A PhD Advisor's Three Rules for Picking Problems AI Can't Obsolete

moarbugs · x · 2026-10-28

A PhD advisor says he now tells his students to pick important problems that meet three criteria: not trivially solvable by AI today, not theoretically unsolvable, and where the solution technique gets better as AI advances rather than obsolete.

He adds that building an intuition for identifying such niches is precisely what distinguishes PhD-level skills — easier said than done.

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