The well-known Billionaire Entrepreneur Mark Cuban argues that in the not-so distant future, a philosophy degree will be worth significantly more than a computer-science degree. The reason, he argues, is the eventual dominance of artificial intelligence. Rubin explains:
“What is happening now with artificial intelligence is we’ll start automating automation. Artificial intelligence won’t need you or I to do it, it will be able to figure out itself how to automate [tasks] over the next 10 to 15 years.”
Repetitive jobs like accounting and computer programming are easily automated, he argues, but the larger human judgment of philosophy cannot be. It is the “big picture” approach, not programming, that will become the key to success.
“Knowing how to critically think and assess them from a global perspective, I think, is going to be more valuable than what we see as exciting careers today which might be programming or CPA or those types of things,” says Cuban.
Ultimately, the rate of technological change will be so overwhelming, that philosophers well be best suited to drive innovation.
Read the full article at CNBC.
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From my own experience, I find this to be true. For me, the question was how to apply philosophy (in other words, how to convince someone to hire me). With a minor in computer science, I found my way into an IT job. From there I eventually moved to things closer to philosophy, as my employer recognized my strengths in abstraction.
Right now I am doing enterprise architecture, and I could not think of a major more suitable for this kind of work than philosophy. But I did find it helpful to have studied something more immediately practical as well. Philosophy is useful, but it really becomes distinctive when combined with other skills, in a kind of ”skill stacking”.