I’ve been very fed up with AI for about past 6 months, completely started to boycott it, discuss it with people of all kinds of different views, and I found joy and pride once again in my own work.
But the world issues coming from AI, and even more so from the billionaires and empires behind it seem to further pile up to insane heights. I’ve been trying to learn more and more about it, and after my bachelor and masters I am considering pursuing phd and research surrounding AI, especially from the critical perspective, which seems to be deeply neglected in the research pov.
This is still a few years in the future, and lot could change, but I am curious what do people here think about pursuing such a thing, and if in current academic world it is even something that would be possible doing, given lot of the grants and funding of AI research comes from these companies that just want to gain even more power through it.
As I said, I am already trying to know as much as possible about it, but I would like to look more deeply into its impact on society, impact on students etc.
Do you think this would be a worthwile endevaour? And if not, where do you think I should be heading to make change about this while not completely starving to death?
Specializing in a bubble is probably not wise. Writing about it and studying it as a tangential topic to your primary area of research is probably better. Philosophy, language, etc.
I wouldn’t say necessary that I want to specialise in this bubble, I mean master degrees specifically would be more broad than just “LLM” anyways, and I feel like with phd you have to choose some fairly specific field of research to study anyways… But maybe putting it better, I would like to go and research these Machine learning technologies in general, and while relevant focus on LLMs, but keep myself updated and educated on other topics too.
Deep understanding of LLMs requires you to deeply understand many Machine Learning techniques anyways, so even when the bubble bursts I feel like it would still be a valuable expertise to have.
But currently I am studying cybersecurity, so in the end I might decide to stay in this field, and as you say, write about this and it’s relevancies to the main field I would be in…