I love his statement about trade-offs - there’s never an end all solution to things and we must be vigilant to what the tradeoffs are in the technologies we use. My belief is that our (including myself) instinct is to rush ahead with what’s shiny and new, monetize it and forget about the wake of destruction you’ve just left in your path. Looking at the results of social media, online shopping and AI makes me believe this is the case for them too. With the exception of say, 20% of its applications where it has made things genuinely “better” (there can be a whole different discussion what better means).
It’s strange to me that this message about trade-offs is not discussed more often by engineers, who are trained to look at these as a habit. If this were true, it would be engineers who would be the first to assess what are the disadvantages of applying AI - either to the product or perhaps to society. Can we have a broader discussion about the things we lose out when we use AI in our cars? As our educators? As our girlfriends/boyfriends?
Dracophoenix|10 months ago
> (there can be a whole different discussion what better means)
This is the major road block to any fruitful discussion of trade-offs. Two people, regardless of intelligence or thought process, will often have diverging definitions and goals.