What drives me? Where am I going?
Self - Reflections
What drives me?
and
Where am I going?
To convey some of my core believes and how they came about, I need to start a while back, so bear with me.
Even as a teenager I have been fascinated with human intellect, behavior, motivation. In short what makes us tick. The only educational avenue I could see then was psychology, which I chose not to pursue, because it would have sucked me in too deep, as I cared too much.
I kept the curiosity about intelligence, and naturally was intrigued by AI. Particularly by what is now called strong AI had my attention as well as the abstract concepts AI research found and how they are applicable to human intelligence. In 2006, I read Marvin Minsky’s Emotion Machine fresh off the press.
In fall 2012, one of those times in live that makes you question everything you have done so far, everything you are doing right now and what you want to do with the rest you have available hit me. Hard. Not only ground-shaking but moving the tectonic plates and mechanisms themselves hard. It all started when a mentor (thanks Dan! and I mean it) asked me what I am good at, what I want to do and what I am missing to do what I want to do. So, I set out to ponder these questions, to quest for information. One of the areas I could quickly identify as missing information was human motivation in general (not self-motivation). I came across the Valve new employee handbook that was “leaked” onto the Internet and created a lot of buzz, because it was so different in how it treats people and in turn motivates.
Going from there, I discovered and learned a lot about how and by what humans are motivated, and how and because of what human perception is intrinsically skewed and flawed. Of course, having this knowledge started to influence how I approached problems at work: I started to seek confirmation of observed problems in data, as well as started to search for patterns and hypothesis as to the cause and the deviations between what the data and human perception. This led me to recognize how significantly our perception and conclusions are influenced by to us unaware values. Values that influence every perception, every thought, every decision and every opinion we form all the time with no option of avoiding it. These values are created in our personal past, based on what we observe from our elders and influencers, amend according to our experiences and exposures, that skew everything we perceive and influence every response and reaction and that are completely transparent and oblivious to us. And that exactly this is the root cause for why humans in its collective is so inefficient, waste-full and destructive.
My interest is in strong AI. Where I am going is to understand, form, create strong AI. What drives me is the believe that to transcend what limits us humans as a collective, needs to be understood and brought into recognition. The easiest way to do it is to create something similar, artificially. It not only complements us, assists us, augments us, frees us from burdens, enables us, but also shows us who we are.
Starting in 2012 I made deliberate decisions to advance me down this road. I educated myself about the current state of AI and focused on the sub-segment ML. I considered complementing my academic education, but choose so far not to: My journey has led me to discover this much cross-disciplinary because I do not have the values resulting from an extended academic exposure bestowed upon me. I choose two areas as my primary targets for gaining more in-depth knowledge: Machine Learning, as this is how data is used to tune a machine for specific tasks without explicitly programming it (creating values) and data science, as this is how information is prepared, understood and ultimately fed into the machine.
To sum it up:
My experiences, interests and curiosity have set me up with an exceptional and consuming interest in intelligence and behavior (human and artificial) coupled with an intrinsic understanding of the biases and limitations of the human and machine.
My curiosity and believe in the abundant possibilities and potentials but also the always present alertness of getting it right and taking cautions to prevent a skew towards the detrimental drive me to go way further on this road.
My goal is to be in the front rows of creating strong AI. The path there is thru the ranks in ML and DS.
