When the most powerful man at the most powerful data company says he has no solution to AI problems? In this Futurism article, Sundar Pichai of Google says they cannot prevent their Artificial Intelligence systems from fabricating answers.
<edit June 2024> When the most powerful man at the most powerful hardware/software company says he has no solution to AI problems. In this Futurism article, Tim Cook of Apple says they cannot prevent their Artificial Intelligence systems from fabricating answers.<end edit>
Google and Apple are lost and they don’t know what to do.
There is a solution, just not the one they want.
Wayfinding
There’s a lovely practical article from 1955 about navigation and wayfinding. I have a PDF scanned from the original children’s book; I can send a copy if you message me.
The problem is that lost people panic and think that going forward is the best idea.
It is not.
The bias to movement as solution is very strong and very wrong.
What to do when lost
When lost (as Google are), there are three steps.
1) Stop
2) Gather your thoughts
3) Move backwards, seeking out where you recognise and where you felt safe
On the last point, it’s also true that being mindful and aware of where you move thru as you go forward is important to not getting lost in the first place. Prevention thru attention. Enabling people to explicitly understand where they are, how far they have gone and how they recognise the touchpoints and choice points they went thru along the way.
Rushing towards failure
More broadly, too many systems remain biased to the idea of forward movement. User journeys, road maps, etc. are mostly represented as linear paths – from here to there. It is not necessarily a good way to think of projects or products.
Design has not helped with ideas of frictionless and deceptive patterns. These make movement too easy and stopping or going back too hard.
Movement matters to human sense making but sometime stopping is the solution.