AI And My Contribution To Humanity

In addition to switching industries to the Computer Games and Interactive Entertainment Industry, my head-first dive into the field of Artificial Intelligence in these areas is much more.

I believe one of the worst fears of a researcher is that your whole life's work or at least a great portion of it is "incorrect" and furthermore useless to the rest of humanity. And I don't mean incorrect in the sense that you prove one thing by disproving another, but rather incorrect as in, your theory or hypothesis is incorrect and you never noticed it the whole time. I like to think of a researcher as someone who explores beyond the knowledge of what's known to be true in order to find more truths about the world after having soaked up all the past knowledge and attempts in a particular area. In fact, this is exactly what you have to do and think about when trying to get a Ph.D, a Doctor of Philosophy. You are just pushing humanity's knowledge a tiny, tiny bit further in an outward direction like a bubble growing bigger and bigger. You get enough of these tiny pushes and the bubble becomes noticeably larger.

Am I satisfied spending my whole life only contributing a tiny, tiny bit to humanity's knowledge and advancement? For me, the answer is yes. Answering yes to this question makes you eligible to become a researcher. But why? After thinking about this I zoomed in on two key, motivating ideas.

The first idea is that I like to think of the world being far more advanced in 100 years, or maybe even in just 50 years, or even 5 years from now. What do you think the year 2020 will be like (it's only 22 years away)? All those Sci-Fi books I read about colonizing other planets, going beyond our own solar system, advancing the way we communicate and share information, doing things in video games that go way beyond trying to pick out differences in the number of pixels you can place on a screen are neat things if they'd really existed. This is the direction I see us moving towards as we advance in technology and sometimes I'd loved to be living in it right now. But at some point we have to bite the bullet and do the work. This work is done by researchers. And I would love to be in the middle of all this as it unfolds. Many times, however, we read about past researchers who've never seen their work come into humanity living and breathed by all. Well, that kinda sucks. But this brings me to my second idea.

My second motivating idea deals with children. More specifically, my children and family. It's great enough to be one of the pioneers helping humanity make leaps of advancement into a wonderful, evolved society but there will always be new people born who will have to live in those societies, including my kids, and my kids' kids, etc. What can I contribute to them? What I can contribute to them is survival. Survival by way of knowledge passed down to help them understand and operate in the new world. It could be as basic as getting a job, because my kid happened to have a father who was an expert in the field and who happened to teach his son a thing or to about robotics and AI which he or she was fortunate enough to pick up and enjoy. It could even be just learning to adapt and use new technologies which not everyone was able to be exposed to at an early age as my child who was lucky enough to frequently walk downstairs to bug me in my lab. This early exposure to research, ideas, and technology from my experience is usually beneficial to kids. And besides, this is the Age of the Geek. :)

I will end with this. Getting down to business and doing the nitty, gritty work is sometimes hard. But that doesn't mean being a researcher I will work, work, work. Choosing to study AI in the gaming and interactive entertainment industry means I will be having fun playing throughout my career.