❝ The Human in the Loop

The quote below is from a recent article by Dr. Rua Williams ,titled On Being an Outlier that appeared on the website of the Goethe Institut:

Just as computer science is vulnerable to a culture of abstraction, our society may be vulnerable to a culture of abdication. Our desire for optimization and productivity drives us to abdicate effort and skill in exchange for rapidity. Our discomfort with complexity, nuance, particularity, and relation drives a desire to defer to some other power for justifying decisions with material and mortal consequences. We still keep “the human in the loop” — we still make the decisions — but we desperately look to an ethereal digital demigod for assurance.

[…]

Sometimes, I think we have built a digital Solomon, but when he tells us to cut the baby in half, we all shrug and allow it. We are not afraid to pass judgment, but we are afraid to bear the responsibility of judging.

I encourage everyone to read the entire article. It touches upon critical topics like the ethical AI, systemic biases inherent in AI systems, and the disproportionate impact of these technologies on marginalized groups.