These experts on AI are here to help us understand important things about AI.
Who are these generous, helpful experts that the CBC found, you ask?
“Dr. Muhammad Mamdani, vice-president of data science and advanced analytics at Unity Health Toronto”, per LinkedIn a PharmD, who also serves in various AI-associated centres and institutes.
“(Jeff) Macpherson is a director and co-founder at Xagency.AI”, a tech startup which does, uh, lots of stuff with AI (see their wild services page) that appears to have been announced on LinkedIn two months ago. The founders section lists other details apart from J.M.'s “over 7 years in the tech sector” which are interesting to read in light of J.M.'s own LinkedIn page.
Other people making points in this article:
C. L. Polk, award-winning author (of Witchmark).
“Illustrator Martin Deschatelets” whose employment prospects are dimming this year (and who knows a bunch of people in this situation), who per LinkedIn has worked on some nifty things.
“Ottawa economist Armine Yalnizyan”, per LinkedIn a fellow at the Atkinson Foundation who used to work at the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.
Could the CBC actually seriously not find anybody willing to discuss the actual technology and how it gets its results? This is archetypal hood-welded-shut sort of stuff.
Things I picked out, from article and round table (before the video stopped playing):
Does that Unity Health doctor go back later and check these emergency room intake predictions against actual cases appearing there?
Who is the “we” who have to adapt here?
AI is apparently “something that can tell you how many cows are in the world” (J.M.). Detecting a lack of results validation here again.
“At the end of the day that’s what it’s all for. The efficiency, the productivity, to put profit in all of our pockets”, from J.M.
“You now have the opportunity to become a Prompt Engineer”, from J.M. to the author and illustrator. (It’s worth watching the video to listen to this person.)
Me about the article:
I’m feeling that same underwhelming “is this it” bewilderment again.
Me about the video:
Critical thinking and ethics and “how software products work in practice” classes for everybody in this industry please.
I might know what you mean, but tell some more?
It’s my own name I made up from a period in the late 2000s, early 2010s when I’d have a lot of freelance clients ask me to build their site “but it’s easy because I have already purchased an awesome theme, I just need you to customise it a bit”
It’s the same as our current world of design systems and component libraries. They get you 95% of the way and assume that you just fill in the 5% with your own variations and customisations. But what really happens is you have 95% worth of obstruction from making what would normally be the most basic CSS adjustment.
It’s really hard to explain to someone that it’d be cheaper and faster if they gave me designs and I built a theme from scratch than it would be to panel-beat their pre-built theme into the site they want.
“customise” is the biggest lie in dev ever told
oh my god, this was all of my clients when I was in college
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holy shit, Airtable - the 4th app in my growing list of “UX is the product” apps that will definitely all be absorbed into one of the other apps on the list at some point. (Notion, Slack, Figma)
they sell flexibility, not speciality! It’s exactly what my rant about AI products is based on.
Here’s a quick collage of the 4 product taglines. Not a concrete purpose in sight. They know you can’t call them up and say “hey, I paid good money for your product and it isn’t doing productivities!”
this is an ad for a self-destructive work/life balance and a paycheck that’s high enough you can just barely afford to patch yourself up when it catches up with you?
ah. yeah. I know what you mean.
I have a set of thoughts on a related problem in this (which I believe I’ve mentioned here before (and, yes, still need to get to writing)).
the dynamics of precision and loss, in communication, over time, socially, end up resulting in some really funky setups that are, well, mutually surprising to most/all parties involved pretty much all of the time
and the further down the chain of loss of precision you go, well, godspeed soldier
Also, like, when you simplify the complicated parts of something, what happens to the parts of that thing that were already simple? They don’t get more simple, usually they become more complex, or not possible at all anymore.
one of the things I love ranting about, and teaching (yes, seriously), to people, is that
simple != simplicity
it’s a nuanced little distinction. but it’s also a distinction with worlds of variances.
and there are so, so, so, so, so, so many people who think the former is the goal
it’s a fucking scourge
I also like your Lisp bracketing
once you learn that I’m, at most, touristly familiar with lisp
you learn that the inside of my mind (and how it contextualises) is a deeply scary place