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> To expect that they are more knowledgeable, and therefore better equipped to see what it means... At least in computing, this seems to have been largely fals

> To expect that they are more knowledgeable, and therefore better equipped to see what it means... At least in computing, this seems to have been largely false. Whatever my respect for the expertise of creators, their track record on predicting the future uses of their developments has been genuinely bad. I don't think that's an indictment of their skills, just an acknowledgement of how complex and rapidly-changing systems really work. Understanding the future impact of ARPANET was impossible without also anticipating the rise of home computers, but the creators of ARPANET had no special expertise on that point. Computability experts and chip designers got predictions about topics from weather modeling to AI Go play totally wrong because everything from GPU computation to neural network advances have rendered their accurate domain knowledge misleading. And the track records of AI experts predicting the real-world role of AI is so infamous that I don't think I need to elaborate. Honestly, I expect that this would be computer science's Modernist moment. Corbusier and friends were genuinely excellent architects, but the move from "designing on sound principles" to "trusting that we know all the future uses of buildings and designing for those" was disastrous. The result is a legacy of inflexible building design, hostile urban planning, and government-embraced block housing that caused real harm to the people it was inflicted on. "A better grasp on their topic than everyone else" is presumably true, but it's not enough. Complex systems are often beyond what any one person can predict, and that only becomes more true when they're also rapidly changing from many directions. I don't think most creators in computer science can make predictions good enough to act on until their creations have been exposed to the world for a while.

vanderZwan 8y ago
> Honestly, I expect that this would be computer science's Modernist moment. Corbusier and friends were genuinely excellent architects, but the move from "designing on sound principles" to "trusting that we know all the future uses of buildings and designing for those" was disastrous. First of all, I love me a good Le Corbusier bash, and I totally agree with you here. I also get where you're coming from. However, what the article asks for is the equivalent to demanding that Le Corbusier would have to ask at every step "how could my design, supposedly built on sound principles, have negative consequences?" which isn't something I recall being a thing he used to do. Of course it won't be enough, but one could argue that if the experts don't even bother to try, things will be even worse.
- Bartweiss 8y ago
  > demanding that Le Corbusier would have to ask at every step "how could my design, supposedly built on sound principles, have negative consequences?" This is a good point, and I'm very much in favor of that. The man himself seems to have been much more fond of questions like "how can I force people to accept a version of this design that uses round numbers for elegance?" I think the proposal made me jumpy because I have so many bad associations with asking technologists to explain the consequences of their work to others. It calls to mind things like The New Digital Age, which seemed totally devoid of introspection (and frankly stupid or even malicious in a lot of places) but was a huge hit with people making important choices about investment and regulation. I'm still very hesitant about things like the mention of public funding boards using these assessments to shape their decisions, but I appreciate your point about preemptively looking for possible negative outcomes. Something like a medical attitude that considers failures and negative events separately could potentially make a lot of sense. We live in a world where the UK police are using facial-recognition software which provides 95% false positives, and it would be nice to at least have an academic framework for talking about how that's not just ineffective but actively bad.
  - vanderZwan 8y ago
    I understand what you mean. Keep in mind this is intended for the context of peer review; an ultimately transparent discussion, but not directly answering to the public. Ideally it would become another form of constructive criticism among scientists.

vanderZwan 8y ago

> Honestly, I expect that this would be computer science's Modernist moment. Corbusier and friends were genuinely excellent architects, but the move from "designing on sound principles" to "trusting that we know all the future uses of buildings and designing for those" was disastrous. First of all, I love me a good Le Corbusier bash, and I totally agree with you here. I also get where you're coming from. However, what the article asks for is the equivalent to demanding that Le Corbusier would have to ask at every step "how could my design, supposedly built on sound principles, have negative consequences?" which isn't something I recall being a thing he used to do. Of course it won't be enough, but one could argue that if the experts don't even bother to try, things will be even worse.

Bartweiss 8y ago
> demanding that Le Corbusier would have to ask at every step "how could my design, supposedly built on sound principles, have negative consequences?" This is a good point, and I'm very much in favor of that. The man himself seems to have been much more fond of questions like "how can I force people to accept a version of this design that uses round numbers for elegance?" I think the proposal made me jumpy because I have so many bad associations with asking technologists to explain the consequences of their work to others. It calls to mind things like The New Digital Age, which seemed totally devoid of introspection (and frankly stupid or even malicious in a lot of places) but was a huge hit with people making important choices about investment and regulation. I'm still very hesitant about things like the mention of public funding boards using these assessments to shape their decisions, but I appreciate your point about preemptively looking for possible negative outcomes. Something like a medical attitude that considers failures and negative events separately could potentially make a lot of sense. We live in a world where the UK police are using facial-recognition software which provides 95% false positives, and it would be nice to at least have an academic framework for talking about how that's not just ineffective but actively bad.
- vanderZwan 8y ago
  I understand what you mean. Keep in mind this is intended for the context of peer review; an ultimately transparent discussion, but not directly answering to the public. Ideally it would become another form of constructive criticism among scientists.