Yeah, the bird use case is charming, but it's also a pretty good demonstration of how much information is sitting there waiting to be extracted from sensors that were installed for some completely different purpose.
Security cameras becoming a 24/7 backyard biodiversity monitor is already great. The fact that the same system eventually detected a neighbor farting in the driveway somehow makes it perfect.
A lot of careers have very effective feedback loops for telling you that you're progressing, while being almost completely silent on whether the destination is one you actually want
Well said. When I was a grad student, chasing what would have been a doomed career in cellular neuroscience, I was unfortunate enough (fortunately in the end, perhaps?) to get struck down by a significant depressive episode. This ended up being the feedback signal I needed to consider changing things up, and I did.
The concept of a "career" as a defined external thing has basically evaporated. There is at best a set of opportunities which you can grab, and a set of dependency credentials and acquaintances which you can use to unlock the opportunities. If the right opportunities do not arise then things can go downhill even if you've "done everything right".
In the end you will die. Religion can possibly offer you something for after death (depending on if you choose the correct one - this is an argument I am intentionally avoiding even though I have opinions). Very few people have a career in religion and thus for most your career will have nothing to say.
Genetically if you don't have kids you are a dead end. You career will have some bearing on the life you give you kids (if you have any, I'm not trying to say you should!) but otherwise I believe it should stay out of your kids life.
Similar to the above, most people live with a married spouse (common law marriage: a legal marriage is not required for this discussion, though it may or may not matter for other purposes). While many people do meet their spouse through their career this is not required and the career itself has nothing to say about it. (historically kings and queens did marry for career reasons)
Note that both kids and a spouse implies you shouldn't allow your career to take up too much time even though many will try to.
Many people have hobbies. Even if you love the things you do at work, odds are your mind cannot handle doing it once you are done with work: your career cannot tell you anything about them. There are many people who pick a career because the things like love cannot support the life they otherwise want to live: their career can't tell them about the destination because it is purely something they do to get there.
All of this is to say that even if your career would offer you help on the destination, you should ignore it.
Its more complicated. Even somebody who is a dead end- can feed back into a extended clan-family and thus enrich the survival of related traits.
And when you contribute to a societey that overproduces resources, thrives scientifically and does not carry a load of parasites, then your career actions may push the cohort fitness.
This of course implies that the offspring of dedicated focus personal has desert flower traits- meaning every offspring will be dumb as a rock, and pro at procreation. Meaning clever people will have "Hippie" pregnant machine offspring and the "spiritual" birth-machines will have hyper-analytical "dead-enders". None of them happy with the state of the world.
Life as they say- finds a way- to make you despair with the result of the affair.
It is far more complicated. I touched on the high level, but somebody in philosophy can write books on the subject (they probably know about many many books on the subject).
Increased happiness is very useful, in my view. That does not necessarily require increase in income.
In fact, beyond a certain level (which is not that high), income level and happiness are not correlated anymore. In other words, investing energy into increasing income does at that point rarely result in more happiness. So, why do it, especially if that energy could go more directly into activities that actually increase happiness?
This is a great observation about “what matters”, though I imagine it falls on mostly deaf ears here at HN where many of us make success in our careers the destination.
A career probably shouldn't choose the destination for you. The danger is that it gives such clear feedback about progress that it's easy to let it do exactly that by default
A lot of the tension around generative AI comes from the fact that the abstraction layer is often presented as interchangeable with the underlying craft
Absolutely. I don’t know how strong their case is or isn’t, BUT if you hire Jony Ive and a bunch of Apple device people in order to build something that is a threat to the “Apple tax” revenue machine, they are coming after you without a doubt.
I may be ignorant on the matter, maybe they've done that kind of thing before.
>according to OpenAI
The most juvenile "press release" I've ever seen a company post on purpose isn't the strongest evidence against them, though. Forgive me if I take everything OpenAI say with an ocean's worth of salt.
There may be real misconduct here, but "some employees mishandled confidential information" and "OpenAI must stop developing AI hardware" are very different claims
Ants are also a special case because the vast majority of ants cannot reproduce. Only the queen and drones are reproductive agents, 99.9 percent of the colony are non reproductive, so their investment in the survival of the colony is total, they have no individual agenda.
As I understand it, the individual vs the group situation is complicated by their shared genetic pool.
I'd imagine it as having dozens of clones of myself, and one of them is tasked with reproducing for the rest of us. It sounds like a total lack of individualism, but if the offspring has my genes and is raised like me (potentially by me), how far is it from being my own ?
eusocial animals are really cool you can kinda treat the entire colony as a single organism. weirdly enough this isn't restricted to insects there are actually some eusocial mammals.
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