What about the world of contracting? You can also be someone who has flexibility on where/ when they work and for who, and it's probably a more viable 'path' in tech than in any other industry.
Since the vast majority of founders fail, having significant financial cushions from your family or years working prior is probably the top pre-requisite if 'founder' is your path.
Contracting is good, but there is a trap. If you find yourself as a contractor and the market crashes, finding new contracts is much more difficult. At least I experienced this during the dot bomb / 911 collapse in 2001. Also, you have to pay for your health insurance, which is getting crazy expensive, and only gets more expensive as you get older. Make sure you adjust your rate accordingly.
This may or may not apply to all locations and all collapses, but expect collapses to happen every 8-10 years.
It's possible to switch to not being a contractor.
I'm also not all that certain that down markets don't hit all categories with similar force. Contractors may be cut slightly earlier (discretionary spending), but that depends on contracting terms and duration (there are set-length contracts), and as a bonus might be hired back earlier.
Much depends on whether or not you have a specific skillset that's in demand, and know how to market it effectively. And that's regardless of your employment terms.
It depends, much of that on your relationship with clients and their own savvy.
If you're a valued contributor and your client is aware of that, they may be able to swing things. That may end up being a zero-sum game, with existing headcount being eliminated. Much depends on the organisation's own policies and savvy.
It's an argument for maintaining good relations, though.
Yes, health insurance is an unavoidable PITA, but I'd argue that contracting actually better insulates you from major market corrections if you have multiple client relationships. While a major dot.com type bust may wipe out most of them, you have a better chance of at least one making it through alive vs putting all of your eggs in one basket as a W-2 employee.
I'll throw a line to Zizek. In his serious works, he does set out a systematic ontology of reality. I don't fully understand it, if there is even something to fully understand, but along the way he without doubt makes you think, and gives relatively accessible interpretations of a ton of other thinkers.
He's not a major philosopher like Kant, but he is much more than a charlatan or provocateur.
To his credit, I probably wouldn't have picked up his serious work if his antics hadn't first put him on my radar many years ago.
I believe everyone should give critical theory a fair shot. But I find the majority of the thinkers to have pretty simple ideas that are heavily dressed up and typically exhausting to get through, with little personal benefit, except perhaps social cachet in certain communities. I personally think you're better off grappling with the dead philosophers who critical theory seems to be predominantly in conversation with, like Kant and Hegel. And then add in Marx and Freud.
If you believe I am off base, I welcome suggestions of thinkers who are an anti-pattern here.
I'm of the opinion that critical theory is a brain-trap. It seems deep, but only because it's been dug so far, and in this analogy there's a much deeper dive a ways off but once you've gotten into the hole that Critical Theory has dug it's very hard to get out.
I don't think critical theory is particularly insightful, or internally consistent except by which it's proponents fit it. It makes many predictions, but most are true only through the lens of critical theory. Looking in from outside, there's other explanations of all the predictions.
Much like Marx: it's an interesting, intriguing theory. But it breaks down at some point, except that people already attached (and it's easy to see why it's an attractive view of the world, simplifying things into a constant struggle against the "oppressor"; the classic narrative) will do great contortions to explain why it's still true, rather than going back to the drawing board.
Of course, you can level the same criticism of libretarian ideals, and they do break down. I think libretarians have a more consistent view of why the break down and where, but it's imperfect and I greatly await a more grand, unified theory.
He isn't considered "real" critical theory, but a lot of the most interesting elements in postmodernism -- questions about language, identity, randomness, representation vs. reality -- are present in Borges, whose work is the opposite of exhausting.
If you haven't read him, I'd recommend the "Labyrinths" collection as a great place to start.
There's a short compilation of his essays called "Writings" that is a great place to start, for anyone interested. Most essays are < 15 pages long, IIRC.
Very simple, elegant arguments, with little fluff. One of the few philosophers I know whose writing is absent the usual obscurantist cruft.
Having read it many years ago (and by read I mean suffered through) I feel the Wikipedia entry is sufficient for understanding the concepts. The book (my copy at least) has no primary sources. You do not need the book.
I wouldn't be so sure, within the last year it's now "Hechy Hech mixed with groundwater", you may have seen the pre-emptive advertising on buses when they rolled it out. My feeling is that it is probably worse than it used to be.
Wow, The Game I had totally forgotten about. Along with the 4 Hour Work Week, those are two books that gave me totally new measuring devices for success and attractiveness when I was in my early 20s. 4HWW redefined 'elite' as young entrepreneurial globe trotters (location freedom), and was probably the main igniter of the digital nomad movement, while The Game redefined attractiveness (for men) as a predominantly behavioral thing - boldness, non neediness, confidence etc. - not a wealth, credentials, or even primarily physical attributes thing (and pretty much ruined going out to bars for half a decade). Agree or disagree, those books really, really impacted thinking for millennials.
Prepared to take the hate too. Answers seem fake under the question about relation with parents, and your voice does not strike me as a 13 year old, in particular seeming too controlling of situation. I don't buy it. I apologize in advance if I'm somehow proven wrong in some verifiable way.
You're going to have to elaborate on complex tasks. I would argue the majority of successful, money generating software based in NLP/ NLU, i.e. the majority of the industry, is "rule based" (used in a general sense to mean non DL). Personal assistants, search, chatbots, etc.
An anthropology textbook in college called "Culture as given, Culture as choice" - basically the good parts of Sapiens minus the preachy, questionable aspects.
Another college textbook, "Global Capitalism: Its Fall and Rise in the Twentieth Century", I think is the best book you can read if you want to understand our capitalistic societies today.
"Incognito" was great for exploring models from cognitive neuroscience, in same vein as Hofstadter works.
French Enlightenment thinkers - esp. Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau, who are not only awesome but in my opinion articulate the core of what's actually worth defending in Western civilization, not to mention are formative of actually good political views.
German idealism, really starting with Kant to lay groundwork, and working up through Hegel, has hands down been the most wild and impactful philosophical journey I've taken. I don't recommend it unless you have some formal background or unusually strong appetite for philosophical reasoning, or (not including Kant) you'll probably just dismiss it or simply not be able to meet the exorbitant time demands required to reach a satisfying level of understanding.
Writers like Borges, Calvino, theater of the absurd - just plain, intellectually stimulating fun.
Disclaimer, I like contemporary 'critical theory' tinkers too, because they make you think outside the box.
It's interesting how people come out of the woodwork with their personal theories on AGI. Do you/ we even really know how general intelligence works, or even how it emerged i.e. incrementally, or in a dramatic mutation more recently? Last I checked there wasn't a scientific consensus on either topic. To then come out headstrong and say "AGI will be like X" always makes these AGI conversations a tad farcical.
Intelligence clearly isn't a one-off/recent thing, since we observe remarkably intelligent behavior from cephalopods, which are vastly distant in the tree of life and not recent from an evolutionary perspective. We also know intelligence is also clearly not a binary attribute from many animal and human studies.
The fact that we don't know how higher-order intelligence works in general is exactly why it will be emergent rather than designed.
You shouldn't worry so much about consensus, but instead use your senses and your brain to make up your own mind. That is the approach that gave us the enlightenment.
Ok but I am talking about general human intelligence when I say AGI and 'recently emerged', not mollusks. You could easily argue we will find out how higher-order intelligence emerged one day, as some researchers already have models for that if you've read a college anthropology textbook; may not be right, but it's not out of the realm of possibility that it emerged recently due to new structure(s) ('design') coming about in a relatively short time period, so making the claim "Since we don't know how it happened, therefore it must be like X" is flawed.
You know what French Enlightenment thinkers were also against? Making headstrong claims (as an authority) without empirical evidence on your side :)
I think "what humans are" is not a useful definition of intelligence. Not only is it not useful, but it's likely to lead us down a blind alley in intelligent systems research. Kind of like if we assumed when trying to build a flying machine that the only way it could work is if it flapped its wings.
Human intelligence definitely did not arise "in one day" and any anthropologist positing such a theory hasn't looked at the last 30 years of research in statistical genetics. Intelligence is an incredibly complex trait resulting from the interaction of many, many genes.
Surely it isn't too much trouble to mentally insert "My intuition is that" before the GP's interesting comment. When dealing with a hard problem, whose solution is many steps removed, we routinely use educated intuition to guide us. It seems to me that insisting on empiricism in this space, at this time, would practically mean halting most thought on the topic.
Since the vast majority of founders fail, having significant financial cushions from your family or years working prior is probably the top pre-requisite if 'founder' is your path.