So a couple of students who finished high school asked me for advice about university.

Four years ago I thought that computer science was the best thing you could study; now I no longer advise anyone to pursue it. There are serious changes in the world that the eighteen-year-old me had no idea were coming. I thought transformers were cool deep learning stuff, not something that could make me unemployed.

Before sharing my thoughts, it is interesting to look at the questions the students are asking. The recurring ones are “how much money will I make”, “how much competition is there for jobs” and “how difficult will it be to study”. It is not hard to see the motivations behind these questions. They mostly try to maximize status while minimizing effort, which seems like a plausible heuristic for an evolutionary creature.

I will not argue against chasing status, and will not undervalue their need for financial stability. But I think the minimizing effort part does the most damage to these students. When you choose your career based on minimum risk and maximum comfort, you are part of the system LLMs have already started to automate. When the foundations are shaking, the way to stand on your feet is to learn to deal with uncertainty and take risks.

The first thing to do is to try to grasp the current landscape. The coming wave of AI is not only relevant to computer science. A student asked me whether pursuing medicine or engineering makes sense, and engineering is not one answer. Software goes first. Anyone can tell now that coding by hand is a dying profession. Hardware and medicine just go later, because the physical world is slower to automate than text. To become a surgeon, you need to spend a decade in education, and it’s hard to know whether in 2036 surgeries will be done by human hands or robots.

You could go through each profession and make predictions about when it will be made obsolete by a combination of AI and robotics, and you might be right or wrong. Nevertheless, the conclusion is inevitable: any job can be replaced by AI one day. So any advice worth giving a student has to start there.

Students have this inflated perception of the diploma’s importance. They ask me less about university and more about which diploma is better. They think the major they are choosing is the most important decision of all, and this is understandable; the parents and teachers reinforce this idea. They grew up in a world where a diploma was the most reliable way to get a job, and jobs are good. Hence no one tells students that it will be no more than a wasted piece of paper in the coming years.

Students need to understand that universities are not holy institutions that give you a structure to follow and eliminate uncertainty from your life. There is never a guarantee of anything in this world and there never will be. Students should take responsibility for their lives, not leave it to some imaginary all-knowing old people.

At eighteen years old, people know barely anything about how the world works. After four years of university experience, I think they should be asking more about the community and less about the institution. The university is the best place to meet people and the worst place to learn anything.

One particular piece of advice I have for them is to move to a different city to study. To get out of their comfort zones and face reality — I think this is the most essential advice. You must sleep in a different bed, eat in a different place and make new friends. To change who you are, you should change your environment.

I also ask them, “What do you want from life?” You can see that most are not expecting this type of question. It is hard to live a fulfilled life if you are not questioning why you are doing the things you are doing. Life is not only about status. I would rather see them being anxious now about why they are living than see them having a midlife crisis.

It might be tempting to conclude that AI will do everything and nothing matters. I would be lying if I said I did not wrestle with that type of thinking. Yes, it’s hard to predict the coming decades and whether an average human will do any work. But there is a great question to ask here: if I didn’t have to work at all, what would I do with my life? At times when I could not answer this question, the coming change was paralyzing.

A couple of great questions to ask are “what are the things I enjoyed in my high school years” and “what are the things I think I might enjoy”. If you can’t name a couple of good ones for both, forget about the career; fix that first.

Whatever you study, your work life will revolve around AI. So start today. Use it, learn what it is good at, and find out where it fails. Build something you would actually use.

How can one make a lot of money in this AI future? I am not sure. If you can learn things and talk to people, that will get you further than the diploma. Do not assume money will come as a byproduct of taking courses.

So in the end, I make students leave the conversation with more questions than they came in with. I don’t know what the future will look like or what professions make sense, if any. Students need to understand that there is no certainty and no guarantee. They should think more about how they want to live and less about what the people around them say, as we all should.