Yes, there are still jobs where you have to do novel and interesting things. It is hard to compare these to the work the Draper Lab did, but that was an exceptional moment in time that an exceptional group of people were able to do because they were at the right place at the right time.

Much of the interesting stuff I was able to do in the past was a result of being at the right place at the right time, but others were because I took some wild chances. I realize it can be a privilege to take wild chances and it isn’t an option for many.

When I read this site, or the media in general, AI exuberance and/or doom and gloom is everywhere. I also felt like the opportunities you are thinking about are vanishing. My current job is actually pretty exciting to me; building a new distributed audio software and hardware solution. The hardware element makes it very real; there are no endless cloud compute resources to help out. I guess what I am saying there still seems to be interesting and challenging tasks out there, but the green fields do seem to be vanishing.