Well, no... actually I think this is extremely bad advice ;-) On Wed, Dec 17, 2008 at 3:20 PM, Steve Richfield <[email protected]>wrote:
> Yan, > > Your quest incorporates some questionable presumptions, that you will > literally be "betting your (future) life on". > > 1. That AGI as presently conceived won't be just another dead end along > the way to intelligent machines. There have already been several dead ends > and the present incarnation of AGI implicitly presumes that there will be no > solution to the "fast learning problem" (that I think I have a solution to). > If the present incarnation of AGI falls to the wayside, your unipolar > background would provide excellent qualifications for the unemployment line. > Obviously it would be unwise of him to base his career decisions on your or anyone's speculations about their own personal research success... > > 2. AGI is already becoming politicized, meaning that by the time you get > your PhD, all of the good leadership "slots" will be filled with people who > will be jealously guarding them from upstarts (like you will then be). > However, your PhD will still help you get a good minimum wage job as an > intern somewhere. > IMO, the best assumption in terms of career planning is that AGI is a young field, nearly all the opportunity is in the future Yes, something wild could happen: OpenCog could achieve superhuman AGI by 2015 ... but one can't plan a career around dramatic possibilities like that ... Personally, I'm working hard to make this kind of dramatic possibility occur, but I also have some backup plans ;-) > > It appears that the only really good reason to get a PhD is to raise money > for a startup. If you have a personality for gladhanding investors, > promoting technologies, writing and presenting business plans, etc., then I > would strongly recommend your getting a PhD. However, if you see your path > as running in other directions, then you might want to reconsider. > > On the contrary, getting a PhD is an astoundingly poor strategy for raising $$ for a startup. If you have a talent for biz sufficient to raise $$ for a startup, you can always get some prof to join your team to lend you academic credibility. Getting a PhD is a good career move if you want to become a university professor, or a researcher in a big-company lab. Both of which are pretty nice jobs, in many ways. And while the research field is important in these job markets, the academic discipline is more important. If you get a PhD with an AGI focus, you can still get jobs at universities or labs that are focused on other areas of computer science, for example. It is also useful in terms of lending you more credibility when you talk about your own wacky research ideas. This may be part of YKY's motivation, and it's a genuinely meaningful one. But having credibility when talking about research ideas is not particularly well correlated with being able to raise business funding. -- Ben G ------------------------------------------- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=123753653-47f84b Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
