🤖 Robots taking over the world, career prototyping, and lessons from Navy SEALs

We’re asking some big questions and getting pretty practical in this newsletter at the same time. Smile, take a deep breath, and have some fun reading some of the musings of the day! Oh, and take some action, especially if you are trying to change your career situation, okay?

👀 In today’s newsletter:

• 💻 AI researchers weigh in

• 💡 Prototyping careers

• 🪖 Ownership like Navy SEALs

• 🔥💵 Hot Job–Adobe Multi-Solution Engineer
  

Today’s hot jobs as features on: jobs.interestingengineering.com 

• Service Engineering Manager

• Adobe Multi-Solution Engineer

• Senior Software Engineer

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📚 MUST READ

🌏 Will Artificial Intelligence Take Over the World?

This is a fun one to think about. Certainly, movies like I, Robot don’t help with the fears of AI overstepping its bounds, but we have a long way to go before that happens.

In 2021, even before generative AI tools like ChatGPT became commonplace, there was a research study done by thousands of AI researchers. Here are some of the feelings of these researchers:

The aggregate forecast time to a 50 percent chance of HLMI (high-level machine intelligence where machines can accomplish every task better and more cheaply than humans) was 37 years, i.e. 2059 (not including data from questions about the conceptually similar Full Automation of Labor, which in 2016 received much later estimates). This timeline has become about eight years shorter in the six years since 2016, when the aggregate prediction put the 50 percent probability at 2061, i.e. 45 years out. Note that these estimates are conditional on “human scientific activity continu[ing] without major negative disruption.”

The median respondent believes the probability that the long-run effect of advanced AI on humanity will be “extremely bad (e.g., human extinction)” is five percent. This is the same as it was in 2016 (though Zhang et al 2022 found two percent in a similar but non-identical question). Many respondents were substantially more concerned: 48 percent of the respondents gave at least a 10 percent chance of an extremely bad outcome. But some are much less concerned: 25 percent put it at 0 percent.

The median respondent believes society should prioritize AI safety research “more” than it is currently prioritized. Respondents chose “much less,” “less,” “about the same,” “more,” and “much more.” 69 percent of the respondents chose “more” or “much more,” up from 49 percent in 2016.

The median respondent thinks there is an “about even chance” that a stated argument for an intelligence explosion is broadly correct. 54 percent of respondents say the likelihood that it is correct is “about even,” “likely,” or “very likely” (corresponding to probability >40 percent), similar to 51 percent of respondents in 2016. The median respondent also believes machine intelligence will probably (60 percent) be “vastly better than humans at all professions” within 30 years of HLMI, and the rate of global technological improvement will probably (80 percent) dramatically increase (e.g., by a factor of ten) as a result of machine intelligence within 30 years of HLMI.

So, will AI take over the world? Who knows, but it seems that at least some of the top researchers out there are worried about it.

🏆 CAREER TIPS

📝 What Prototyping Can Teach Us About Engineering Career Planning

Often engineers have a sense of being stuck or unfulfilled, lacking direction, low confidence in their skills, or their values don't match those of the organization they are a part of. If you are experiencing any of these feelings, making changes is essential for you to advance and grow. The process of making those necessary changes, however, can also feel daunting and uncertain.

Yet you must take action, even small and imperfect actions. Your career is a continuous process that requires planning and activity.

Career Planning

Engineers, through their training and experience, are often excellent planners of work and projects. Even though the process of planning your own career may feel quite different than planning an engineering project, you can use many of the same principles. For example, you can spend some time clarifying what the end goal is. What do you want to achieve? What is the hypothesis you want to test? You might then determine your methods. What actions will you take? How will you collect your data? How will you know you're on track?

Then, as you take action, you must iterate through the experience. It's similar to creating prototypes in engineering work.

Prototype Forward

Prototypes are not finished products, but rather iterations that can provide useful data and testing opportunities to make sure you're on the right track.

You can prototype your career too.

You can try a new role, take on a side project, or shadow someone doing a job you are curious about. Consider each stage of your career a prototype. You're not a finished project, you're just in a current iteration. Look at what you like and don't like, decide on what you want to shift and try, and iterate towards your next "prototype" in your career.

Career Iteration

Life, like engineering, is a series of iterations as we work towards our goals. You will continue to change, develop, and grow throughout your career. Thus, the work and impact you deliver should grow and develop as well! As you go through various steps in your career, you can consider a simplified scientific method as you go through various iterations: Hypothesis, Experiment, and Analysis.

Have a hypothesis or something you want to try. Then, take action while considering it an "experiment." Just because you do something for a while doesn't mean you have to do it forever. Finally, run the "analysis" and collect data about what worked and what didn't.

Then do it again.

Be Intentional

As you go through these prototypes and iterations in your career, you should be intentional. Sure, sometimes opportunities will come to you that you will want to try out, but also be proactive to look for work and skills you want to try.

🚀 AND ANOTHER THING

• Are Engineers Creative? Why Yes, Yes They Are 

• Researchers designs robots to maintain resilient deep space habitats

• Five strategies for 2024 success for founders of construction tech

 GADGETS OF THE WEEK

📚 BOOK RECOMMENDATION

⏳ Extreme Ownership: How U.S. Navy SEALs Lead and Win by Leif Babin and Jocko Willink

In this book, two U.S. Navy SEAL officers who led the most highly decorated special forces unit of the Iraq War demonstrate how to apply powerful leadership principles from the battlefield to business and life.

Combat, the most intense and dynamic environment imaginable, teaches the toughest leadership lessons, with absolutely everything at stake. Jocko Willink and Leif Babin learned this reality first-hand on the most violent and dangerous battlefield in Iraq. As leaders of SEAL Team Three’s Task Unit Bruiser, their mission was one many thought impossible: help U.S. forces secure Ramadi, a violent, insurgent-held city deemed “all but lost.” In gripping, firsthand accounts of heroism, tragic loss, and hard-won victories, they learned that leadership―at every level―is the most important factor in whether a team succeeds or fails.