What’s a technology that you think is overhyped?
Artificial intelligence. You take that idea about free throws and apply it to all text that has ever existed, and that’s the idea behind the technology. My problem is that once you call it “artificial intelligence” instead of “pattern recognition,” it conjures dangerous robots that are threatening our existence, or automating human jobs, or beings that are more powerful or more intelligent than we are.
That’s never panned out. That narrative has accompanied artificial intelligence since they came up with the term in the 1950s, and it’s the same narrative no matter what the technology does. One on hand, you have people like me who think that machine learning technology, or pattern recognition technology, is incredible; transcription services are incredible; handwriting recognition is incredible; coding assistants are incredible. These are incredible tools that make my life better on a daily basis. But you see that we pour all this money into them as if they’re going to create some new consciousness or end humanity, or that they’re somehow equivalent to nuclear bombs. It’s just incongruous.