overuse of AI by students may lead to the attrition of capacities beyond their proficiency at using ChatGPT.

“I think it’s impacting their learning,” Pavlin said. “Not all students, but [there is] definitely a subset of students where I’m concerned about their critical thinking skills.”

AI and the college student

When asked how students could best prepare for the careers that await them in an AI-altered job market, most of the scholars interviewed recommended they develop their more uniquely human attributes.

“The machines are already smarter than the human brain in many instances,” Myers told The Fix. “[They have] been for a while and that’s just going to continue to become increasingly the norm.”

“So where does the human come in?” Myers asked rhetorically, answering that humans enter through the “collaborative process” and “the unique human qualities of the human brain.” These he said are developed in the social sciences and humanistic majors.

Clemenceau said students must develop their human qualities.

“Students need to put down their phones and THINK,” Clemenceau wrote in an email to The College Fix. “AI is not very good at being creative.”

Whether majoring in computer science and learning to code is still a wise choice was a point of some disagreement.

“Coding will be irrelevant as a tool or resource to bring to the table,” Myers said. “The AI is doing its own coding going forward. It doesn’t need the human coders anymore.”

In contrast, Freedman noted that people “have been saying ever since I was a beginning programmer (in the 70’s) that programs that can write programs were coming.”

“Is it more true now? Probably. Does that mean the [number] of programmers needed will go down? T[h]at’s a much harder question to answer.”

“I think there will always be room for people who care about the quality of their work, understand the business needs, and can communicate with non-programmers,” she said.

As for choosing a major, though, she added: “I don’t think students’ majors have a lot to do with their success in the work world; their personal qualities are a lot more important. So I don’t think we can tell students what majors will be more useful.”

Kim expressed similar sentiments, saying “I personally believe that with any major, if you’re going to be using your tools to your advantage, and if you’re really going to be motivated enough to not just follow the crowd, you will have a job.”

Clemenceau said the future may be bleaker than his optimistic peers.

“I see two roads,” he said via email. “A small percentage of people will reject AI as inhuman and soulless and empty, and take the ‘human road’ as much as possible, living more spiritual lives.”

However, he added, a “larger percentage of people will fully embrace AI and (sadly) sacrifice part of their humanity, becoming less creative, less able to think critically – and more easily manipulated.”

MORE: Using AI to write essays can impair brain function: MIT study

IMAGE CAPTION AND CREDIT: A graphic showing a laptop user employing AI / Supatman, CanvaPro

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