Ask HN: Is PhD in AI worth it if I'd like to conduct my own research?

3 points

3 years ago

One acquaintance of mine, a teacher of informatics, offers me to enter PhD studies in AI at one local (EU) math/CS center where he has some connections. Because not many CS/math graduates currently want to proceed to a PhD and they're interested in AI and want more PhD students in this field.

He's the author of this [1] article on quantum fuzzy logic, which had received some international recognition, is obviously attached to it and would indirectly like me to build upon it. It seems decent to play with, but I wouldn't like to dedicate a whole dissertation to it, because there's more fundamental research to it. I'd love to apply to Michael Levin's lab at Tufts for some research assistance etc with some experimental ideas, but would like to build some minimal hardware and software prototypes first.

My background is in cognitive psychology/neurobiology and I have been teaching myself programming/CS during recent years. Initially I wanted to proceed to PhD in neurobiology and my supervisor recommended me for PhD studies. Currently I have developed several research lines in biophysics (and any CS etc required for it) for my own personal interest, and I was thinking it may be more efficient to start a business to fund my research and conduct it on my own or with relevant folks, rather than trying to fit systematized research attachments of others. Alternatively, I'd like to be paid for learning stuff I have a moderate to strong interest in, rather than hopping from one random job to another.

This teacher of informatics is prone to making generalizations about how the brain should work with such logic (though his logic was tested only on phoneme recognition) and doesn't seem to realize that <i>you are not your beliefs</i>. Can you imagine an AI generating such a statement, negating essentially any corpus of knowledge it was trained upon? And yet a human brain generated it.

Also from some indirect source I've heard that he's also supporting some racist war, though it has never been a topic of interest or direct discussion. And I wouldn't like to discuss my research interests full scale in such context.

Should I enter these PhD studies or better find a random job to continue on my interests in free time?