Well, I heard hamming give this talk at NASA Ames in 1984. By the end of the year I’d quit my job (doing research on very obscure properties of programming language semantics), partially because I realized there were only a dozen or so people who even understood our work — what’s the point. Until then really I was just working on things that looked like fun — nothing really wrong with that.

I spent a few years working on common sense reasoning (AI) but began to feel it was making no progress. One thing that had shocked 20 yo me in Hamming’s talk was his criticism of Einstein for working on unified field theory: the fundamental mathematics and theory weren’t there yet so the effort was a waste of time. I was partially wrong but it didn’t seem like that was the right time for such work to be a productive effort, so after a few years I quit.

Since then I’ve mostly worked on problems where I could make a difference. At the end of the 80s and in the 90s that was enabling work on Free Software/open source and end user Internet access; first decade of this century pharmaceuticals (trying to reduce drugs in the water supply), then solar and renewable power (in the long run it’s hard for any one person to have significant impact for the good reason that lots of others are all pushing it forward), and lately climate repair.

I’m still old school enough that I non-cynically do work on projects that make the world a better place, and I think the world is a better place in ways large and small due to my efforts (and those of so many more).

I am disappointed that when the gold rush hordes flooded into the Bay Area in the late 90s they said they were “making the world a better place” because that seemed to be just a thing people around here said.