Engineering + math graduate whose goal is to maximize impact. I am currently deciding between two career paths, but have been struggling a lot to determine which would be more impactful:
- Become a professor/researcher in robotics, working on mainstream technical problems such as zero-shot learning. (To be clear, I’m not primarily thinking about robotics safety or AI safety, but rather general robotics capabilities research.)
- Try to found “low-sophistication” hard-tech startups — i.e. products that are not extremely technically sophisticated and could easily be prototyped in a local makerspace, meaning any wannabe hard-tech founder could easily make it.
Note: For personal reasons, it is unlikely that I would found a highly sophisticated hard-tech company, i.e. one that requires advanced fabrication / other specialized technologies.
Has anyone here faced or thought seriously about a similar decision? If so, how did you decide where you had more counterfactual impact?
One way I’ve tried is through estimating the number of “counterfactual days saved.” Here’s my crude analysis:
- If a robotics bottleneck takes 600 researcher-years to solve and 400 researchers are already working on it, adding me would move the solution from 600/400 = 1.5 years to 600/401 ≈ 1.496 years, or about 1.37 days earlier. If 50 startups benefit, and I work on three such bottlenecks over my career, that gives roughly 3 × 50 × 1.37 ≈ 205 startup-days saved.
- If I found five successful simple hard-tech startups, and each brings a useful idea to market one year earlier than it otherwise would have arrived, that is roughly 5 progress-years saved.
This crude analysis is missing many important factors, but on first glance, it seems that the startup path is more impactful, assuming I am unlikely to be an exceptional researcher in robotics (which I think is probable).
If anybody has a better way of comparing impact between academic and startup paths, though, would deeply appreciate it — I have been stuck at a crossroads for quite a bit…
