Chris - It's not always easy to judge what is of interest to people, including people on this forum.

However, I'm reacting more to your second point.  The SSA is much more than this forum, and in my view has a good deal of vibrancy.  Evidence for this is, for example, healthy attendance at conferences, and, especially, a large amount of engagement in the Early Career and Young Statisticians Network.

I needed to create a week of content in a course I am writing for our on-line Masters of Applied Business Analytics. The topics is something that I am not very strong on: optimisation combined with non-linear generalised linear modelling. There are plenty of interesting issues. The algorithms for fitting non-linear models and how they are affected by non-orthogonal parameters and conditions of identifiability.

I got Claude to generate some time series data for me, relating demand to price and advertising budget with a business conditions confounder and a couple of plausible exogenous drivers. It gave me the R-code. I then had difficulty fitting various models and asked it what the problem might be. It was not perfect in its diagnoses but much better than I would have been.

After a few days I have a really good data set and a case/story explaining the background, 75% based on Claude’s writing creativity. At various points of our “conversation” about computaitonal difficulties it suggested key teaching points that I should stress. For instance, centering predictors and avoiding fitting non-linear models when the relationship is linear. For instance, a logistic curve will tend to blow up if the data is linear in x.

I now understand the topic much better than two weeks ago. Claude largely taught me this content and I will now teach it to the students. I wonder how long it will take the market to determine who the middleman is!

Where does this leave people with my skills i.e. academics?

If I am still in this gig in 5 years (unlikely) I suspect content creation will be quite different. I will not only use AI to create the course material, but I will need to use AI to teach it to the students (as it taught me). I imagine that, over and above some readings (perhaps condensed by AI from documents I supply) the core learnings will be based on a list of AI prompts that students give to a (specially trained and mandated) AI. I would road-test all these prompts until the responses were providing the best learning outcomes.

• ·         Explain the key issues in this case.
• ·         What are the main pitfalls in a naïve analysis?
• ·         What are the main modelling options?
• ·         I fitted this model and got this output. Here is how I interpret it. What do you think?
• ·         I tried this model and got this error. What is going on?
• ·         Give me a high level overview of how optim works.

etc. You get the idea.