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Ask Slashdot: How Can Programmers Move Into AI Jobs?
"I have the seriously growing suspicion that AI is coming for us programmers and IT experts faster than we might want to admit," writes long-time Slashdot reader Qbertino. So he's contemplating a career change -- and wondering what AI work is out there now, and how can he move into it?
Is anything popping up in the industry and AI hype? (And what are these positions called, what do they precisely do, and what are the skills needed to do them?) I suspect something like an "AI Architect", planning AI setups and clearly defining the boundaries of what the AI is supposed to do and explore.
Then I presume the requirements for something like an "AI Maintainer" and/or "AI Trainer" which would probably resemble something like an admin of a big data storage, looking at statistics and making educated decisions on which "AI Training Paths" the AI should continue to explore to gain the skill required and deciding when the "AI" is ready to be let go on to the task... And what about Tensor Flow? Should I toy around with it or are we past that stage already and will others do AI setup and installation better than me before I know how this thing really works...?
Is there a degree program, or other paths to skill and knowledge, for a programmer who's convinced that "AI is today what the web was in 1993"? And if AI of the future ends up tied to specific providers -- AI as a service -- then are there specific vendors he should be focusing on (besides Google?) Leave your best suggestions in the comments. How can programmers move into AI jobs?
Then I presume the requirements for something like an "AI Maintainer" and/or "AI Trainer" which would probably resemble something like an admin of a big data storage, looking at statistics and making educated decisions on which "AI Training Paths" the AI should continue to explore to gain the skill required and deciding when the "AI" is ready to be let go on to the task... And what about Tensor Flow? Should I toy around with it or are we past that stage already and will others do AI setup and installation better than me before I know how this thing really works...?
Is there a degree program, or other paths to skill and knowledge, for a programmer who's convinced that "AI is today what the web was in 1993"? And if AI of the future ends up tied to specific providers -- AI as a service -- then are there specific vendors he should be focusing on (besides Google?) Leave your best suggestions in the comments. How can programmers move into AI jobs?
https://ask.slashdot.org/story...
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All of your programming jobs are belong to us.
- Skynet
I have the seriously growing suspicion that AI is coming for us programmers and IT experts faster than we might want to admit,
Sounds like there will be a great market for fixing easily hacked programs made by AI. ;)
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Read up on AI.
Build some AI stuff.
Write a resume that says you built some AI stuff and that you're otherwise good at programming and computer tasks.
Apply for jobs. Be willing to go where the jobs are and do the work needed.
Be able to explain why someone should hire you for AI stuff.
Repeat until hired.
That's the outline of a plan for you. Someone can probably refine it. Works for non-AI stuff too.
Coal mining is the future. Trump 2020.
This AI has only started to learn how to write stories.
Give it a bit of time to learn.
Most of the hands on development of current Machine Learning business solutions is handled by data scientists (pretty much, decent programmers with strong statistics skills and some knowledge of what the various hyper-parameters do). There is plenty of front and back end work to do, too.
No smoking sigs indoors.
Have a CS degree or equivalent background in data structures, algorithms, and writing code.
Take a class on machine learning, which is probably the most popular subfield of AI; this is most of what text-based AI uses. The Coursera-presented Stanford one is pretty much the gold standard there. https://www.coursera.org/learn/machine-learning
Probably take a class on general AI. I don't have a suggestion there.
Asking naive, uninformed questions twice does not not make them less stupid. The author is obviously much younger than AI and has just recently heard of it. (AI lived a long life, died, and has been reborn) They probably heard the term being used as a noun i.e. "an AI", cringe!! Do what everyone in the field has always done -- Read about it. Then if you want to actually do anything, get a degree in mathematics as a solid base then dive into the literature.
1: Launch deep learning /machine learning / AI company.
2: Attribute long response times with "deep and complex problem".
3: Behind the scenes: hire a bunch of Indians to write up plausible results.
4: Profit
The most prominent AI strategy at the moment is neural networks. Go learn the math behind it. The more math you know the more you will be applicable to different areas of AI study as the current focus moves.
Through Googles captcha system, same as today.
you can't.
To get a job with actual AI (aka machine learning, it's not really AI or if it is only a very narrow part of it) you'd need to have started already in college and then done your master thesis or Phd about something in this area: pattern recognition, genetic algorithms, neuronal programming, whatever your chosen field would be.
There are no jobs in AI actually, at least not a lot of them. There will be the aforementioned people who do the heavy lifting but they are part of a few small teams in mostly big companies and few small ones, many of them then bought out by the big ones resulting in a few small teams at big companies.
There will be many many sharecropper jobs where one writes stuff for some AI platform by the big companies. E.g. something that adds an interface to website or service X to the AI platform Y's API so Y's and X's customers can use the platform with their cool AI toy. Or many guys massaging geodata, placing of roadblocks of varius kinds etc into the databases for the so called "self driving cars" which are anything but self driving, etc. Those are not "AI jobs" however, they are pure McJobs without anything special, same sort of monkey webprogrammer like before. At most you need to know what JSON, XMLRPC or whatever the API uses ist.
The whole point of "AI" is to not needing many people doing the jobs. If you do want a job, create something with this buzzword "AI" aka machine learning, start whatever you want yourself and get totally obsessive about it 36h a day. That's about the only chance to break in from such an outsider position as you seem to be right now.
If AI's supposed to be able to create opportunity, why not use it to help connect the displaced and long-term jobless?
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
"I have the seriously growing suspicion that AI is coming for us programmers and IT experts faster than we might want to admit,"
Nothing to fear. They'll come for _all_ of us at the same time.
One of the tricky things about the growing field is the current lack of maturity of companies (and other organizations) to put the tech to work. Programmers have been around for a long time. As bad as it can be at times, there are commonly defined roles and organizational structures to plug a programmer into that generates business value. This isn't the case with AI roles.
The AI applications that get the most buzz and are generating value right now can be either completely encapsulated at the customer end-point (e.g. queue/purchase recommendation) or "put on a chip" (like self-driving cars I guess? But OCR/computer vision, NLP applications, all these stay in the machine and replace whole people functions like a traditional clerk/data entry or customer service rep.)
The problem for labor with those applications, is that there's just not that much work. Once it's done, it either gives a player significant competitive edge and competition disappears, or is easily replicable, and only requires integrators to bolt it on to an existing org or product.
But all the applications that involve actually running orgs (quantified-self downstreams, "devops" of leased AI products that alter org structures, nextgen BI for people load balancing and performance management,) these will always require significant customization, ongoing development, and a business voice to change assumptions and make hard-pivots. And pretty much every company that is going to survive competition will need this stuff. That's where I see the jobs growing. But there aren't any titles for this. Look for the business need in companies advertising for data/business analysts, "product" managers for domain-specific data tools, report developers, and weird hybrid titles that they made up. Then you'll probably have to explain it to them after you get the job and handle the immediate needs. A big dirty pool, but maybe you can train a classifier to narrow it down :)
I'd almost steer clear of actual data science titles (which is probably where these functions should live.) The market has weird ideas about what these should do as well as the qualifications required to perform the duties. It's flooded with stats phds with almost no programming experience, and a narrowed view how to apply this stuff. You'll mostly wind up as a code-bitch trying to bridge a large function-role gap.
So focus some training in those soft skills and take the business integration route!! FWIW
Why work your ass off educating yourself to get into an AI position when you can do nearly nothing as a Slashdot editor? What's the pay for that again? Is it really that difficult to read the summaries of every Slashdot article which gets posted? I do that and still have time for other things.
upload your consciousness into a computer.
AI (as defined by the pioneers of 'AI') is dead. However, Machine Learning is still a high-specialization, high-skill field, and does have an enormous level of potential in individual domains.
ML for vision != ML for language translation != ML for flight control != ML for stock market prediction != ML for Medical analysis. Etcetera.
In general, ML is compute hungry, and does well when provided with large training sets, balanced with a good mix of True/False behavior.
"How Can Programmers Move Into AI Jobs?"
Easy:
1) Become a programmer.
2) Apply for jobs in AI.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
Is there a degree program, or other paths to skill and knowledge, for a programmer who's convinced that "AI is today what the web was in 1993"?
Well you have to be smart enough to earn one or more PhDs. Someone who believes that is probably not going to be able to do that, but if he tries he will probably quickly learn what a stupid idea it was. Hopefully he will still decide to get his PhD though. We can always use more AI researchers. Although dumb ones are less valuable you never know who might get lucky and stumble upon some cool breakthrough.
The first point is that the only example we have of intelligence is intimately tied to life and can only really be viewed as an aspect of that and the idea that intelligence can be separated from life or at least some form of artificial life is speculative at best. As someone who was quite interested in a career in AI research back in the 80s and has been following the feeble creep of its progress since then I am convinced that wetware is going to be the real future and not so much neural net ASICs like Google's TPU or whatever Nvidia is working on to run neural network architecture which although useful is I think not going to be the foundation for real AI that can give a nice robot chassis like Boston Dynamic's Atlas some level of general intelligence or common sense.
Think of something more like putting a rat/pig/monkey brain into an Atlas Robot. That is figuring out how to digitally interface with a brain-in-jar and train it directly as if it were a complete living animal. Even a rat brain is a far more sophisticated neural network machine than anything we will probably build from scratch in the next few hundred years.
Current neural network architectures are based on a highly simplified model of how real brains actually work. We still really don't know how real brains work. There are projects like The Allen Brain Atlas, The Human Connectome Project, The Brain Activity Map, or whatever Henry Markram is currently up to. There is an interesting Wired article about him that you should read. Maybe consider pursuing a career path like his.
I'd also suggest maybe thinking in at least as much in terms of DNA programming as CPU or GPU programming via Synthetic Biology and follow a career more like Craig Venter who famously made his own artificial bacteria or rather wrote the DNA and inserted it into an empty host cell. That's just a small start of course but it may eventually lead to being able to build artificial life forms that we can make intelligent just by giving them a large enough brain or encephalization quotient. Ultimately even an Atlas Robot with something like an Nvidia P100 cluster running deep learning style neural nets is a kind of very primitive life form. Going fully wet and nano is just another way to attack the same problem in a more integrated fashion: the way I think a far more advanced civ tech would do it.
I guess you should really think in terms of which vision of AI you want to follow or place your bets on. Silicon based connectionism is in vogue at the moment and I think that is great because a lot of progress was lost back in the 80s when it was considered a dead end. It is certainly a more powerful and promising approach than trying to hand code intelligence into a piece of software, but I still think we are just nipping at the heels of an even better approach: biology. Ultimately we are copying the only machine in existence that can create intelligence and that is the
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
Once AI gets to a certain level, the machines will take over making us redundant.
Failing that, all the work will be done in India, Vietnam etc.
The USA, Europe are too expensive for the PHB Beancounters.
I would not recommend anyone to go into IT as a career. I can count myself lucky to have been employed for 40 years in IT and recently retired when my job went to India at 1/3rd the cost/hour.
I don't think there's such a thing as AI. When someone mentions AI I think heuristics.
I always think of a*path finding. Nothing more.
As a 40 something year old C++ dev I'm probably out of date but I've not seen something I'd call AI.
What, if anything, am I missing? Is it just another buzz word?
Just back from WWDC17 and I have this takeaway: leave the creating/training/designing/refining machine learning models to the academics and companies with deep pockets. You're not going to catch up with the PhDs that have a head start on you, especially without a unique authentic problem at hand that nobody else is working on yet. Instead, USE the models that exist. Maybe train 'em with new/different data if you feel compelled, but mainly learn what models exist (natural language processing? Sentiment analysis? Image recognition? Speech recognition? Real-time identification of objects in video?). Learn how to use those models to solve the problems you're working with, or another team is dealing with, or that isn't even being considered for technology and humans are still doing it. The PhDs will keep creating new and better building blocks, just like we started out with basic web tools and now we have WebRTC. Our jobs will be to apply them. And that requires a lot less linear algebra. I think we can all say amen to that.
Editordavid did not make this point so quit railing on him
.x]Beau[x. %=-
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>> How Can Programmers Move Into AI Jobs?
That's how :
http://www.commitstrip.com/en/...
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Programming is a tool. People with expertise in some STEM area make use of it. And they will increasingly upload their knowledge to AI systems.
All those people who are self taught coders without a broad educational background will be left behind.
Have gnu, will travel.
AI exists to put programmers out of work, and the 1% taunt you with it so you don't rebel when it finally happens. Trying to "get into AI" is a fool's errand. There is nothing AI can figure out that hasn't already been figured out and suppressed by governments (especially your own). AI curing cancer? Well we already know where cancer comes from, so let's not expand that revenue loop any further.
I've been hearing about AI for a very long time. Does it actually do anything useful yet? Other than maybe some niche manufacturing or profiling technology (spying and ads)? I get it. It can play chess. It could do that in 1991. And even better in 2000.
I think it's all a bunch of FUD.
My $0.02:
Probability Theory by E.T. Jaynes If you want to understand AI you need to read this (several times).
The Elements of Statistical Learning Hastie, Trevor, Tibshirani, Robert, Friedman, Jerome
Elements of Information Theory by Thomas M. Cover, Joy A. Thomas
Deep Learning by Ian Goodfellow and Yoshua Begino
For those of you that don't want foreign labor taking your white collar jobs, I've got good news.
No Indian or Chinese labor will ever take your job by learning to perform it cheaper.
The bad news? Well, I'll let LearnBot5000 fill you in on your job status.
Present day IT companies and companies who develop and/or operate IT have not reached the level of software development reached at university, e.g., requirements management/engineering, version control systems, design before develop, test driven or contract based development, testing, staging, agile (the real.on not the hacking shit one). As these things have not penetrated the market fully, AI will not help to do anything.
You can work in entry level AI positions if you have a masters. If you get a PhD, meaning you've contributed new research, then you have a chance to move up into a leadership role in AI.
If you're a college drop out, then there isn't much place for you in the new AI industry. This is even the case in places like silicon valley that normally don't look at your degree status.
(posted anonymously because I work in AI in SV)
These are not intelligent enough. Have you seen the comments from them on the "limitations" of AI? They don't understand a damn thing.
At the Harvard commencement this year Mark Zuckerberg spoke about doing something yourself instead of waiting for somebody else to do it, even if it seems obvious because if you don't then maybe nobody else will. Steve Jobs once said in an interview that a key insight for him was the realization that he was just as smart as everybody else out there and there was no reason why he shouldn't be the one to do what he saw as important work. Sometimes people get so absorbed in their advanced degree and credentialing process that they forget that the real world mostly doesn't give a shit. Zuckerberg, Gates and many other important persons in tech either never went to college or dropped out. Maybe there are some lessons in that.
Update your resume to reflect 10 yrs of experience in 2 year-old technology.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
I've been hearing this since my first internship in High School. I worked on expert systems then went home to watch new episodes of Knight Rider. Are we closer? sure. Is it the primary programming need? no. All that data AI consumes still comes from rather boring systems to do the daily work of business. If AI floats your boat... pursue it. If it doesn't, there are still plenty of jobs that will remain and that are will remain meaningul, interesting, and challenging.
..yeah. that one. learn what you're even asking and you might have the answer.
the question "how do I get into AI?" makes sense if you don't know shit all nothing about state of AI.
it's not like you have to have a degree but it helps because NOBODY FUCKING KNOWS WHAT AI IS. those who claim to know the most are usually futurologists who know even less than you(which makes them able to spout all the bullshit they want).
Do you want to get into machine learning? object recognition? download opencv and play around. some people call that AI, some people don't.
you see, right now, companies will splatter AI on everything that 25 years ago they would put "fuzzy logic" on - yet nobody actually has actual artificial intelligence. some companies have facsmiles of AI - again, not the same thing. nowadays you could get away with a regular old fuel injection system and calling it AI. seriously.
Basically, anything that analyzes anything can and will be called AI. it's not right but that's how it is.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
and first you need to learn more about biology.
I would recommend you learn how to solve problems using AI and how to use the currently available AI tools and patterns.
Here's a good place to get learn about the algorithms and services Microsoft uses in Cortana. https://gallery.cortanaintelligence.com/browse
Here's a good place to learn about how AI is being used to solve real problems right now.
https://sv.ai/issue-1
OK, a program learns those things that are recommended by slashdotters.
Then they apply for a job and get rejected for not having experience in AI.
how to get around that?
then go into the porn industry. In all seriousness, all Turing-complete computer programming is AI. So, go program something. You are doing AI. In this day and age it is practically impossible to not use AI in your code somewhere (whether you realize you are doing it or not). If you want to study how to develop new "AI" algorithms, ha, good luck. That is going to take an advanced degree and many years of study. There is no "easy" way.