[deafpolygon]

AI will make trivial stuff easier to work with, so we can focus on the harder stuff. This isn't going to hit critical mass for at least another decade, so you have time.

> built some pretty fun and cool things like chess engines, video games, 3d renderers from scratch and competed in my national computing contest with a solid placement

You're already ahead of 99% of the folks out there. Learn AI, learn ML, get into that now and you'll remain ahead of the curve.

I don't think AI is going to be quite that ground-breaking for at least another 20 years. It's impressive now, yes, but until it's on every device running under every OS as part of a commercial package, it's not going to disrupt anything.

If anything it'll be like the transition to cloud computing. Jobs will change. The disrupting factor will be that a good portion of data processing jobs will no longer need bodies to fill it. Middle management in IT will be next. Programmers and sysadmins will be safe for some time to come.

[djmips]

I agree with you but I also fear that we are making the classic mistake of thinking linearly when the changes will happen on a exponential which is something I think the OP hinted at with regard to Alpha Go.

[deafpolygon]

Yes, they all said that programmers would be obsolete by 2000's, and sysadmins would be out of a job by the time cloud was mainstream.