A SLUH student asked me recently what the safest career choice is in a world changing due to artificial intelligence. His question came after reading Matt Shumer’s “Something Big is Happening”— one of many recent popular “AI doomer” articles that predict dire consequences of AI in the economy — which included this doozy of a quote: “If your job happens on a screen (if the core of what you do is reading, writing, analyzing, deciding, communicating through a keyboard) then AI is coming for significant parts of it.”

As someone who works in the heart of AI in my job as a Distinguished Engineer at IBM, I see a lot of truth in these articles. AI’s capabilities have only accelerated. In the last three months I feel AI has made a notable leap — one that leaves me astonished nearly every day. I’ve seen the core of my career — software engineering — change drastically from “creating to supervising” as a software blogger put it recently. 

But some caveats. As your English teachers would surely note, these article authors are masters in persuasive writing, including Shumer’s emotional comparison of AI today to the early days of Covid. They also vastly overestimate how quickly these new AI capabilities will affect change in society. Professor Ethan Mollick of The Wharton School said back in November 2023 (the early days of generative AI) “even if there is no development beyond the current level of AI, we have at least a decade of absorbing the effects of ChatGPT on our lives.”

 For you, SLUH students, though, whether AI upends the labor market in two years or 10 means little as you plan your careers. And the truth is I don’t know which fields are safe or not. All other technological revolutions resulted in a net creation of jobs, but at the expense of certain categories of jobs. Some believe Jevons Paradox applies to AI: for example, AI might make software development so easy that it might actually drive the demand for drastically more software and thus more software engineers!

 To future-proof yourselves from AI’s changes, let me be so bold as to offer some advice: Embrace your Jesuit education. Knowing how to think critically and deeply will be the key to adapting to whatever changes lie ahead. 

Don’t use AI. As your teachers probably say, you’re only cheating yourself by using AI for schoolwork. Research shows that you weaken those skills that you outsource to AI. If you don’t strengthen that base of a liberally educated mind now, you’ll be the one left behind as these changes occur.

But do use AI. The irony is when you step into the labor market you’ll be expected to use AI. As a digitally native generation, you can understand these new tools quickly and find creative ways to use them. So pick a personal passion and use AI to brainstorm and build. Push the boundaries of AI and yourself. (A more succinct version of these last two contradictory points courtesy of Nicholas Thompson, CEO of The Atlantic magazine, when he spoke recently at WashU: “Use the tools all the time. Remember they are brilliant. And also that they are fools. And that they will make you into mush.”)

Finally, hold on to your humanity. Drastic societal change can expose people’s moral foundation. Foster the foundation that you’re building at SLUH. If you are called upon to determine how AI is used, act ethically and in service of others. 

Jason Hunt 

SLUH parent