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I have a mixed hands-on practical history, and an eclectic self-taught background in AI, computational intelligence, and machine learning before it was called t
by eggy 10y ago
I have a mixed hands-on practical history, and an eclectic self-taught background in AI, computational intelligence, and machine learning before it was called that. From experience, can say you need the guy who can put it all together in a real working prototype. There are tons of academics smarter than me, and some of my past collegues, but it only counts where the rubber meets the road, aptly punned.
I have been self-teaching myself neural networks, genetic programming and algorithms and AI since the 80s. I remember the 'Decade of the Brain' the 90s and reading Patricia Churchland and Terence Sejnowski's book 'The Computational Brain'. I was also a welder building motorized and pneumatic and hydraulic animiatronics in the 90s. I started to go deep on the engineering, and it helped a lot, but there was a guy I worked with who commanded the time and space and materials in front of him, and had a gut feeling on how to put it all together.
Systems integrations is important, but interative and incremental design, also familiar as a design methodology in coding is the way to achieve results. This is because the individual engineering of subsystems, and the subsequent computer modeling fall short of the emergent behaviors of a real physical prototype.
If I were hiring, I would not be scouring Udacity or the Unis, but lone wolf garage engineers and tinkerers with the math aptitude too. Two of the successful companies I worked at started in somebody's garage, and both were not college educated. Find people who have managed to somehow put together 60% of what you're looking for and then fund them and set them loose.
Too many of the engineers I've worked with were great with churning out the stuff they were taught, but in the one-offs, or bespoke, which seems to be the fashionable word nowadays, they failed miserably with 'paralysis through analysis' too much analysis.
This is why when I had my own business in the early 2000s, I lamented the death of the trade school in the U.S. It was very difficult finding young people who could actually build stuff. The maker movement is welcoming, but a lot of it tends to be mechatronic, and high tech. You don't see too many 'makers' nowadays that are capable of fabricating without a 3D printer, or making heavy-duty iron mechanical monstrosities like some 'Junkyard Wars' aficionados were building for a while.
This is also why it is hard to find people to work on the BIG projects like tunnel-boring machines (well this has picked up somewhat), or other big equipment. Now imagine finding someone who can also design compliant controls and mechanics for all of this. Certainly worth $10M per person!
- jayjay71 10y agoI wish more people built stuff as well, but I think you're confusing passion and profit. There are fewer people with those skills because the markets are changing - there's just less demand than there used to be.
- eggy 10y agoI don't think it is just markets, or any confusion with passion and profit. Having grown up in Brooklyn in the late 60s/early 70s and then some, I have seen regulation quell a lot of hacking or making in the US. It struck home when I tried to buy my kids chemistry sets in the 2000s. Baking soda and vinegar basically, that was it, due to all of the safety and litigation concerns. I am not calling for a wild west mentality, but the opposite of trying to legislate intelligence is a sure way to stagnation and oppression of creativity, passion and possible profit. I was making blackpowder from my hobby store-bought kit in the 70s, and playing with all sorts of chemicals. My mom & dad did not discourage me. I had to setup my darkroom after they went to bed, since we lived in a railroad apartment. If my Dad got up to go the shared hallway bathroom, there went my negatives or prints! I went on to melt and cast aluminum, solar ovens, tesla coils, lab mice, the whole shebang. Anyway, I am optimistic by some of the things I have seen kids do on YouTube in the US, but some of them seem like they have been funded by a huge corporation (VIDEO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92M5qcjDkaU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92M5qcjDkaU). I give my kids as much support as I can, but even they will not accumulate the materials present in that video even with a singular-purposed feat such as that. My son had told he might not have been able to bring his science project to school, a home-made cathode ray tube, for safety reasons even though the teacher knew it didn't emit harmful Xrays at the power and configuration of the setup. He finally proved it, and was allowed, but there were other 'mysterious' concerns about such devices and the local police. Now I have lived in SE Asia for almost 8 years. Chinese farmers/tinkerers are building home made submarines to harvest ocean bottom sea life that are so much a part of Chinese cuisine. That and trike planes, basically tricycles with a hang glider and a huge propeller on back - sort of a real hacked ultralight you would see in the US. The scene is surprisingly large in the light of such a heavy-handed government. Even now where I am in East Java, people hack together some weird stuff, and the police don't stop them or pull them over - imagine a train of dollies being pulled by a small 125cc scooter on a secondary road with passengers! Scary, but I am glad to be around creativity and people using their wits to solve problems with constrained resources.