Working with AI research is amazing, because you can start with speculations about the nature of intelligence, creativity, or consciousness, and end up with concrete technology that is useful for people everywhere. Most other fields are either interesting or useful, AI is both.
This is in striking contrast also to most of humanity's history, when a society focused either on speculative thought or on practical applications. In some societies to could be either a scholar or an inventor, but not both.
The most prominent exception is probably astronomy, where throughout much of history you could think about the nature of the universe and at the same time make practical predictions of things that affected society (tide, eclipses, etc).
The industrial revolution famously connected science and engineering. But rapidly, the engineering fields became very specialized, and making progress in those fields soon again relied only on very specialized and obscure questions.
Inventing the transistor had immense effects on society, but didn't really involve much thinking about big and foundational questions.
AI research, on the other hand, relies on fresh thinking about how the mind works, as well as how our biology works and how anything can be learned, in order to make real progress. Those who don't think about such questions will not create the next major advance in AI.
My personal journey reflects this. Finishing high school, I loathed the idea of studying engineering (boooring!). Instead I studied philosophy and psychology because they addressed questions I cared about. In fact, the only questions I really cared about.
I wanted to understand what consciousness was and how intelligence worked. But I quickly discovered that psychology didn't have tools to make real progress on this, and philosophy requires a dialogue work empirical knowledge and methods.
So I gradually became a computer scientist so that I could address these questions and make some actual progress. Had I not had this drive to make progress, which is closely related to inventing new technology, I might have become a novelist instead, or a philosopher.
I guess I could even have allowed myself to be smitten with some religion and become some kind of preacher or some such things. I think I'd be good at that, possibly better than at my current job. But it would require belief of some kind.
As it stands, I believe the most meaningful thing to do with my life is to understand the mind my building minds. Well, understanding tiny slivers of the mind through building systems that imperfectly does something vaguely mind-related. But it's a start.
I'm lucky to have been born in a time when AI research is an actual career path. Also, to have had access to an education system where my unorthodox path was possible.
