Based on the recounting of Goethe’s Faust (in the 1780s) by Marshall Berman (in the 1970s), the rapid exodus (or, at the very least, attention diversion) of computer science or general STEM field professors from tenured positions of renowned universities to start-ups they founded (in the 2010s), is oddly, and perhaps a bit eerily, similar to Faust’s mental and physical journey through his tragedy.
A typical course of action of a professor that might be familiar to everyone studying in the field of computer science (and perhaps other STEM fields) by now is to
- Live and breathe academia for decades, crawling through papers, conferences, journals, talks, lectures, etc., to eventually
- Reach professorship and expertise of one’s field through tons of dedicated works and even more luck, all the while being increasingly desensitized by the ideals of academic contributions to the world,
- Proceed to be tempted by the industrial side of one’s field, with promises of real-world application of ones idea that is locked by the lack of freedom or resources in the academic world, or simply by the large sum of money the industry can offer, or most likely both, and finally
- Decide to take some “sabbatical”, “leave of absence”, or simply work one’s behind off, to establish one’s own or join someone else’s start-up, getting a more handsome pay and a lot more resources, be it human or computational ones.
This is of course a very crude way of telling their stories. But I hope at least part of it rings some bells to people who know one or two academics like this.
Now, Faust’s journey, or at least the first part of it, seems to be
- Being an acclaimed academic in his time, feeling locked up in his laboratory by his own idea, and that he had no impact in the real world and has not truly lived;
- Rescued from a suicidal attempt by joy of the outside world, attempted to join this world, but realized that his true goal in life is to rapidly and completely change the world with his creation as an industrialist;
- Tempted, by a literal devil, of money, fame, youth, and sexual gratification, but most importantly (according to Berman) of the development of one’s self (think Byung-Chul Han) and the world towards an unknown, perhaps non-existent, but certainly exciting, end, in exchange of his soul.
- Agreeing to this bargain, receiving everything that was promised, and so on.
It seems hard not to see the parallel here, especially if we recall that the largest subset of professors that fits this profile is the group of computer science professors that go on to found AI start-ups, and if we drink the AI doomers’ Kool-Aid and believe that the development of AI will turn out to be some kind of Pandora’s Box that will destroy the world, or at least change it permanently for the worse.
To clarify, the intention here is not to cast a moral shadow upon this phenomenon of professor exodus. It is to simply make an observation. The central thing that makes the parallel between Faust and CS professor interesting to me is that
- Both parties exhibit a certain sense of despair that their works in the academia have little real-world impact or applications,
- They both have a sort of intrinsic, natural, and morally ambiguous desire of “changing the world” (a.k.a. LinkedIn and Twitter contents that generic Bay Area tech bros pumps out every day), and
- They have both been tempted, not necessarily by an “evil force” (that’s too cliche and naive a read on both Mephistopheles and free market economy), but by entities that promise to provide them with large quantities of resources to fulfill their goals, in exchange of something they actually don’t fully understand (“soul” for Faust, “a rapid change of human society” for AI startup founders).
References
- Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air (1982).