Course for AI

I think that generic undergraduate degrees in CompSci are obsolete and unnecessary. They made sense in the past, before the internet and MOOCs. Back then Universities were the only and sole source of relevant knowledge but those times are gone, although when it comes the rest of the STEM, students usually need guidance, tutoring and access to specialised and very expensive equipment. This is why I feel like I would be wasting lots of time and money by doing CS just for the magical BSc next to my surname...

I think that generic undergraduate degrees in CompSci are obsolete and unnecessary. They made sense in the past, before the internet and MOOCs. Back then Universities were the only and sole source of relevant knowledge but those times are gone, although when it comes the rest of the STEM, students usually need guidance, tutoring and access to specialised and very expensive equipment. This is why I feel like I would be wasting lots of time and money by doing CS just for the magical BSc next to my surname...

What percentage of the Minf Informatics course can be specialised in the study of AI?
Reference: https://www.ed.ac.uk/studying/undergraduate/degrees/index.php?action=view&code=G500

What are your actual goals? If you're not too bothered with having the letters BSc after your name, and you're already comfortable with self-teaching, perhaps you'd be better off sticking just to distance learning and focusing on bringing your skills up to the standard that will get you into the kinds of jobs you're after.

There's tonnes of good content on https://www.edx.org/ and https://www.coursera.org/ which is all available for free as long as you don't want a certificate

Also https://eu.udacity.com/ has loads of free beginner-intermediate content. It also has more advanced content and nanodegrees which aren't free, and are a little expensive, but still much cheaper than a brick university - a lot of the content has been created by various global tech giants like Google and Amazon.

https://www.pluralsight.com/ is a monthly subscription service with a lot of excellent video-based tech content for specific technologies. Again, quite a lot of content here is written by senior figures at all kinds of different tech companies, although there structure of pluralsight is a lot less formal since it's pretty much all video-based.

https://teamtreehouse.com/tracks is another decent pay-for service which has a lot of content around programming and web development - Treehouse develop most of their own content, but they seem to have quite a bit of good content.

FWIW, here's my (20+ year old) experience:

I was always interested in both maths and computing. I eventually decided to do maths because I felt "I'm going to do computing anyhow, but I need to be taught maths". My first degree was a first in maths from Cambridge. I was a pretty good coder and had done some paid programming work, but I wanted to get a job in computer graphics (which was pretty niche back then), and I wasn't successful in finding anything.

I then did a MSc in computer science at a "mid-level" university. It honestly didn't teach me very much - I was somewhat shocked at the lack of intellectual rigour compared with maths (and I think this would have been true even if I'd done maths at a more mid-level place), There were two of us with maths/physics degrees (everyone else had a BSc in comp-sci) and we 2 came top of the year by a fairly comfortable margin.

Subsequent to getting the MSc, I got my first job in "the industry", which I've now worked in for over 20 years. Although I don't use that much of what I learned mathematically, there's certainly a fair chunk of stuff at work which falls in the "we need DFranklin to work out how to do that". It's as much the training in analytical thought as the actual material knowledge.

Overall, my feeling is that although in many ways what I got out of the MSc was "a piece of paper", it was an important piece of paper in terms of getting that first job. So it may well be best to "suck it up" and do the degree that most visibly "ticks the right boxes", rather than the one you think would work best.

Possibly an important caveat: my MSc was a one year course, and I still frequently found myself frustrated by lecturers with no "real world" experience etc. I could see a 3-4 year course being very difficult to bear.

I have already figured out that I have to "suck it up" and pick one.

Currently, I am looking for an undergraduate degree from which I could extract the most value. Does it matter which one? I went through quite a few job ads, and it seems that any STEM degree with a decent Git repo would do.
I was thinking about doing Maths & Stats at Open University, it passes as a legit degree, and I don't have to deal with teenagers. They also happen to offer a degree in Engineering Desing/Modeling which would land me a better job in my company and it feels like it would be "good enough" for more AI-ish job applications.