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Idealism About AI Self-Driving Driverless Cars, Lofty But Loony
Dr. Lance B. Eliot, AI Insider
You might have seen in the news last year that Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook and its CEO, testified before Congress and included these key points:
“Facebook is an idealistic and optimistic company. For most of our existence, we focused on all the good that connecting people can bring.”
“It’s clear now that we didn’t do enough to prevent these tools from being used for harm as well.
“We didn’t take a broad enough view of our responsibility, and that was a big mistake.”
Some reacted to these points with a sympathetic response. To them, this was simply an example of engineers that were trying to do the right thing and, inadvertently, some not so right things happened along the way. This is the image generally of the Silicon Valley, namely tons of engineers that are all doing the right thing and at times they find themselves puzzled to realize that maybe it wasn’t entirely right. They are so focused on making a better mouse trap, and advancing forward with exciting new technology, we can hardly blame them for their intensity of focus on the matters at hand.
I recall one senior software engineer from a major tech firm in the Bay Area who told me she began to realize after she…
