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Comment by softwaredoug | Hacker News Reader

A lot of this is because of a lack of data literacy throughout the org and leadership.

Instead AI is thought of magic, something you hire a data scientist and they just do. Few in product, leadership, and other disciplines can think critically about different approaches to provide the right kind of data driven (and data skeptical) leadership.

I think it’s similar to how software was treated 20 years ago. You hired for it and effectively delegated it. You could supposedly manage software devs without technical knowledge. Now code literacy is heavily sought after in many disciplines. We need to get to the same place with data.

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Hits the nail on the head for me.

I worked for a data analytics consultancy for about 6 months, filled with data scientist types - the statistics and decision trees type.

One of the bigger projects was looking at computer vision to get a robot to detect when a pipe was busted underwater.

I asked the CTO about it and they said they were going to do it by teaching a mini off the shelf robot to locate a beer bottle in the office and transfer learn from there. I mentioned that would be highly unlikely for several reasons and was quickly ushered away from their pet project.

Suffice to say they eventually had to negotiate the final project scope down just a bit to offline binary image classification (broken vs. not broken).

So even a company filled with so called data scientists can fall into the trap of believing the snake oil.

Addendum: not necessarily believing their own snake oil I suppose, totally possible that they were just naive about the capabilities after reading too many wired/ars articles.

Or they had no choice but to follow the AI strongman, I mean, CTO, because of bad culture.

Culture eats strategy, after all.

Less CTO AI Strongman, more underhanded/nuanced pressure in the form of this is a big pitch we could win and we're a small start up about to be acquired by a big conglomerate and it could affect how much we make from that deal from the MD and founders etc.

Edit: I only joined the company because I thought they were above all the snake oil, turned out their oil was just a different color.

Hahah I feel this story.

This is entirely the case in too many places, and them trying to solve a problem that pressure gauges solved about 100 years ago.

This is my big concern with autonomous driving. Namely, we have confused perpetually being on the cusp of solving a big problem (self-driving) because we’ve solved an important subset of that problem (perception)

This feels pretty spot on for me. I’m actually very curious about the transition in software from very top down styles of leadership to more autonomous work. In my experience, middle managers will fight tooth and nail to ensure their own job security. I wonder how data scientists could pull off a similar feat.

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