Ask Lemmy

20 years ago the line was “there are no careers in psychology/philosophy”. So I got a comp sci degree, and I do well enough coding, but I could probably be happier with how I spend my days. I still read philosophy in my free time. Less tangible paths have always been demonized, largely because society needs a lot of laborers and engineers, and fewer thinkers and theorists. The potential of AI is just the latest buzzword applied to a century old coercion tactic.

That said, if we entertain the possibility, I think you’re taking too narrow of a view of the possibilities. Who will advise the training of those therapy AI models? Doctorate psychologists.

I work for an education tech company, obviously our product is built by an engineering team of comp sci majors that know how to code - but we employ a large number of former teachers and folks with pedagogical degrees to guide how the product actually works in the real world.

The same will continue to be true for future products, a model to perform a task well doesn’t exist without those that deeply understand the task at hand.

Another example that comes to mind is data science - has any economist ever recommended a theoretical math degree as a career choice? And yet every company racing to implement the latest machine learning models now needs someone that understands Bayesian probability networks and Markov chains. Suddenly a “useless” degree is in high demand.

If that’s what you want to do, I think you’ll find your way. Minor in comp sci and think about how to implement your psychology learnings in code, if you want to have a contingency plan.