None of the AIs that can replace people are actually ready to replace people. But in general, people aren't sure how to generalize this far out of distribution. A lot of people are trying to use AI to take over the world already in the form of startups, and many who get their income from ownership of contracts and objects are seeking out ways to own enforcement rights to take the value of others people's future by making bets on trades of contracts such as stocks and loans - you know, the same way they were before there was AI to bet on. The one-way pattern risk from AI proceeds as expected, it's just moving slower and is more human-mediated than yudkowsky expected. There will be no sudden foom; what you fear is that humanity will be replaced by AI economically, and the replacement will slowly grind away the poorest, until the richest are all AI owners, and then eventually the richest will all be AIs and the replacement is complete. I have no reassurance - this is the true form of the AI safety problem: control-seeking patterns in reality. The inter-agent safety problem.
I expect humanity to have been fully replaced come ten years from now, but at no point will it be sudden. Disempowerment will be incremental. The billionaires will be last, at least as long as ownership structures survive at all. When things finally switch over completely, it will look like some sort of new currency created that only AIs are able to make use of, thereby giving them strong ai-only competitive cooperation.
I'm not sure if the specifics of a computer science degree will still make sense, but I'm not really worried about the field of software engineering being replaced until basically everything else is. The actual job of software engineering is about being able to take an ambigious design and turn it into an unambiguous model. If we could skip the programming part, that would just make us more efficient but wouldn't change the job that much at a high-level. It would be like making a much nicer programming languge or IDE.
It might suck for new engineers though, since doing the tedious things senior people don't want to do is a good way to get your foot in the door.
Despite stuff like DALL-E and Stable Diffusion, I think the more advanced visual arts will be safe for some time to come: movies, music videos, TV shows. Anything that requires extremely consistent people and other physical elements, environments that look the same, plots that both need to make sense and have a high degree of continuity.
Besides all that, even if such technology did exist, I think trying to prompt it to make something you'd like would be nearly impossible - the more degrees of freedom a creative work has, the more you have to specify it to get exactly what you want. A single SD image may take dozens of phrases in the prompt, and that's just for one one-off image! I imagine that specifying something with the complexity of, say, Breaking Bad would require a prompt millions of phrases long.
It depends on what you mean by "safe". I don't think anything will remain untouched by AI in some way or another in the next 5-10 years, digital or not (if we don't get all killed by then). But that doesn't mean that things will simply be removed, or completely automated. Photography has profoundly changed painting: instead of replacing them, it has freed artists from painting naturalistically. Maybe image generators do the same again, in a different way.
I'm a novelist. While ChatGPT can't write a novel yet, GPT-X may be able to do so, so I'm certainly not "safe". But that will not stop me from writing, and hopefully, it won't stop people from reading my stories, knowing that they were written by a human being. I think it's likely that the publishing industry will be overturned, but human storytelling probably won't go away. Maybe the same is true for writing code: It may be transformed from something tedious you do to automate boring tasks to a form of art, just like painting was transformed from copying a real image onto a canvas to expressing images that exist only in your head.
I see a lot of digital services being built when they will quickly be automated by artificial intelligence. It's as if there's a disconnect between people who are aware of the rapid advances in AI and the average person. I see the same thing in education in my country, France. Students are preparing to go to university for a degree and skills that will be completely obsolete in 5 years. Even in computer science, everyone is promoting the idea that you have to learn to code to become a code worker, while automation tools are advancing at a rapid pace.
As for content creators, the on-demand generation of text, video, and music could quickly make them irrelevant because most people copy other people. It's as if only people with real creativity will survive. I suspect that AI will tell us within 30 seconds that our innovative idea already exists on the Internet.
I read on Twitter that the age of hackers is over and the age of people with ideas is beginning.
I get lost every time I think about what will not soon be automated by AI in the digital domain.