The paradox of complacent judgement
Jun. 23rd, 2018 09:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
timeletsI've started reading a book on AI written by three economists (Prediction Machine, Agrawal, et al. 20018). Clearly, AI is a complex subject and it's surrounded by uncertainty and wild expectations. We generally know that we don't know enough to make conclusions where the technology is going to lead us. Nevertheless, it's also clear that human mind is even more complex than AI. It's also clear that an interplay of hundreds, thousands, millions and billions of minds, i.e. society, is even more complex than an individual mind. To deal with the problem, we have multiple fields of expertise that try to address specific aspects of social life - politics, economics, engineering,business, sociology, demographics, etc...
Now, I close the book and venture into the social media. What do I see? I see engineers (who generally understand that AI is complex) make breathtakingly simplistic, mindless conclusions about the society, an entity that is not only much more complex, but also lies outside of their field of expertise. The level of incompetence is astonishing. Even more astonishing is the gap between the actual incompetence and the confidence they have in their own competence. How come the evolution didn't weed out this blindness to the reality.
For example, a software engineer walks into my journal and writes in capital letters (!):
This is obviously false. You have to be blind, dumb and deaf not to see that government institutions all over the world are deeply engaged in healthcare. Nevertheless, let's give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that he just expresses a certain wish about how things are supposed to be, i.e. it's a normative statement made from a belief of how the world should function. Ok.
Obviously, there's a gap between the current and the desired state of the world. You'd think that an engineer would at least make an effort to explain how we get from here to there. Not a chance! Instead of trying to say something meaningful on the subject, he makes a moral claim:
This is mental level of a 2-year old when s/he throws a tantrum if s/he can't get a candy. How come an adult, a professional who supposed to be familiar with complex system design and basics of logic behaves like an small child? What turns off his mind when he walks out his field of expertise? Is there a way to turn it back on?
Now, I close the book and venture into the social media. What do I see? I see engineers (who generally understand that AI is complex) make breathtakingly simplistic, mindless conclusions about the society, an entity that is not only much more complex, but also lies outside of their field of expertise. The level of incompetence is astonishing. Even more astonishing is the gap between the actual incompetence and the confidence they have in their own competence. How come the evolution didn't weed out this blindness to the reality.
For example, a software engineer walks into my journal and writes in capital letters (!):
Медицина - НЕ ГОСУДАРСТВЕННОЕ ДЕЛО.
This is obviously false. You have to be blind, dumb and deaf not to see that government institutions all over the world are deeply engaged in healthcare. Nevertheless, let's give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that he just expresses a certain wish about how things are supposed to be, i.e. it's a normative statement made from a belief of how the world should function. Ok.
Obviously, there's a gap between the current and the desired state of the world. You'd think that an engineer would at least make an effort to explain how we get from here to there. Not a chance! Instead of trying to say something meaningful on the subject, he makes a moral claim:
А люди, которые норовят затащить в нее государство - нехорошие, мерзкие люди.
This is mental level of a 2-year old when s/he throws a tantrum if s/he can't get a candy. How come an adult, a professional who supposed to be familiar with complex system design and basics of logic behaves like an small child? What turns off his mind when he walks out his field of expertise? Is there a way to turn it back on?
