Are We Too Impatient to Be Intelligent?

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

One of the worst mistakes we ever made was making email instantaneous. We should have built in a two-hour buffer unless you flagged the email as time-sensitive or urgent. Why is that? Because now everybody has to check their email every 10 or 15 minutes on the off chance that someone has sent them a time-sensitive email. So the burden falls on the ... See more

all our models that justify transport investment assume that travel time is always a disutility. In other words, the more time you spend in transit, the worse off you are. If you come along with fancy ideas suggesting that people may sometimes prefer slower to faster, it fucks up our whole model.”

So this is what’s happened to the world: optimizatio... See more

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.

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

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

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.

In New York, people speak fast. In the American South, they speak slowly. Both of them are a form of politeness, understood in a different way. In New York, you speak quickly because you respect the value of the other person’s time and you don’t want to take up too much of it. In the South, you speak slowly because you want to respect the person by... See more

There are brilliant examples all over the place of people tweaking time subjectively. One of my favorites is the Uber map. It doesn’t change how long you wait for the taxi. It changes the quality of the waiting time by reducing uncertainty. If you look at human emotions, although humans might say, “I don’t like waiting for a taxi,” what makes them ... See more