Technologists shouldn’t try to dumb things down for the general public; we should try to state as clearly as possible where the problem lies and how it might be

Technologists shouldn’t try to dumb things down for the general public; we should try to state as clearly as possible where the problem lies and how it might be mitigated. In this case, we need to make it clear that what’s called “AI” is just a new kind of statistical tool, and like all statistical tools it’s only as good as the data it’s provided and the human interpreters of its outputs. Ironically, I think “conservative” is both an excellent descriptor of function approximators—they tend to conserve whatever bias they’re provided with—and a terrible word to use for popular writing, since it’s so easily confused with political conservatism (even though e.g. no politically conservative “AI” would autosuggest “on my face” as a completion of “can you sit”).