The End of Engineering

TLDR: I no longer consider myself an engineer.

For the past 20 years, I’ve been engrossed in the idea of becoming an “inventor”, drawing inspiration from Edison and Da Vinci. Being an inventor in the past required a couple skills: engineering, resourcefulness, creativity, and prior knowledge. These skills were actually relatively easy to possess, and the idea space was quite vast and unexplored at the time. I’m not sure if the circumstances are the same today.

One question I wish I could ask early inventors and physicists is how obvious their ideas were. Although impressive, I feel like I might have also discovered Newton’s laws of motion or built a plane like the Wright brothers because it required minimal priors compared to work nowadays. But there is no way they were obvious. Good ideas almost never are. It took 5 years for a chat interface to come from the GPT technology—even the authors of the paper were late to the party.

Notes

• I don’t have insane technical ability, and am not noble enough to dedicate my life to gaining skill in one thing
• Being young, it’s essential to look for high leverage plays in the world, and that comes from immeasurable value
• when your value is easily measurable, you enter a rat race
• if your value is a function of your time you will almost always lose