Terence Tao

You don't need to be a PhD holder to just work on one atomic thing.

You can execute code and you can get results.

You know, you can print out the world pretty quickly.

Yeah.

Um,

If programming was taught as an almost entirely theoretical subject, where you just taught the computer science, the theory of functions and routines and so forth, and outside of some very specialized homework assignments, you're not actually programmed on the weekend for fun, that would be considered as hard as math.

So as I said, there are communities of non-matheticians where they're deploying math for some very specific purpose, like optimizing their poker game.

And for them, then math becomes fun for them.

That's a tough, tough, tough question.

Yeah, so...

There's a lot of certainty now in the world.

There was this period after the war where, at least in the West, if you came from a good demographic, there was a very stable path to a good career.

You go to college, you get an education, you pick one profession and you stick to it.

It's becoming much more a thing of the past.

So I think you just have to be adaptable and flexible.

I think people will have to get skills that are transferable.

You know, like learning one specific programming language or one specific subject of mathematics or something.

That itself is not a super transferable skill, but sort of knowing how to reason with abstract concepts or how to problem solve when things go wrong.

These are things which I think we will still need

Even as our tools get better, you'll be working with AI and so forth.