Career in Technology - March 7

The hot career path for graduates changes every generation. Many decades ago it was oil, or advertising. In the late 80’s, investment banking was in, and then was supplanted by internet companies. Following the early 2000’s technology bubble, private equity and hedge funds became the most desirable for talented graduates, and now Silicon Valley is once again in vogue.

I am glad that the technology sector has picked up again. We absolutely need the smartest people to go into the field, and build the products and services that will move the world forward. Technological innovation is the tide that lifts all boats, and it can impact other industries in both dramatic and subtle ways. For example, I see tremendous implications for machine learning techniques. The same AI training method that produced AlphaGo, the Go world-champion-beating machine, was also recently been used to build Liberatus, a No Limit Texas Hold’em AI that won a statistically significant match against 4 of the best heads-up poker players in the world. By teaching a machine to develop its own solutions, we have imbued computers with the power to learn almost any skill.

Imagine a future where business negotiations, law, finance, or even the arts, are not only performed better by computers, but their methodology and results are also virtually indistinguishable from those of humans. Just AI development alone, itself a relatively narrow subset of technological innovation, can potentially make the vast majority of jobs obsolete. It is difficult to fathom how, with these kind of stakes, we can be satisfied with the best and brightest among us to work in anything but in technology. We are fortunate we have reached a stage in the economic and political climate where participation in the technology sector is financially rewarding, more accessible than ever, and encouraged by the government and its citizens alike.