Terence Tao: commitment

Transcript context

…What advice would you give in general to young people how to pick a career, how to find themselves, what they could be good at? That’s a tough, tough, tough question. Yeah, so there’s a lot of uncertainty now in the world. There was this period after the war where, at least in the West, if you came from a good demographic, there was a very stable path to it, to a good career. You go to college, you get an education, you pick one profession and you stick to it. It’s becoming much more a thing of the past. So I think you just have to be adaptable and flexible. I think people will have to get skills that are transferable, like learning one specific programing language or one specific subject of mathematics or something. That itself is not a super transferable skill, but sort of knowing how to reason with abstract concepts or how to problem solve when things go wrong. Anyway, these are things which I think we will still need even as our tools get better, and you’ll be working with AI supports and so forth. But actually you’re an interesting case study. You’re one of the great living mathematicians, and then you had a way of doing things, and then all of a sudden you start learning. First of all, you kept learning new fields, but you learned Lean. That’s not a non-trivial thing to learn. For a lot of people, that’s an extremely uncomfortable leap to take, right?…

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