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'We Can't Compete': Universities Are Losing Their Best AI Scientists (theguardian.com)
The Guardian shares the story of a PhD student at Imperial College London who abruptly stopped coming to the facility, even as he had one-year of studies left. From the story: Eventually, the professor called him. He had left for a six-figure salary at Apple. "He was offered such a huge amount of money that he simply stopped everything and left," said Maja Pantic, professor of affective and behavioural computing at Imperial. "It's five times the salary I can offer. It's unbelievable. We cannot compete." It is not an isolated case, the report says. Adding: Across the country, talented computer scientists are being lured from academia by private sector offers that are hard to turn down. According to a Guardian survey of Britain's top ranking research universities, tech firms are hiring AI experts at a prodigious rate, fuelling a brain drain that has already hit research and teaching. One university executive warned of a "missing generation" of academics who would normally teach students and be the creative force behind research projects. The impact of the brain drain may reach far beyond academia. Pantic said the majority of top AI researchers moved to a handful of companies, meaning their skills and experience were not shared through society. "That's a problem because only a diffusion of innovation, rather than its concentration into just a few companies, can mitigate the dramatic disruptions and negative effects that AI may bring about."
Time to write the "AI for Dummies" book.
Anybody want to help?
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
So they're just losing them? They're not being "killed" like the last dozen articles?
Why should they be surprised? PHDs are treated like crappy free labor by universities.
Perhaps when they stopping paying administration officials obscene salaries and pay professors and grads what they are actually worth the quality at universities will improve.
With out that generation how will we as a species create Rokko's Baselisk?
Universities are turning from being institutions of eductation to political shitshows. Nobody needs that noise if you've got skills and want to actually learn or achieve something.
Company pays more for person to work on a product than a university pays to work on research. News at 11.
If this is important for Universities, maybe they can take some of all that lovely guaranteed student loan money and direct it towards salaries instead of beanbags, crayons, safe spaces and "grounds improvement" and whatever the hell else they spend gobs of that money on.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
Why pay tens of thousands for human talent in a classroom when AI Universities can do so for a fraction of the cost? Why would people paying for manicured lawns and dorm rooms?
You can start by learning the correct spelling of the word "without".
Their research was going to be tied up in Patents either way. Before it would have been tied up in University patents, most of which don't return money either to the public, or to the department it came from. Now it will simply be tied up in a Corporate coffer with the same length of time before it will become practically usable for the majority of the populace.
What's the alternative? Suppose he completed his PhD. He wasn't going to stay in academia if he could make so much more money in the private sector.
He probably should have leveled with the school all the same out of courtesy.
The Daddy casts sleep on the Baby. The Baby resists!
The trouble is we're heading for another industrial revolution. And if you know your history that means decades of unemployment until some new tech comes along. We need political and social solutions for the near term. Or we can just accept a declined standard of living.
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Professor is a voluntary role best assumed by those whose passion is to teach and give back;
pay comparable to working in industry to attract people who are after lots of $$$ is Not one of the benefits of being in academics VS practice.
Eventually some will come around after their stint in private industry is over, or private industry will start giving back, because
companies will want more people to be knowledgeable on the subject areas their business relies upon.
Ultimately some fields are so specialized that the training itself will have a high cost to entry, but this is not the purpose for students to attend traditional university.
Create AI Scientist AI.
Sdelat' Ameriku velikoy Snova!
What? No. Being a PhD means you sit around, have grad assistants teach your class, grade your papers while you get to sit around in a tweed jacket with elbow patches, smoke a pipe and leer at co-eds. And have your grad assistants write your papers and since you're the PhD, your name is on it. Please, it's the cushiest there is. The fact they are even getting paid is an outrage.
I honestly can't tell if this post is deadpan sarcasm, or if it's serious.
I wonder if the Anonymous Coward who posted it even knows himself which it is.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
I'm speaking as a professor at a university, and I don't see why this is a bad thing.
Research at universities is a good thing, don't get me wrong, But R&D at companies is also valuable. In many cases even more valuable, because companies want research that actually leads to a practical result. Too many university researchers are farting around with abstract stuff of no foreseeable use to anyone, publishing useless results in write-only journals.
Research at a company is measured on a different scale: can it be used for something? Who thinks we would have multi-core, multi-GHz processors in our pockets, if this hadn't been driven by commercial interests? A few ideas were developed at universities, but practically the entire computer revolution has been driven by commercial research. Maybe it's now time for AI to follow that route as well - we've fiddled with it in academia since the 1950s, but finally - finally - it may lead to something more than niche applications in the real world.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
I don't know about London, but here in the states university research generally manages to get in bed with corporations and none of the useful results ever make it back to the public domain anyways...
Is that the sound of the world's smallest violin I hear?
Dont worry about Univs losing Artificial Intelligence experts. They have a lock on Natural Stupidity.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Every computationally related academic discipline has this problem. When our grad students get a little bit of bioinformatics/data science experience, they get scooped up by industry. Its very hard to recruit post-docs at salaries that can be covered by grant funded budget.
Its OK....they rather spend money on sports and stuff like that. Isn't that what college is about these days?
Greedy capitalism and unchecked neoliberalism harms society and accentuates the problems we already have.
News at 11.
Money doesn't matter to everybody. I, for example, wouldn't leave a university research job for a private sector job. I have enough money. I can't be the only one.
I don't respond to AC's.
I would argue that if academia is completing for labor with industry in a particular area of study, then has advanced the technology enough to get out of the market. It is time to move on to some other area of research.
A word of warning...
AI has a history of going through boom-and-bust cycles; enjoy it while it lasts.
And remember, despite what anyone tells you, it is not different this time.
Sorry for sounding so pessimistic.
This is the PhD gamble. You hope that you learn enough and live long enough for your cutting edge research to find a practical purpose.
Back in 2004 DARPA sponsored a 'small' project to drive cars autonomously. Lots of companies and schools threw warm bodies at the problem and for a few years it some of it was purely theoretical research.
Then it reached a tipping point that a profitable end was in sight.
Uber went in and cleaned out CMU's autonomous vehicle department.
And we're complaining that people with Ph.D.s, who normally go homeless in the real world, are managing to get high paying jobs?? We should be thanking the good fucking lord!
Whenever somebody complains about some market condition and claims they can't compete, they always mean they don't WANT to compete. Whether you're talking about American employers saying they can't get Americans to do the work that illegal immigrants do, or tech giants saying they can't get the talent they need in the United States. What they all mean is that they can't get American employees for the substandard wages they want to pay. They know how the job market works and that if they paid enough there'd be employees to meet the demand. They just don't want to be subject to market forces, which is why they support work visas - it allows them to draw labor from an external market that is independent of the company's actions.
There are too many PhD graduates to fill in the open academic positions, even if you were to include temporary and teaching ones. And since industry companies not only offer good salaries, but often also good research opportunities (even if you cannot publish everything that you do), there is obviously a pull into that direction.
I had very persistent friends who did multiple post-docs, and temporary positions to finally find a full time professor opportunity. I admire their passion. However that route has a lot of sacrifices, especially if you are starting a family.
I'm not an academic but from looking at their job postings I can only assume they don't work for the salary so much so as it pays their bills while they get to work in academia: their BS positions pay what you can make at fast food and their MS and PhD positions pay what you can make with a BS in contract research.
Pay the salaries or stop complaining that you lose all your talent. We should be devoting at least a few percent of GDP to pure research. University should be a place for pure research but having our brightest minds chasing grants half the time and doing teaching, marking and committee work another 15 hours a week is a total waste basically means professors do their research for free on their own time. It is so frustrating the way we organize pure research at western universities. The USA also has other institutions that do leading edge research such as NASA and a few others. I can't even think of another famous non-american pure research organization other than CERN.
Pay has to be competitive. Canada has to be the worst example of this. Canadian math and computer science departments essential are producing engineers for US companies. A friend just messaged me from California, I realized I was the only Canadian born engineer I knew still working in engineering in Canada and I work remotely for a US company! (sample size 100+ Canadian born colleagues from university or work, 200+ engineers I know well enough in Canada to know their background)
And Basilisk. And Roko.
Corporations are hiring whoever they can in a desperate attempt to not go bankrupt and/or have stockholders fire all the senior management when they discover that the current so-called 'AI' they've been working on all this time is a dead-end technology that will never be any better than it is right now -- and that's pretty goddamned crappy. What we need is real, self-aware, fully conscious, cognitive (i.e. 'thinking') artificial intelligences, and we'll never achieve that on the path we're on right now, nor will we ever, not until we understand how an actual biological brain achieves those things -- and we're nowhere near understanding that. Your dog or cat has a greater ability to think than even the best so-called 'AI' we currently have, and if you don't understand that then you understand nothing about the subject. Therefore: Google and other companies, who have now invested untold millions and countless years developing their dead-end excuse for an AI are desperate for their own survival, and are hoping against hope that throwing more bodies and what money they can beg borrow or steal will somehow give them the results they want -- but they are wrong, they will fail, and this whole 'AI' thing will become just another fad that came and went.
You can start by learning the correct spelling of the word "without".
... and "Roko" and "Basilisk".
But it doesn't want to pay the money. So people choose what's better for their lives.
And to most people who do AI/ML, it's probably the biggest break in their lifetime.
AI is a joke of a CS specialty and only idiots are attracted to it anyway. Useless fad.
Don't forget that the core mission of any university is education. While schools are performing a lot more research these days, that research is always in the context of training. As a commercial scientist working with a lot of universities, I have been frustrated with the seemingly inefficient policies, facilities, and labor contracting at universities until I realized that good work rightly comes second to good teaching at a school. (For example, "education first" is why students have access to shared facilities that would only be open to specialized full time staff in industry.) It seems obvious when put that way, but it changes the context of discussions like this.
There are a lot of AI students being picked up out of universities early because of increased demand and general advances in the field. This is great. The universities should be thrilled. They have done a great job getting those folks prepped for roles in the economy outside of academic training.
That can be frustrating to the PIs (professors) at universities who want to focus on research, but they also need to remember that research is their secondary goal.
Fields that find economic purpose don't disappear from universities, and basic research doesn't stop. There's never been an academic field that ended because it was too financially successful. The organizations that lead the way change.
Maybe we should rethink paying fucking football coaches multi millions of dollars a year and use that money to pay teachers.
Where's my small violin?
These universities who rake in the cash are upset they are loosing their AI minds? It's a free market. If you need the skills you need to pay for it.
This also demonstrates how universities in general are slowly becoming obsolete with their programs. Force your students to take a bunch of completely irrelevant time wasting garbage courses and watch them go elsewhere to do their research.
... because it's no longer, "academia," it's "Student Loan Corporation."
We don't suffer from brain-drain because the education system, from bottom to top is shit. Americans are not prepared for university by the lower grades.
"Foreigners" are prepared and take their skills to other countries.
We suffer from pocket book drain and schools make money, not from teaching efforts, but from interest rates.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
I'm currently a PhD student at a major research university on the west coast.
I can confirm that we are not paid well and are taken advantage of. Goal post shifts, demands to write manuscripts prior to being "allowed" to work on dissertation work, little support on things that are unrelated to the actual "work" that I'm supposed to be doing (like technical challenges, software, etc.). I pulled in a $20,000 fellowship this year and instead of adding to my salary, my advisor just used it to offset his total costs, and I walk away earning the same. I make ~$28,000 before taxes.
I have already turned down two jobs with six-figure salaries, and I don't even work in AI. My work involves lots of GPU computing in a very specific sector of medicine. I have stayed because of personal reasons (although I did genuinely quit and walk away early on for one year only to return later).
The problem is systemic: it's not any one professor's fault, but every professor and university is complicit in the problem. Some are worse than others though (cough my advisor cough).
I have no sympathy whatsoever when they lose people. Until they wake up and realize that they've basically had access to the most highly skilled workforce essentially for free for decades nothing will change. Maybe this will be the wake up call they need.
Wow someone might need to pay a valued academic a decent salary, so sad!
"Pantic said the majority of top AI researchers moved to a handful of companies, meaning their skills and experience were not shared through society."
Last I checked, the majority of grads we've hired at my company have learned a hell of a lot more useful skills and experience in the 4 years after college than the 4 years they spent there.
Newsflash buddy: COLLEGE ISN'T THE ONLY PLACE TO LEARN. Furthermore, the people who go to college/university expecting to be spoon-fed information and have no skills in independent research or original thought are the least useful people around when it comes to innovation.
I am HAPPY to see people jumping ship and leaving their Masters to do the work themselves!
For so many decades graduate students have been treated as slaves that this comes as happy news to me that now finally graduate students SOMEWHERE have some level of power to affect their own careers other than relentlessly and thanklessly slaving under professors who then take the fruits of the grad students labors and present that as their own!
I'm kind of surprised this hasn't happened already, but I imagine that the future of computer science education is largely going to be basically on-the-job training. Corporations will have their own in-house colleges and teach and train their own future work force. Companies relying on outside non-profit orgs to spend 4+ years training their employees is woefully inefficient.
Universities can and have been just as bad as HR when it comes to finding talent and building a "workforce".
In business, HR is usually looking for unrealistic requirements and filter out people who are probably more than qualified, but lack experience or requirements in specific area of length or experience. I experienced this many, many years ago when I had 5 years .net experience, not 7. Stupid. ( Thankfully, those fuckers went out of business. Fuck'm)
Academics does the same thing when it comes to admitting people to advanced degree programs.
Have a crappy undergrad record, but nevertheless excel in industry and work in cutting edge technology? Too bad. They look to what you did 20 years ago not what you are doing now.
Then there's the stupid test they want you to take. Do they have an ACT for A.I?
Don't have the means to quit your day job? Well, the University says, Fuck You, you ain't getting in.
Then, of course is the cost. People with homes, kids, spouses that spend money like water, aren't going to be able to afford ten of thousands of dollars.
Universities are living in yesteryear. They need to wake up and understand what's going on with talented people today.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
omg! People with marketable skills are getting hired? WHAT HAS THE WORLD COME TO?????
If you're any good, then you're working in industry. I learned that lesson as an undergrad.
And spend that money on salaries. Any student who needs a sport fix, join your local rec league.
Given that the term "AI" gets slapped on everything, these companies could just be looking for really good algorithms and not true AI (which would probably take a while to create).
Word verification: convoke
Every company these days thinks they need AI.
This reminds me of how companies have been flocking to data warehousing during the past few years. They all want it. They don't know why they want it, but they've heard it's powerful, and that means they have to have it. Meanwhile, many of those same companies haven't really mastered the fundamentals of their relational databases.
The result of this hype is that anybody who can convince a clueless hiring manager that they know something about AI...can get hired for exorbitant amounts of money.
Yes, AI is good for many things. Companies like Apple and Google and IBM are putting it to good use. But many companies are just jumping on the bandwagon. Like all bubbles, this one will burst at some point.
First, there's no such thing as artificial intelligence, not in the true sense of the word "intelligence". The machines are just good at interpretive and predective logic. AI's definition was changed. In the true sense AI means artificial and intelligent. Artificial is true, but intelligence is missing.
Second, why are Universities calling these guys scientists? They are just a specialization in the field of comp-sci. Technically you could call them scientists, but you'd need to call anyone graduating with a comp-sci degree a scientist.
Third, they can't compete? You mean they spend so much money on other areas, such as their education of the students, that they can't afford to pay the high prices? Or is it that the students that they are taking advantage of are leaving for private business?
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
I qualify according to your requirement. What would you hire me for?
After many years of reading and posting on this Slashdot, I'm out. The only people remaining here seem to be angry, old, self-centered Ayn-Rand-loving baby-men who begrudge everyone, whom they blame daily for their sad empty lives.
It's been fun but I won't miss it.
Old people fall. Young people spring. Rich people summer and winter.
If they really needed that person, they really can compete. 5 times less than a 6-figure salary implies you were paying probably around 20-30k which is about average for a PhD student.
That particular college has a $167M endowment, others in the US have billion dollar endowments. But yeah, they can't pay $100k for a good researcher.
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there were decades of poverty brought on by job displacement until the economy caught up. New automation tech put people out of work but it didn't necessarily employ them. They don't teach you about that in high school because a) the books try to keep an upbeat pro-America tone and b) you're lucky to get 20 pages on the topic.
Where do you think the two World Wars came from?
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Kind of like requiring all students to learn "coding". Next they'll need to know how to "AI"
We no longer need socialized research in AI. There is no need for government to prop up this industry because there is actually a market for it. There is no reason Universities need to have monopolies on research when the free market will pay for it.
99% of research that happens in the University welfare system is irrelevant and boils doing to a solution looking for a problem.
If this is important for Universities, maybe they can take some of all that lovely guaranteed student loan money and direct it towards salaries
A university is never going to be able to compete on salary with companies like Apple. Instead universities compete on interest. You can work on groundbreaking, curiosity-driven research that industry usually cannot afford to take a risk on. For example, I'm a particle physicist and get to work at places like CERN trying to understand the fundamental nature of matter while my brother, who is also a physicist, builds better hair dryers. He earns far more than I do and has a huge research budget but it's nowhere near enough to make me even vaguely consider a career change. The reward for my job is not
However, in a few cases like AI the upside potential is so huge that companies like Apple can take a risk on these types of project which, with the higher salaries they can offer, will make them irresistible. I don't really see how this is a problem though. It might make things harder in the short term for university researchers but in the longer term, it will mean more students choose to take CompSci giving them a larger supply of students so that they can cope with losing a few.
There is a huge market inflation of PhDs in liberal arts who can barely get jobs as janitors because they lack marketable skills.
STEM may be different, but what we are witnessing is the death of the university. The giant higher education scam propped up by government-issued loans is imploding due to a lack of fiscal sustainability. In the coming decades, we will see these universities start to fall like dominos. Speaking of Dominos, I hope these unemployed intelligentsia know how to make pizza.
Yeah, fuck them. All of the up-side to being an academic disappeared more than a decade ago. If they think salary is the *only* thing theyâ(TM)re not winning at, theyâ(TM)ve got their collective heads up their asses.
So long, and thanks for all the Phish
The social contract is that they complete their studies and publish unrestricted research and provide free intellectual property in return for subsidized education. Therefore they are in violation of this contract. So force them to complete their studies and provide their labor free-of-charge, from jail or any handy gulag if necessary. To all according to their needs, from all according to their abilities.
We can not allow self interest to stand in the way of society.
So in principle they can't compete because they are educational institutions.
When the amount of money is 5x the amount the universities can pay...at that point, it IS pretty much all about salary.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Of all the universities in the USA, only 20 schools break even. The rest LOSE money.
AI is the special case. It grew from machine vision for self driving cars and robotics, to Big Data data mining (pharmaceuticals, financial derivatives, astronomy and medical), natural language processing of news feeds, to image processing for film and gaming.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
The failure of the UK can be found in decades of spending on experiments.
The first was the overspend on the Skynet military communications satellite https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
In the end the UK had to buy into imported US tech and was using US systems. After trying to buy into and recreate it own domestic version of most of what the USA mil had done.
The UK mil, industrial and education complex had to suffer budget cuts to pay back for all the spending on Skynet.
The second bright idea was the Computer Literacy Project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Trying to place a new computer into average schools so very average students could use a computer.
Great for schools and teachers but that removed focus on advanced computing at the university level.
With decades of UK funding lost to both the mil and education, the US moved on with funding its best students and was able to fully fund its best academics.
The UK spent its funding on other projects and now wonders why its best academics decades later don't have the support they need.
The USA had the correct idea. Give very average students text books, calculators. Offer some computers to the best students. See how they test in math, get the best of the best to well funded US universities.
Spend more on the students who can show they can study.
The UK spent its funding on mil projects, very average students and new computers. The average students did not do great. The needed university funding was lost for a generation.
The best conditions and wages also got set aside for the GCHQ after all the 1950-70's poor working condition issues. Good wages was seen as a one way to ensure gov/mil workers and later contractors did not get attracted by offers to spy for other nations.
That was more funding removed from academics and lost to much better working conditions for the security services.
Other nations just poured their funds into their best academics and top universities after testing their students to ensure they could "study".
The UK spent its funding on trying to get average students to understand computers.
Years later that generational change in funding has its results. Average students recall they had to copy code from a book into a computer.
The best students recall their funding been reduced and now look to other nations that really can support the best academics with the best wages.
Take your genius to more supportive nations like the US and enjoy full funding and real freedom.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
No it's not. If you're being offered that salary you can take it at anytime. Once you're earning enough to meet you're needs other perks of jobs become more attractive. What's the point of earning money from a job that makes you suicidal or where you don't have any time to enjoy life. Sometimes taking a paycut to enjoy life or allow for an even better opportunity is the best option.
Different people have different perspectives. Some people may look at it like: max income now = retire earlier/better
Dots are not operators in ANY OOP language you silly fuck!
Sound like a bold statement.
OK, sound even bolder now.
Ezekiel 23:20
AI is the special case. It grew from machine vision for self driving cars and robotics
Did you just erase several decades of AI research in one fell swoop?
to Big Data data mining
That's more like statistics. That doesn't inform your cognitive models in any way, and one of the huge things in AI is forming improved cognitive models. I don't quite see where there's a contribution in AI from big data in this particular area.
Ezekiel 23:20
Lot of AI faculty and students went expert system startups.
Most failed.
Those are the areas that I know are in demand. I've seen job adverts for salaries going up to $500K, but only for someone from a leading university, with publications and wanting to run a research department.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
If all the hyped AI research reaches its ultimate goal - true, super-human intelligence - then it is not a problem that there's a "lost generation" in academia. Because once the machines are better an humans at thinking, they will do the research stuff and tell the puny humans how to slave away in order to retain their right to exist.
And if the AI research does not succeed, much less research in that area will be on demand / financed anyway.
exactly; enough money = live how you like, never work again.
1. This guy was scooped up for big money by someone looking for STEM knowledge. Not Liberal Arts. Not middle earth-er english majors NOT FINE ARTS or get a degree so you can get pawed by a producer...but something of practical use. The Indians and Pakistanis and Chinese and Russians get it...and will continue to do so...while they wait for our next innovation so they can move forward...
2. He went flying like a bat out of hell to the United States where OPPORTUNITY STILL EXISTS AND IS AGRESSIVELY SOUGHT without crushing taxes and even with a "build the wall" immigration policy which is laughable compared to the English immigration system. Oh yeah...and he'll be working on AMERICAN SOIL paying AMERICAN businesses and therefore...AMERICAN TAXES..supporting AMERICAN INFRASTRUCTURE...
Can it be all you corporate IT outsourcing foreign labor supporting Democrats and Global Marketers might have misjudged the current policy? HMMM..would he have jumped as quickly under a Clinton Administration Economy? Guess we'll never know eh? Of course we can guess what an English PHD would be worth in America...that must be why he stayed..oh, he didnt....
I've contemplated this perspective a lot: earning a lot now and chasing the pay or living.
I've decided that for me... life is short, time isn't guaranteed, and I'll be far less able/healthy to travel freely when I'm older. I took a cut in pay for a lot of flexibility and I have to say, although I don't have as many pretty and shiny objects as my peers (who, admittedly, I occasionally become envious of) I'm financially stable including retirement and live with virtually no stress while enjoying my work. Sure I'd love more pay but the balance isn't quite what it is now. I'll probably jump back in the rat race soon with my next upcoming position move to see if I'm making a mistake.
I'm a bit removed from AI so I'm certainly not current with the latest most trendy neural networks, but from my earlier work with neural networks, it's not obvious to me what has changed with respect to the underlying cognitive model.
There are some newer approaches but from what I understand, most models still use the same classic cognitive model (Which I felt was flawed at the time) or they optimized aspects of that model for quicker/more efficiemt computation in specific problem domains (CNNs for many CV related provlems).
No mate, I'm racing right now and I'm stressed to the bone, I do not think that you are making any error, as a matter of facts I'm searching a way to get out this shitty situation I got myself into. The sad truth is that after a life of scrambling and fighting to come out "at the top" if you somehow desire to slow down a bit and have some time for yourself you will be seen by your peers and your employer as a failure, not worth to invest on or give a chance to try other career path.
Housing took $50,000 off of his $100,000 salary.
Found the Hillary Clinton supporter! Seriously dude, fuck off back to your safe space. The humans are talking.
The glut of academics happens when a field goes from hot to not-hot. In 10-20 years, a lot of people will be "studying to work in AI".
By then, there will be quite a few lower-level jobs and a fairly saturated job market. The hardest parts of the new field will solved, and the bulk of the work will be applying those solutions to a business- or industry-specific function. The same thing happened with robotics/automation over the last 20 years.
There will still be high end work, of course, but the distribution will resemble the legal profession---a few rock stars will make high-six figures or even millions per year, but the vast majority of jobs will support an upper middle class lifestyle. At this point, the relatively secure and relaxed academic environment will become an appealing alternative to the rat race, and the glut will become the status quo once again.
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According to the latest ruleset, this post should be modded as Vorpal Flamebait +5.
I fail to see a problem. Perhaps it's news to some academics that human begins respond to incentives, but what would they propose? Instituting an internal passport system and controlling free movement?
Yeah, fuck them. All of the up-side to being an academic disappeared more than a decade ago. If they think salary is the *only* thing theyâ(TM)re not winning at, theyâ(TM)ve got their collective heads up their asses.
Once upon a time, a job at a University (at least here in th e US) wouldn't be the highest pay, but there was usually a decent retirement plan, and the work was pretty stable.
Now Universities have major problems. As tuitions raised by double digit percentage every year, because parents were hypnotized that their children would end up living under a bridge if they didn't have a degree, most degrees don't mean anything at all - no job prospects.
This allowed the Universities to add more and more management and accountants, until professors and researchers were a minority of employees. So those folks sucked up money at an alarming rate.
So there goes any hope of decent compensation, and there goes the decent pension exchanged for 401K type programs. Of course, the multiple levels of management and accountants only knows one thing - you need many more levels of management and even more accountants. Buh-Bye Overhead. My once generous budget for professional development and requirements to pursue it ended up turning into "I read a web page about a process" in the end.
The final nail in this coffin is that Universities have been largely taken over by third wave feminists. You have to sit and listen to be told that as a man, you are a rapist, and that anything a woman decides is sexual harassment is sexual harassment, and you will lose your job.
All in all, a pretty poisonous atmosphere. Where I once would suggest to anyone to pursue a career at University, I now not only say you don't want a career there, but you would be better off getting an online degree.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
It may seem dark but if you just took your head out of your ass it'd look brighter.
Nope. It grew from symbolic processing into a hyped thing that would revolutionize everything. And then it failed.
Research shifted to less impressive goals but including (yes!) self driving vehicles. Military robots that is - due to DARPA sponsorships mostly. It didn't go anywhere. Some of the research tried to do important but less hard tasks - expert systems for instance. A lot of rules with either a yes/no tree or in some cases an inference engine. That worked but not to the extent the hype had claimed.
Neural nets is another thing that have been used for pattern matching as have misc. types of fuzzy logic. Fuzzy logic have been in shipping consumer goods (e.g. washing machines). The problems with neural nets have been that they require much computational power, that they are almost impossible to debug and that they doesn't work well on a lot of problems. So there have been fixes for some problems but no general proof that they do what they are claimed to do. Neural nets aren't new and the only thing (unless I missed something really fundamental) different now is that there are more computational power available.
The difference between mere pattern matching and true AI is real understanding of the concepts the machine handles by the machine. While some AI proponents like to claim there's a sequence of goal-post moving (when AI can do X critics claim that a true AI must do Y too) I see it as being realistic. A pattern matcher isn't the same as something intelligent.
Self-driving cars? Hell, I'd be happy if the AI guys could invent a traffic light that's smart enough not to make me wait when there's no cross traffic for blocks around.
Goddamn things are stupid as shit!