1. Become a professor/researcher in robotics, working on mainstream technical problems such as zero-shot learning. (To be clear, I’m not primarily thinking about robotics safety or AI safety, but rather general robotics capabilities research.)

2. Try to found “low-sophistication” hard-tech startups — i.e. products that are not extremely technically sophisticated and could easily be prototyped in a local makerspace, meaning any wannabe hard-tech founder could easily make it.

Note: For personal and practical reasons, it is unlikely that I would found a highly sophisticated hard-tech company, i.e. one that requires advanced fabrication / other specialized technologies.

TLDR: Has anyone here faced or thought seriously about a similar decision? If so, how did you decide where you had more counterfactual impact?

I’m currently leaning toward startups because the academic robotics work I’m interested in seems both popular and capacity-constrained. If I pursued it, I would probably be taking a spot that another strong researcher would otherwise fill, limiting my marginal impact. Thus, my impact as a researcher would be close to zero, while at a startup, I could at least potentially have some impact.