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Posted on 2024-06-24
When I was a kid, computers were the coolest thing in the world to me. I had other creative hobbies, but programming felt limitless. I could take old gadgets that the rest of my family didn't have a use for or were too "old" and give them new life or at least get some amusement out of them. This continued from middle school into high school and into a completely expected computer engineering degree.
That's where I had a bit of a crisis of faith in the church of technology, so to speak. I thought all of this was so deeply interesting because, as a naive young person, I truly thought technology would bring us together and "make the world a better place". In university, undergrad was learning a ton of techniques entirely disconnected from actually helping people or thinking about how what we would build would be useful. I didn't really connect with my peers, who were disproportionately male and conservative (my program had the worst gender parity in my alma mater). By the end of my degree, I was considering leaving engineering altogether and taking a related job or doing a master's program in something like library science.
The only reason I went back for grad studies in engineering is because I worked outside of it. I did a few years part time in digital humanities as a research assistant building tools and infrastructure for researchers, and fell in love with these kinds of small weird projects. I also took a class on human-computer interaction and felt like it all clicked. The projects were interesting and I could use my tech skills and my engineering background to do something meaningful, even if it only impacted a few people.
Now I'm trying to wrap up my research on my PhD and I'm disillusioned again. Not by my own research, but by the whole ecosystem I'm a part of. I have colleagues embracing LLMs for everything from formulating research questions to replacing participants in interviews. Every project we do to try and make a positive impact on the world struggles to get funding since there isn't a path to producing licensable IP (an open license does not count). I get involved in my union and my peers are positive, but the rest of the department, staff included, are strong believers in whatever they've decided to name meritocracy.
I can't help but ask what the point of this all is.
I still believe in the idea of technical skills being used to empower positive ends, but I have no idea what career I'm building anymore. I'd thought I would love to continue working on the same kinds of research projects that go against the grain of what's profitable and instead strive for something good, but I don't know if it is good to embrace tech trends on meaningful problems when those technologies are themselves deeply harmful. I see the impacts LLMs have in their creation and deployment and I struggle to reach any conclusion except that they are ecological and social disasters. Deploying them in such widespread ways feels deeply unethical to me. Even if this ends up fine, somehow, other technologies will just go down this path as well.
I don't know where this leaves me. I'd like to work a job that means something and is ethical, and I don't know how to make that a reality. I don't have a model for this kind of behaviour and it's impacting my ability to stay motivated. I'll keep up the effort as best I can in the immediate future, but I need to start actively seeking out some alternative ideas of what the next few decades of work could resemble. Hopefully things come together quickly.