Purpose in technology:

1. Automating trivial tasks/making existing tasks easier:
   1. Physical: robotics
   2. Digital: software
2. Automating knowledge work/making existing knowledge work easier:
   1. Converting real world data into structured/formal data: NLP
   2. Building models on that data: statistics/classical ML
   3. Reasoning/searching for solutions using the models and data: alpha go-type search
   4. Searching for data: NLP

Projects:

1. Converting BERT to search engine: search is meaningful and I’m curious whether I can
2. Operating system: automate dev work
3. Robot: get back into that kind of work to see if I want to do my day job in it