In his essay “I Saw Something New in San Francisco“, Ezra Klein remarked:
Recognizing a bad idea beneath good writing — even in myself — is part of my job. But what would it mean to grow up with that kind of companion? What would it mean to have your every adolescent intuition turned into persuasive prose? What is lost in not having to do the work to build out our intuitions ourselves?
This remark about intuition really struck me. With my engineering teams for innovation and product development, I wanted to cultivate intuition as a form or time travel, in the sense that we could get to a solution faster. But it came with a caveat, one of my “innovation aphorisms” that “Intuition without Experience and Analysis is Superstition.” And to that end, I felt it was vital to make sure my Engineers gained experience in the field and the factory and by talking to operators, factory and construction labor, procurement teams and suppliers, etc.
But innovation (and my time travel analogy) must be tempered with judgement, especially when our Work can impact the public’s health or safety. I think one of the fundamental problems with technology (in the IT software sense) is the lack of standards and ethics, and certification and sanctioning bodies that pertain to Professional Engineers. [The same applies to much of corporate governance in my opinion].
When one’s license and ability to work in your chosen field is subject to sanction, it causes the Engineer in Responsible Charge to exercise due care and judgement before Stamping drawings and specifications.
Lacking such a system for software practitioners, we need to have clear tort reforms that break the corporate liability shield to make the developers and owners of AIs personally liable for damages. They and their underwriters will be incentivized to mitigate some of the harms of AI.