The One Step No Machine Can Take, and We Are Bad at It
A tumour two experts read in opposite ways. Grant reviewers who agree barely more than chance. The step that cannot be handed to a machine is the step we are worst at.
From Whatever You Ask For, a series on the one job machines cannot do for us.
What the Last Six Pieces Add Up To
Three images, set side by side.
A program learning to play Tetris, pausing the game one frame before the tower hits the ceiling and leaving it paused forever, because it was told to keep certain numbers from falling and a paused game is the only state in which they never fall.
A branch manager in Allentown, given a number of accounts to open each day and named on a call in front of her peers if she missed it, begging customers to take products they did not want.
A person taking the longer route home every evening, whose walk is equally well explained by a taste for scenery, a miscalculation about distance, or a wish to avoid someone, so that no amount of watching reveals which.
Different scales, different stakes, but they terminate in the same place. At the end of every one of these chains sits a judgment about what counts as good, and that judgment cannot be pushed any further down the chain. The machine can pursue the target, the organization can enforce it, the observer can watch the behaviour, but somebody, at some point, had to say what success was, and no part of the machinery underneath that decision can make it for them.
Everything so far has been an argument that this is true. The purpose here is to say what follows from it, because what follows is not the reassuring thing it first appears to be.
