The Waymo effect: how AI is quietly making research less collaborative

It absolutely was used, and heavily. I won't even cover the "it's not ___, it's ___", of which there are MANY in this piece. But beyond that:

Count the lists of three:

    A guilt-free space to be alone with one's thoughts, finish an email, or take a call en route without the awkwardness about conducting it in front of a stranger.

   It costs travel and scheduling and the glacial work of building trust. It costs ego management and compromise and the periodic small heartbreak of the author-order negotiation.

Look for referenced to "naming" things, used in the sense of "identify" or "realize" rather than, you know, naming something.

    It took us slightly longer to name what we had lost.

    Swap “pilot” for “researcher” and “autopilot” for “agent”, and the mechanism Wang is guarding against is the one Bainbridge named four decades earlier.

Look for things being done "quietly":

    Two people who had crossed continents to talk to each other were quietly delighted by a technology whose central feature is that you don’t have to talk to anyone. (ed. - is that *really* Waymo's central feature?)

    once a frictionless option exists, we take it by default, and quietly surrender whatever the friction was doing for us

    Every conversation redirected from a colleague to a chatbot is a thread quietly withdrawn

    while the invisible thing that sustained it quietly falls below threshold

    competence quietly erodes precisely because it is needed only rarely

    the quiet risk is that our incentives are training us

> It’s making me want to be a lot less collaborative with such individuals. I don’t want to sit around and refute Claude text outputs all day.

I echo the sentiment. It's frustrating to try to collaborate with a Claude/ChatGPT meat proxy.

You can write a very thoughtful two-line question over 5 minutes and get a 5 page design doc back in a minute.

> Treating AI as if the output is factual is just a misuse of the tools, I think.

Especially because it's very often wrong. AI tools lack the necessary context of the specific situation and the surrounding technology environment to make appropriate suggestions for anything more complex than clean sheet designs and toy prototypes. There is too much complexity that is hidden in domain knowledge and not even exposed fully in documentation for any AI tool currently to ingest it all into its own context to give you an accurate answer, even setting aside hallucinations and that these tools are incapable of reasoning.

I have this same gut punch constantly. AI has destroyed functional outcomes in corporations, because managers are all deep in AI psychosis deciding that whatever the tool says is perfectly correct at all times. We've replaced analysis paralysis with a complete absence of thought from any human in high-level impactful strategy discussions, everything is entirely being abdicated to AI tools in so many companies. It's ridiculous.

AI will radically change the economy, but not because its replacing jobs, but because its eroding trust, domain knowledge and expertise, and thinking/creativity while being a massive waste of money and total boondoggle. This bubble can't burst soon enough so we can get on with doing shit that actually matters for people that actually helps them.

I was responding to you in the context of the GP.

> The flip side of being confidently wrong sometimes is that we treat understanding new systems as something approachable. So, yeah, it's annoying that we don't stay in our lane, but, from my boss's perspective, I'm the only one who's actually willing to just read code, investigate, possibly read a paper, and figure out what's going on instead of punting and saying it's someone else's turf I'm blocked until they get back to me.

Eventually you have to understand something. And part of that process is being wrong and annoying people.

GP here is suggesting that accepting established status quo at face value (i.e relying solely on other people's experience/letting them deal with problems you face in their domain without being able to examine why they arrived at the decisions they did) can lead to worse outcomes, and I agree.

Your response was that it is frustrating to have someone walk in and question things (precisely what GP is suggesting), only to have the final product of whatever decisions these people make be worse than the status quo (not what GP is suggesting).

I responded by saying - there is a difference between not listening to experience and examining whether the resulting implementation/decisions based on the experience are actually valid.

You did not address that. Is there not a difference between these two things? GP is suggesting to do the latter, not the former. i.e question why things are the way they are, crucially not that people should make decisions based on things we don't understand about the status quo.

You only responded to - * I doubt that someone smart (as you put it) would deliberately want things redone because they don't understand it, that's a trait borne of arrogance not intelligence.*

Your response claimed that I am denying the validity of your experience, when I made no such statement. All I said was there is a difference between questioning things and forcing decisions based on things they dont understand - smart people don't do the latter, arrogant people do. Someone doing what you are suggesting, is not doing what GP is suggesting, they are different. The former is smart, and the latter is not smart.

When I pointed this out here: I was just trying to examine the problem - if this behaviour is something you see often exhibited by “smart” people then: either you are unable to convince them of your side of the argument for different reasons, or you are not actually arguing with smart people. Do you see the distinction?

You accuse me of gaslighting you.

> Intelligence and arrogance are somewhat contra-indicative.

There might be a trend of this in academia (which is where the xkcd joke stems from), but in my personal experience I dont see this much in industry, and you can disagree with that.

I also don't see an xkcd joke being an actual basis of anything either. You are making declarative statements - but a _lot_ that many physics (and pure mathematics) grads are enormously more arrogant than the general population, enough that the trend under discussion has actual basis. - without any backing of this other than anecdata, and I was pointing out a different anecdotal experience.

I think I could qualify as an expert on various topics relative to many average people. But it always bothered me when experts wanted to "just be believed". In your example, it doesn't long to explain why a database is better than the file system in this instance and a moderately intelligent should be able to understand and not need you or Claude as the source of truth.

So I think it can be good people are able to "AI" to question expert opinions - though naturally, as you say, it's bad if people take the AI as a single authority akin to an expert.