Master Chief — LessWrong

Career Choice: Becoming a Researcher in a Non-EA-Priority Field vs Founding Tech Startup?

Engineering + math graduate whose goal is to maximize impact. I am currently deciding between two career paths, but have been struggling a lot to determine which would be more impactful: 1. Become a professor/researcher in robotics, working on mainstream technical problems such as zero-shot learning. (To be clear, I’m...

Jul 28

How inevitable are most accessible hard-tech startups?

(For context, I’m an undergraduate considering entering the hard-tech startup space. One concern I have is whether some of these startups are highly inevitable, and therefore whether my marginal impact as a founder would be essentially negligible.) Question: For many hard-tech startups that do not require extremely sophisticated technology, if...

Jul 12

Is it ethical to work on general-purpose robots given the risk of cyberhacking?

One potential risk of developing general-purpose robots is that they could greatly reduce the friction required to establish a totalitarian regime. If there were millions+ of general-purpose robots deployed in the world (in households, nursing homes, construction sites, etc.), and someone were able to hack / take control of a...

Jun 306

Master Chief's Shortform

Jun 302

Becoming a Researcher in a Non-EA-Priority Field vs Donating $100k / Year to EA Research?

Mechanical + electrical engineering graduate who likes research and whose goal is to maximize impact. To this end, I am currently deciding between two career paths: * Become a professor / researcher who spends their career identifying, tackling, and pivoting between neglected scientific problems that are not among 80,000 Hours'...

Jun 119

Becoming a Researcher in a Non-EA-Priority Field vs Donating $100k / Year to EA Research

Mechanical + electrical engineering graduate who likes research and is trying to compare two career paths: * Become a professor / researcher who spends their career identifying, tackling, and pivoting between neglected scientific problems that are not among 80,000 Hours' main recommended paths (e.g., advanced manufacturing, alternative energy storage, cryptography,...

Jun 118

Does robotics capabilities research accelerate AGI timelines?

^ This is a question I've tried researching online, but haven't found much discussion of it: was hoping to start some here. For context, I am a final-year math + CS undergraduate considering pursuing a career in theoretical robotics, particularly in continual learning and the development of robots that can...

Jun 54