Thoughts on AI

AI is both fascinating and scary. Fascinating because it holds huge potential to revolutionize so many things (health care, agriculture, finance, manufacturing, transportation) and the list goes on. It’s a bit scary because I’m not convinced we know ‘exactly’ what is going on behind the scenes. You see that’s what AI is ‘supposed’ to do. It is trained to reason and decide for us. That’s where we’re going to get into trouble.

Slow Down

Initial thoughts are to slow down. I’ve spent 36 years working in information technology. There have been a number of times when releases should have been delayed. There may have been functionality that should have been added (or removed), etc. I’ve seen things like revenue recognition being used to get a product out the door (whether it worked or not) because we needed to record that revenue. I’ve seen QA work hard to test a release and record the issues. These issues were then passed back up the chain of command only to be downplayed. Why delay the release on a piece of functionality that will rarely be used. We’ll patch it later. It doesn’t matter, we move forward. I’ve seen things like that and more during my career and that’s the part I think is scary. We should just SLOW DOWN.

More to Come

I’ll post more about AI in the days to come. It really does have fascinating possibilities. I’d just like to see us slow down, take our time. The ‘get it out the door’ mentality needs to stop because the risks are now greater.