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Which careers or fields of study suit the 'philosophical intellectual'?

yzsn3b

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I’m most attracted to ideas and theories. All film, literature, life pursuits are only interesting if dealing with philosophical ideas(the matrix, blade runner, do androids dream of electric sheep, stranger in a strange land). I want to figure out what I should do. I’m interested in novel sciences that deal with ‘big ideas’ AI, complexity, theoretical cs, logic. I also have an aesthetic sensitivity... I play piano and would like to compose music and sometimes I feel even more sensitive to the human condition and want to write/make films. I'm 20 and feel like I need to decide soon on what I want to do but I just can’t make my mind up. If I am to pick anything I’m sure I will remain interested in the rest. The possible paths I’ve considered are…. Majoring in philosophy and figuring it out after that, majoring in computer science with a minor in philosophy and mathematics and going into AI research and becoming an AI scientist. With studying only philosophy I could go on to writing, film, entrepreneurship. The AI route I could do something meaningful and deal with the concepts I enjoy thinking about most. Anyway, I feel very lost maybe someone has some insight.
 

Ex-User (14663)

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Well, do you like the idea of AI or do you want to actually deal with all the technical intricacies of it. Those are quite different things, and let me tell ya, AI in real life is something quite different than AI in science fiction. AI in science is fiction has all this cool shit about the morality of AI, philosophizing about what is human, what is machine etc etc. AI in real life is just doing math and statistics all day.

But.. on the other hand, the only way to credibly philosophize about AI and things like that, is to know how it actually works. That has been my approach so far – technicalities first, save the philosophizing for the weekend.
 

yzsn3b

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Well, do you like the idea of AI or do you want to actually deal with all the technical intricacies of it. Those are quite different things, and let me tell ya, AI in real life is something quite different than AI in science fiction. AI in science is fiction has all this cool shit about the morality of AI, philosophizing about what is human, what is machine etc etc. AI in real life is just doing math and statistics all day.

But.. on the other hand, the only way to credibly philosophize about AI and things like that, is to know how it actually works. That has been my approach so far – technicalities first, save the philosophizing for the weekend.

I've read some papers by those in the AGI conference but they're more cognitive research scientist focusing on artificial general intelligence than the usual machine learning research. I find regular machine learning/stats based research for recommendation systems and things of that nature rather dull. Look up ben goertzel, hutter, pei wang... I would like to do research in that realm.
 

Ex-User (14663)

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I find regular machine learning/stats based research for recommendation systems and things of that nature rather dull. Look up ben goertzel, hutter, pei wang... I would like to do research in that realm.

Not to sound like a skeptic, but I am curious about how you consider those people's work to be conceptually different than the "regular" machine learning algorithms. I mean, I would love to know myself – it would certainly make AI a more interesting topic for me personally.
 

yzsn3b

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Not to sound like a skeptic, but I am curious about how you consider those people's work to be conceptually different than the "regular" machine learning algorithms. I mean, I would love to know myself – it would certainly make AI a more interesting topic for me personally.

Their goals are completely different. From what I know most machine learning is just stats focused on expanding on current ML research.. Research focused on industry like recommendation systems, computer vision, things of that nature.

Agi is focused on creating AI as people know it from movies. Cognitive architectures, knowledge/reasoning systems, automated reasoning. It's much more interesting imo.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lRPSLqDRVf8

here's one of the researchers I'm in contact with.
 

Ex-User (14663)

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It seems the distinction you make is between strong and weak AI. From what I understand, strong AI – the general sort of artificial intelligence – is an extremely small field of research at the moment. But it's interesting as hell for sure.
 
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