As excited as I am for the breathtaking advances in machine learning over the past decade, I am equally displeased with the media’s mad rush to tout AI as a mag

As excited as I am for the breathtaking advances in machine learning over the past decade, I am equally displeased with the media’s mad rush to tout AI as a magic elixir of the modern era. Our societies have been constructed over a long period of time with gaping inefficiencies. Case in point: the automobile. Yes, back when the alternatives were capital-intensive railroads or poop-intensive stagecoaches, automobiles offered unprecedented mobility. Yet in our blind rush towards our perceived ideal of modernity, we built cities to satisfy the needs of the automobile first, and people second, or last (thanks GM!). Self-driving cars could make transportation easier, faster, and more accessible, but it’s an awful lot of assumed progress that doesn’t factor in the inherent and damaging inefficiencies of the automobile: -Cities are built for cars. Wide streets make walking worse. When I spent a month in Rome I never needed to use a car because everything was so much closer to my front door. -Suburbs are unsustainable. They require a scale of infrastructure (water, electric, gas, pavement, internet, etc) that is far more expensive per mile than in dense cities, and anybody whose home street has been pulverized to dust can tell you that there is simply neither money nor will to pay forward our expensive past mistakes. -More roads suck. Anybody from car-centric cities (LA, ATL) knows that with massive 8 lane highways comes equally massive amounts of drivers. LA has highways everywhere and they’re basically always packed. Is that a sign of a working or a breaking system? -Cars are expensive. People who need cars to work get tied into expensive loans which hamper their economic potential. And Uber is not even on the same planet of being close enough in price to replace ownership with access. If poor people didn’t need cars, they would be less poor. Poor people in the developed world who spend a great deal of their paychecks on transportation are the first world equivalent of the third world villager who spends most of their productive time securing fresh water for their families (which we take for granted comes clean out of the tap). If we really want the world to improve, we cannot simply tweak the edges of a broken system. Just the example of automobiles shows how fiddling with algorithms only serves to further bake-in our structural inefficiencies. We have to be willing to put anything and everything on the table for debate. In short, we have to restructure all of our society to attain the lowest cost of living for all people. Otherwise we will keep developing radical technologies while scratching our heads and wondering why the poor keep getting poorer.