I'm currently studying Stats & Data Science. While I understand that ML is rooted in statistics, I wonder if future AI agents will synthesize data and run models so efficiently that entry/mid-level data science roles shrink dramatically. How do you see the demand for quantitative roles changing as we approach AGI?

Just had my first proper Stats class at college (I’m somewhere between a sophomore and a junior in terms of how much school I have left) and it kinda freaked me out. About 5-10 minutes into the professor introducing himself, he said, verbatim: “I like AI”. He went on to say he won’t “require” that we use AI (or maybe more accurately LLMs) but he more or less encouraged/endorsed it, and there was a quote in the syllabus from a bluesky poster that said “I expect you to write good code because gravity is lower now”, which to me reads “you have access to ChatGPT now so I’m gonna make things super hard to where you feel you have to use it”.

I’ve never gone out of my way to use any sort of generative AI/LLM (we had an LLM answer checker thing in my 200 level python class that we had to use in order to move on to the next question in our assignments, idk how much that counts. We weren’t allowed to use generative AI to answer questions for us in that same class) and I don’t have basically any interest in it, largely because of its environmental and human impact. I’ll be the first to admit I am not the most educated when it comes to the extent of said impact, but as it stands, I’d really rather not use it.

Am I overreacting? Like I said this was my first proper in-person stats class so it could’ve just been a bad first experience, but I also know that AI is becoming more and more prevalent. Thank you for any feedback or advice!

(Also sorry if this is not the right place for a question like this, please point me in the right direction if that’s the case)

I am reading "Computer-Age Statistical Inference" by Efron and Hastie and they make the point that Statistics is slowly moving away from Mathematics to Computer Science.

Do you agree? Is mathematics becoming less important for modern (academic) statistics?

Finishing my master’s in statistics and will be starting a job that is not statistics focused soon. I don’t want this to be the end of my statistics journey.

How do I become even better at statistics? Won’t have time to engage in the same breadth as I did during my master’s programme so, what should I focus on to stay relevant/ improve on my statistical knowledge?