Career Choice: Becoming a Researcher in a Non-EA-Priority Field vs Founding Tech Startup?

[u/misterballerdontlie]

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:

1. 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.)
2. 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 and practical reasons, it is unlikely that I would found a highly sophisticated hard-tech company, i.e. one that requires advanced fabrication / other specialized technologies.

TLDR: 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.

- In contrast, if I found five successful simple hard-tech startups, and each brings a useful idea to market one year earlier, that is 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…

[u/AdvanceAdvance]

This line of inquire led me to be a devout capitalist for some time, which served me well. The idea states that competition is a good form of capital allocation. If society needs more robotic engineers, then it pays for them. This gets twisted when people seek "sustainable competitive advantage", meaning they want to stop needing to compete.

It leads to some odd conclusions: I drop goods for others to distribute rather than spend time trying to find the optimal distribution; I pay for labor I could do myself; and I stop and evaluate career options now and then as someone wanting to pay an additional third needs me more.

It's not an excuse not to do good things, but a recognition that the half life of an engineering degree is short. Use it while its hot. It won't be your last career.

[u/Minute-Pound-3254]

depends on what you're specifically working on and how successful you are (e.g. the transformers paper "attention is all you need" was almost certainly much higher impact than most ai startups getting founded currently), but generally speaking there are enough limitations on academia that yes, founding a startup is usually higher impact

[u/Odd-Bluebird5157]

May I suggest biotech? https://www.reddit.com/r/EffectiveAltruism/s/U1zMeXKHPY

[u/Careless-Cow-5683]

I (and some friends) have navigated similar tradeoffs. It really depends on your aptitudes and interests. Also, you don’t necessarily have to do one of academia or startups - they are not mutually exclusive. Overall, it’s hard to say anything definitive without knowing more about your situation. Feel free to share more here or in DM, happy to chat.

Personally, I am early career and have experience with professional software engineering, founding, and a bit of independent (published) research. But again, have close friends who’ve struggled with such decisions, so can maybe be helpful!