I agree that there are plenty of computational people who are not AI obsessed or bandwagon riders. I hope some of them are getting these AI jobs instead of others who just started "doing AI" by prompting ChatGPT.

I think you're interpreting my attempt to provide some quantitative estimates on the phenomenon you're commenting on as a disagreement with the sentiment of your post. That's not how I intended it, and I'm sorry that's how it came across.

bsky.app/profile/mark...

I didn't comment on the normative desirability of the number of AI jobs. I also think that the AI hiring focus is unwise and obviously hype driven. My hope is that many cases are just hiring people they'd already want, using the AI label as leverage to get the line from uni/donors.

I mean, that job *does* say "computational" on the wiki, so it's included in the 9% figure I quoted. I think that illustrates my point that adding those secondary labels can help give us a rough upper, in addition to the lower bound that comes from looking for "AI" specifically.

That's why I included the computational/data science cases too, as a comparison, since I figured those would be the most likely to contain hidden AI.

Yeah, no - I haven't scraped the text of each ad because they're all on differently formatted sites which makes that a real pain. So as you say, it's possible that there are some which have that in the ad but not the wiki description.

A lot of the AI jobs are cross-listed across areas and ranks (more so than other jobs) which may contribute to the feeling that they are particularly prevalent - the estimates above taken cross-listing of the same job into account.

As far as relative market-share among the areas, neuroscience/biopsych lost the most (-4% relative to last year) while clinical has gained the most (+5%). Of course, clinical was already the largest area, and thus it has lost the most in absolute terms from the general collapse of the market.

Comparing this year and covid to the years preceding each, this year currently represents a 1.5x larger drop. There are likely to still be some late job postings (more so than in previous years) but at this point we're sitting at 37% of last year's total.

That said, I think departmental areas are often more political formations than intellectual ones. Having already compartmentalized ourselves, breaking down those administrative walls may result in more locally powerful subfields exerting hegemony over weaker ones, rather than interdisciplinarity.