Scifi authors have definitely been writing about smart computers for a while now. Maybe some of the things that are newly specific to ML can be fodder for writi

Scifi authors have definitely been writing about smart computers for a while now. Maybe some of the things that are newly specific to ML can be fodder for writing: - When building an ML model, you think much less about the structure of the model and much more about getting a variety of data to feed it. One could imagine some really silly situations. If you're training an affect-recognition model, you might want to contract every single actor in hollywood to act out a single scene. Maybe your voice recognition model is not working on certain people, so you hunt down a specific person and force them to read all of Shakespeare's work out loud. You might work on self-driving problems, and every day you instruct a full village of people to enact a precise ballet of driving, walking, and roadwork, to get the autonomous brain to learn some weird corner case of reasoning. Similar to Player Piano, so many people will be working on non-directly-productive work, almost play-acting work so a computer can do it for real. - Sometimes ML doesn't work in really weird specific situations. In the 90s, your program could stop working because the lighting and shadows changed, but now the reasons for something failing are so much more obscure. What is it like becoming an expert in psychology for something that doesn't even really think? What does that person do day-to-day and what does their boss think of them? Is it more like being an independent psychiatrist, or more like a police detective? (then again, I'm drifting into an Asimov plot even as I write this...) - Each object you train an ML model on takes a certain amount of investment, in data collection, in debugging, and in adjusting the training process. Each object adds expense, so maybe a solution is to stop adding objects? Maybe your Alexa enhanced home edition was built in 2025, so to keep your house in order you can't buy items made from 2026 onwards. Or maybe it's a big societal issue, so the government mandates that every new item created must pay some kind of registration fee. Maybe it only allows 10 new items per year. Some people would be pretty unhappy about that. Maybe you're right! Maybe switching from straight edges screws to philips screws makes for a really boring story, because we've already written every story that accounts for some kind of screw driver.