Are We Too Impatient to Be Intelligent?

This is a massive problem in decision-making. We try to close down the solution space of any problem in order to arrive at a single right answer that is difficult to argue with.

“The mere consciousness of an engagement will sometimes worry a whole day.”

So this is what’s happened to the world: optimization trumps human preference. The people who want to win the argument are effectively prepared to ignore human truths to preserve the integrity of the artificial model.

So I’ll end with a very weird question: What does slow AI look like? We’ve automatically assumed that the way we interact with it is instantaneous. Are we sure that’s right? Would it be interesting to be able to say to an AI, Look, over the next three or four months, can you give me some ideas about holidays in Greece? Do we want to make that decis... See more

But the value wasn’t in the essay. What’s valuable is the effort you had to put in to produce the essay. Now, what AI essays do is they shortcut from the request to the delivery of the finished good and bypass the very part of the journey which is actually valuable—the time and effort you invest in constructing the essay in the first place.

Similarl... See more

We’ve got to understand that sometimes as an option, self-checkouts are great. As an obligation, they’re bad—because sometimes the time spent in the process is where the value comes from. You can see this because people on a Saturday love nothing better than to shop in the most inefficient way possible. That’s basically what a farmer’s market is—le... See more

If you read Influence by Robert Cialdini, what you realize is that many things are successfully sold by opposites. Everybody has one of these, so it must be good. Or: not many people have one of these, so it must be good. You can achieve the same emotional effect with opposite messages. There are two great ways to check into a hotel. One of them is... See more

And this leads to a problem, I think, which bedevils many technologies and many behaviors. It starts as an option, then it becomes an obligation. We welcome the technology at first because it presents us with a choice. But then everybody else has to adopt the technology, and we suddenly realize we’re worse off than we were when we started.

You can s... See more

The Unaccountability Machine by Dan Davies is a fantastic book, which argues that people create these models because if you can reduce decision-making to an algorithm, or a formula, or a process, or a procedure, you avoid the risk of blame. Computer says no, effectively.

Instinctively, people love to codify things, and make them numerical, and turn ... See more