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> overexcited executives failed to heed the caveats of the nerd Yes, the nerds are so well-known to consider the risks of what they create. If only they’d thou
by KarlKemp 5y ago
> overexcited executives failed to heed the caveats of the nerd
Yes, the nerds are so well-known to consider the risks of what they create. If only they’d thought of the risk that someone could use their work in the real world, even though it came with specific instructions not to do that. Maybe they wouldn’t create possibly-destructive ML models then.
Alas, it remains a mystery what a private company might do after paying a lot of money for something. Now where was I? Ah, right! Predicting criminality from baby photos! I love how DARPA sponsors basic research with absolutely no expectation of ever using it. Although I‘d better name it README.MD, just to make sure they do not forget to read it.
- civilized 5y agoTechnology has dual uses. Kitchen knives can be used to kill people, so should they never have been invented? You can take this line of reasoning very, very far. Some people think we never should have left our hunter-gatherer lifestyle. To these people, the agricultural revolution was a disaster and things have only gotten worse from there. It's a tremendously ignorant viewpoint IMO, but it's where you land if you believe technology with the potential for bad use shouldn't exist in general.
- solveit 5y agoYes, at every startup I was in, the stats nerds were in fact well-known to tell the nontechnical people and even the devs that what they were doing wasn't going to work, or rather that we didn't have good evidence that it would work. This is such a well-known feature of stats nerds that it's a meme.