Congratulations on the degree! And congratulations on identifying the clusterfuck. It's hard to see the forest for trees.
I agree with the premise in the suggestion for "discrete AI", but my analysis is different: I think we need continuous AI. Three reasons:
- Biology is doing it and it's working great.
- Modern AI is hitting a power wall in much the same way Titanic realized too late that it couldn't sink. We're going to have a gigantic energy headache soon. (This is the same argument for discrete AI)
- We simply do not understand complex dynamical systems well. Which is why the weather is so hard to predict. But the world consists of dynamical systems, so this is really where we want to push the envelope.
I'd argue helping out in the field of neuromorphics. It's basically the combination of DL + dynamical systems, similar to how brains are computing. There's a lot of energy to be saved (> x1000, really) and there's a lot of new, cool hardware coming out you can help interface. And many of the new ideas in DL comes from neuromorphics (sparsity, SSMs...). We're building up an open source community over at open-neuromorphic.org
Happy to answer any questions you have
What about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honey_Heist ? It's not DnD, but the rules are ridiculously simple: you're a bear and if you want to do bear stuff, you roll in your "bear" skill. If not, you roll for "not bear" (i.e. criminal). It's so dumb it hurts, but it works for all ages and I had a blast trying this with some friends.