The Job Search

I’m going to be writing some new types of posts, and therefore introducing a new tag. They’ll be about the time I spent on my job search. I’m now (luckily) employed, but I was on the job market for about 9 months, not including the job searching I did while in college, and have quite a few tales to tell.

I was speaking to a friend recently about our job hunting experiences, and the one thing we immediately agreed upon is that job hunting is a soul crushing experience. Between making cold calls to doing interviews to following up, it’s all a massive time sink. The worst of it is, even if you put in all that time, you have no guarantee of success, just better odds.

The one comfort you can have is this: You have a skill. If you’re in a technical field and you’ve gotten proper training, this skill should be easily identifiable and valuable. Maybe you can program or cook well or can translate another language. And as a job seeker, this skill will be something employers are in need of. And if a business is hiring, they obviously have a need for that skill.

Technological Singularity: an Unrecognizable Future

Do you ever feel like technology just moves too fast? I’ve already posted on how technology has past me by in many ways. But there might be more to it than people falling behind current trends. There’s the idea of a technologic singularity.

The technological singularity is an event in the future when technological progress becomes so rapid that it makes the future “different”. Central to this concept is the concept of accelerated change: technologic breakthroughs allow the next technologic breakthrough to occur sooner and easier. For instance, our technologic improvements in computers have allowed us to study genetic data faster and advanced our knowledge in genetics.

(Ignore that calculations per second, they are a poor measure of intelligence)

Some interesting consequences occur. As we build faster computer and create better algorithms, it allows us to create faster computers and better algorithms. But, that’s really all just an evolutionary trend, when our computers reach a high level of AI it will become revolution. It will be a paradigm shift: a social change so large that will occur and a new generation will be created.

And after the singularity? We will be able to construct machines smarter than us. And in turn, we will become more intelligent. We will become something else.

Before I finish, I would like to recommend The Gentle Seduction by Marc Stiegler as a look at what our future may become.