The Second Wave of AI

I'm glad that I studied computer science — it gave me the foundations I need for my career today, and having foundational knowledge will keep me grounded in the rapidly evolving discipline. But if I were starting college now, I'd think carefully about where the most interesting problems will live in ten years, and I'd be strongly pulled toward mechanical engineering with a heavy focus on robotics.

The second wave of the AI revolution isn't going to stay in the cloud or in prompt engineering loops. It's going to move into the physical world: energy-efficient hardware running inference at the edge, actuators with human-like dexterity, batteries and thermal systems enabling real autonomy, and embodied AI navigating messy, unpredictable environments: hospitals, factories, lunar bases, and beyond.

Software engineering is transforming in real time, and honestly, it's remarkable to watch. The craft is shifting: high-quality prompting, fine-tuning agents, and steering agentic outputs are becoming core skills. My generation got to internalize the foundations — writing compilers from scratch, debugging race conditions in bare-metal code — and that grounding is genuinely valuable. But the tools are evolving fast, and fully autonomous agentic development across the full stack feels increasingly plausible within the next few years.

That shift is actually an opportunity. It means the leverage is moving. Domain expertise, physical intuition, and the ability to bridge software with hardware are becoming the differentiators that compound.

If you're a student, think three steps ahead. A CS foundation is still powerful — but pair it with a domain that will matter when software development becomes more commoditized. Hardware that makes AI physically useful. Robotics that turns abstract agents into real-world impact. The interfaces between bits and atoms.

Medicine (surgical robots, prosthetics), healthcare (exoskeletons, assistive devices), defense (autonomous systems built to survive chaos), aerospace (lightweight, extreme-environment robotics) — these are domains where taste, depth, and systems intuition still compound massively, and where great engineers will have enormous impact for decades.

We're not just watching the future unfold. We're the ones who get to shape where intelligence meets the physical world.