Thats a frequent opinion that sounds sensible. But when you put some thought into it, you realize that a lot of the electorate are poor uneducated people who did not know better.
I feel we are witnessing what happened to the newspaper once again. Only this time there is an interesting twist: manufacturers have been bailed out. Will the government step in again? No one knows.
"If you want to present at a big conference, then you must have experience doing smaller conferences or presentations."
You can gain experience by presenting in local meetups, making videos and posting them online, doing short tech talks at your job, etc. Doing those first will net you a lot of valuable skills and experiences.
Some people are able to do it. But most are exaggerating or not doing the exercises. It takes me weeks to properly finish a good technical book due to time constraints. Either way, just do your best and forget about anybody else.
I've worked on enough projects to have covered both sides of the equation. The pristine codebase that belonged on a museum yet took way too much time to ship a feature. The other side of the coin with the codebase that somehow worked (no one knew how) and brought in millions because people would keep piling stuff on top of it. Have also worked with a codebase that started off awfully and was cleaned up enough to reduce the amount of time lost on stupid bugs and and thus increased how effective the team was delivering new features (with a direct financial improvement as a result because sales picked up significantly). It all boils down to finding a balance. Sadly, people confuse technical perfection with a product that works.
I do STEM Q&A sessions at schools various times a year. I cannot mentor anyone at the moment, but I could schedule time and do a Q&A session with them. No strings attached. Email in profile.
Disclaimer: I work in Ed-Tech. This is in no way a sales pitch.
There is a real risk related to goal oriented AI. It does not need to feel or dream. Merely having survival as its goal is sufficient to make it dangerous to other life forms. Worse is that it can happen at any time (it may have happened already). Given the computing power, tools, and availability of knowledge we can assume that it can be done outside of a controlled lab environment by a non-scientist.
This sentence[1] from his website always makes me chuckle:
Although my professional truck-driving career was brief, I did learn enough to do a nearly perfect double-clutch with a non-synchromesh transmission, while driving up a hill on a forest track, carrying a bunch of kids in the back of a dumptruck--the tippable, flat-bed kind, not one designed to squash garbage.