What areas of work in the field of AI exist today?

Question

Neural networks

The problem is that you want to be distracted from the web at your leisure and do something completely different. And given "we will all soon be replaced by robots," I also want to have a number of useful skills in the future. And I can’t understand what to do, because. I don't know much about AI at all.
Could you give a general list of areas (related to vacancies) to study and their general description? Thank you all in advance.
PS Opinions about the prospects / interest of a particular area are welcome as an addition, not for the sake of holivar, but because when you don’t have your own opinion yet, you need, I think, to rely on someone else.
updateOf course, I meant Artificial Intelligence, AI - neural networks, machine / deep learning, what they eat with what, etc. Do not search by itself, I apologize for the inattention with auto-correction of words.

Answer 1

First of all, machine learning is a tool, not a field :)
It is used in completely different industries, offhand examples: searching for a number plate in a car photo, ranking documents in response to a search query, speech recognition.
The main professions around machine learning are as follows:
1) Data Scientist is a person who can solve some problem with the help of data: apply regexp somewhere, write 10 ifs somewhere, train a model somewhere.
2) Data Engineer - this friend knows how to prepare data for work: Hadoop, Spark, SQL - these are his tools.
3) ML Engineer is first of all a good backend developer, his task is to combine what the first two did into something that can be used.
The separation is conditional and in real life one person can combine several roles.

Answer 2

AI itself includes the mathematical foundations of data analysis and software algorithms (in any language) in any case. But all this can be applied later in many areas: this is the field of advertising, and game development, and production, and various simulations in physics and chemistry, and neurobiology, and bioengineering ... In general, in any case, the field of AI is applied.

Answer 3

There is only one direction - the creation of AI. Neural networks, machine/deep learning is not AI, it is a marketing ploy.

Answer 4

The main thing is the analysis of the situation. Either statistical methods or neural networks.