If AI came about 40 years ago, it would have been much more restricted and advanced much much slower.
But politics does not care for the average worker anymore. Every democratic country is slowly turning geriatric, so due to how democracy works, the will of the OLD is what runs societies. And job security is not one of those things, when the biggest voting block does not even work.
It's fine to follow your dream, but just make sure that your dream wants you too.
It also helps to have rich parents, if you grow up poor you understand the consequences of choosing the wrong career path can be devastating. Some people have the freedom to experiment and still get a soft landing, other people need to get it right the first time.
> I don't know what would be a good career path, but most certainly avoid anything that AI is having the most success at in 2026.
This hinges on an assumption that means our whole society is turned upside down completely with no way to predict anything. But this is an assumption only. So you can either plan for a known path and do something valuable there, OR just put up your hand and prepare for.. what? Like not even physical jobs are safe because who will hire anyone if a good chunk of all humans will be out of jobs? Your best bet would probably be to build a bunker and stock up on canned food.
I used to write code by hand, now I just write prompts and manage the AI. There is some expertise involved but considerably less than before, and no doubt even that will vanish in the coming years.
For mathematicians the picture is even more bleak because their field is being strip mined and they face a future where there are perhaps no human reachable conjectures. Moreover if your job is to teach other mathematicians and nobody wants to become a mathematician... This is the future even if the technology hardly improves at all.
You don't need to know if there will be safe jobs in the future to avoid jobs that are unsafe today.
Personally if I were a teenager today I'd choose a career in medicine. You can still exercise your brain, but because it's practical and the fact that you have people's lives in your hands means that it's considerably less likely to be replaced by AI any time soon.
There's never been a better time to be a professional mathematician, perhaps. Just like there's never been a better time to be a senior software engineer.
An 18 year old entering university today will retire somewhere in the 2070s. Is mathematics, or software engineering, a promising career path for the next 50 years? No, it's most certainly not, and anyone suggesting otherwise is delusional. I don't know what would be a good career path, but most certainly avoid anything that AI is having the most success at in 2026.