
Ask HN: Is ML/AI a good long-term career path? - drumttocs8
ML&#x2F;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&#x27;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?
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sova
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.

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frankbreetz
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...](https://www.bls.gov/ooh/math/mathematicians-and-
statisticians.htm)

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.

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kiterunner2346
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.

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psv1
Considering how murky the definitions are, it's ridiculous to say that ML has
no future but data science is a predictable career path.

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psv1
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.

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alltakendamned
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](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.

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

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methusala8
Can you please elaborate on the skills needed to be in the top 10 percent in
this field? Thanks

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dlphn___xyz
tech is general isnt a good long term career path

