On Quality, Time, and Uncle Al
Are we going where we want to be, or merely following the path laid out by efficiency?
What do we say we're striving for?
I believe there is an elephant in the room that everyone wants to talk about, but I'd rather not name it. Recently, I've been thinking about the world that we could create if the 'efficiency' that we've recently gained could be made to point to quality instead of productivity. I've been consumed for the last couple of years with the disconnect between what we believe our virtues are and what we - and particularly the laziness with which we - enact these virtues. I feel like the mechanical intelligence (which I have affectionately dubbed Uncle Al) is the easiest and most topical exemplar of this. There is a distinct dichotomy in talking about Uncle Al in the same way that people do when trying to defend a capitalistic system. We appeal to it at its best, without consideration of the actual enactment of it. Uncle Al certainly could cure cancer, but is he? (note: Probably a mistake to anthropomorphize like this.) And if we're being honest with ourselves, are these achievements even the monuments that we're aiming at?
What are the Measures?
I've recently read Cory Doctorow's "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI" in which one of many points that he brought up struck me. Who is the motivator for Ai usage? And more importantly (in my opinion), what does it mean for the people who aren't the motivators? It feels like the communities that created the tooling that is now being monopolized by these tech giants are largely getting glossed over as how they became inspired to create the tools that have been so beneficial. As if the inspiration for a tool like Neovim, and the extensions developed for it, came solely from generating shareholder value.
Goodhart's law: When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure
The benchmarking process and honing of weights in accordance with it lack the nuance in which we would judge a human intellect.