The past few years I have found myself in a situation where a lot of people seem to find themselves, that is a position where the question, “what should I do with my life?” is often posited.
This led me to think about my previous blog post which considered how a lot of engineers have been wasting their working resources on getting people addicted to various social media which in effect wastes a lot of time. This is not all engineers, but a significant amount of resources has been poured into this effort. This then led me to consider useful things in the world, and realized, if it makes people’s lives materially better, then it is something worth doing. So, instead of trying to find what I am meant to do with my life, which is difficult, I refocused on what would be useful to do with my life.
What I want to work on in the future is combining machine learning with the physical world. How do you make a material difference in people’s lives? Well, one is that you can give them more time. For example, I bought my mom an Irobot Roomba j7+.
My mom always cleans her house a lot, and vacuums every day. It is a good-sized house, so that is a lot of time spent just doing this one chore. The Roomba however, maps out the house after several passes and doesn’t go over objects like wires or, if you have a pet, the pet poop. It uses machine learning to learn the best way to vacuum your house and to recognize objects it should and shouldn’t vacuum over. You can move your couch around and it will learn the new path. It docks itself, charges itself, self-empties, and it has a bunch of other features that are quite cool. The best thing is that it actually sucks things up well and it makes the carpet look nice. It saves a lot of time daily, and time adds up every day. 30 minutes a day turns into about 7.5 days a year. In five years, that is 38 days. This is significant time and it saves my mom that amount of time every 5 years.
So, although I am not sure what field I would like to go into exactly, I know I want to do something actually useful for society and I find robots very cool, so something with machine learning seems like a reasonable fit. The best case for me would be to work in healthcare, where differences that affect people very strongly can be improved. I hope to work on robots that print organs for people when they have issues, and perhaps even do surgeries with much better results than human surgeons. Of course, we would still need actual surgeons still to work with machines and make sure the machines are making the correct decisions.
These are perhaps fantastical ideas, but believing in fantastical things makes life more colorful and meaningful. A lot of people for example are pessimistic about the whole fusion reactor being available in 10 years, but I go through the day with the belief that it will be available in ten years and perhaps a shorter time. Like this belief in fusion, I believe my fantastical ideas are possible, not because I think I have some special ability to make it so, but because it just makes life feel much more alive and brings it that color and meaning that a lot of people seem to be missing.
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