Computer Science Has Finished Its Job: Have You Considered Theater?

One of the most interesting parts of high school for me has been watching how maths and science are, broadly speaking, considered the more valuable and desirable path for anyone who hopes for a prosperous career. That belief doesn't come out of nowhere, because the education system is built around it. In Australia, every student finishes school with an ATAR, a single number that ranks them against everyone else in their year and largely decides which university courses they can get into. The way that number is calculated rewards maths and science subjects far more than any other, so if you're a music student, then unfortunately you were born with a set of talents that don't meet the system's standard for an intelligent person.

I raise the education system because, as far as I'm concerned, it stands in direct opposition to the realities of work and the real world. The fact that it leans so heavily towards maths and science is exactly why I think those fields will become the most useless areas of study in the future. I use the word "useless" very deliberately, and while it's harsh, I truly believe that the only fields worth pursuing in the future will be the arts.

I say all of this while admitting that I've committed myself to technology, and more specifically to software engineering. So why on earth would I be saying that the arts, of all things, will be more valuable than STEM? The answer is that working in technology has put me close enough to the thing that is going to replace us that I can see it coming.

AI was built by maths and science. Every part of it, from the statistics and the code to the chips it runs on, came out of the exact fields we've been told are the safe bet. What AI turns out to be best at is the very work those fields train people to do, which is solving problems that have a correct answer. Code either runs or it doesn't, a calculation is either right or wrong, and data either fits the model or it doesn't. This is no coincidence, because anything that can be measured can be used to train a machine, and our entire idea of what makes someone "smart" has been built around the things that can be measured. We have spent generations teaching people to be good at precisely the kind of work a machine can learn to do better.

I can already see this happening in my own field. Software engineering was supposed to be the career that couldn't go wrong, and yet a large part of the conversation now is about how much of the job AI can already do. The people who built these systems have essentially engineered their own replacement, and they did it deliberately, because automating work is what the field exists to do. In that sense, computer science has finished its job, since it has automated nearly everything it touches, including itself.

The obvious response is that AI can make art too, and it's true that it can write a song, paint a picture or draft a script, and it can. However, nobody is moved by a song simply because the chords were arranged well. People are moved because someone else felt what they feel and found a way to express it. An AI can imitate that expression, but it can't mean it, because there is no one behind it who has lived through anything. When a machine can produce endless content for free, the content itself stops being worth very much, and what becomes valuable instead is the human being behind it.

This is why I believe that in the future the only real measure of human value, and the only thing truly worth exchanging between people, will be art that creates an emotional connection with its audience. When machines can handle everything that can be measured, the things left for us are the ones that can't be measured, such as making someone laugh, making someone feel understood, or putting into words something another person has never been able to say.

So if you're deciding what to spend your life learning, it's worth asking which of your skills a machine could learn from a textbook and which ones only come from being human. The fields we've always treated as the practical, sensible choice are the ones most likely to be handed over to the machines we built with them. The skills we've been taught to treat as hobbies, like telling stories, making music and understanding people, may end up being the only ones that still belong to us.