Required time to move into a regulated engineering field is 4 years. 4 years in the AI world is currently a 10^4 = 10000x capability delta. It's not like the engineering and academia curmudgeons will replace their employees as much be utterly destroyed by the AI labs hiring maybe one or two tenured professors per field to make an internal startup and then letting them oversee what the megascaled reasoners spit out at breakneck pace with a sufficiently low hallucination rate.
Yeah kinda seems like this guy would be better off pivoting to landscaping or baking or something. Maybe construction, there's always work in construction. Pays well too!
I really wish to be wrong here.