- An economics professor warned students against rushing into STEM to get AI jobs.
- He said that some of the workers in IT jobs that are advancing AI may be replaced by AI themselves.
- Instead, he said soft skills like empathy and communication are going to thrive in the future.
Students are scrambling to study STEM in colleges in the hopes of landing lucrative and exciting roles in the AI industry, but a Nobel Prize-winning economist has cautioned against the hype.
Christopher Pissarides — an economics professor at the London School of Economics and winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2010 — told Bloomberg in a recent interview that workers in IT jobs who are advancing AI are risking making their own roles obsolete in the future.
"The skills that are needed now — to collect the data, collate it, develop it, and use it to develop the next phase of AI or more to the point make AI more applicable for jobs — will make the skills that are needed now obsolete because it will be doing the job," Pissarides said.
He added: "This demand for these new IT skills, they contain their own seeds of self-destruction."
Applications to study computing at universities were up almost 10% in the UK in 2023 due to the interest in AI, according to the University and College Admissions Service, per the BBC. There was a 16% increase in applications to study software engineering and an 11% rise in applications for computer science compared to 2022.
However, Pissarides explained that there may not even be enough AI jobs to go around for all of the graduates.
"Despite the fact that you see growth, they're still not as numerous as might be required to have jobs for all those graduates coming out with STEM because that's what they want to do," he said.
Instead, Pissarides pointed out that soft skills like communication and empathy in industries like hospitality and healthcare are likely to thrive in the future because they're unlikely to be adopted by AI.
"When you say the majority of jobs will be jobs that will involve personal care, communication, good social relationships, people might say 'Oh, God, is that what we have to look forward to in the future'," Pissarides said.
"We shouldn't be looking down at these jobs. They're better than the jobs that school leavers used to do."
The hype around AI is partly influenced by the lofty salaries companies are dishing out. Big tech firms like Google, Microsoft, Meta, and OpenAI are handing out six-figure salaries for AI roles, Business Insider previously reported.
But even non-tech companies like Disney, JPMorgan, and Accenture are offering competitive salaries to workers with AI skills and knowledge, BI reported.
In the US, there has been an overall rise in STEM graduates since 2010, according to the Pew Research Center, especially as technology roles are some of the highest paying in the US.