I had a chat with my supervisor the other day about the future (whether I should do a PhD etc) and he told me if he was in my position right now he wouldn't go into academia. Not because I'm not talented but because of AI advancing.
Listening to him talk (I think) he envisions the future of academia to be like this:
The government will keep on reducing the amount of funding into academia, and the number of academics doing research will be limited. Research will be more about thinking of interesting problems to solve rather than actually solving problems - we try to get AI to solve these problems. Academia will become more of a teaching job rather than doing research as a result of AI being advanced enough to solve a variety of problems.
He is a professor and is an expert in a variety of areas such as maths, statistics, biology, and computer science so I feel he is pretty knowledgeable in what he talks about.
I was wondering what others think of this take and whether academia will turn to be more of a teaching job.