High-Tech Solution to Disaster Response May Be Too Good to Be True
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Re: High-Tech Solution to Disaster Response May Be Too Good to Be True
#2“We really think we can enable a disaster-free future.”
That statement gave me pause since it's quite the unrealistic claim to make.
Re: High-Tech Solution to Disaster Response May Be Too Good to Be True
#3For one, it’s great to see startups tackling hard problems like this: generally I believe there is huge benefit and opportunity for startups in providing government services like this. It certainly helps to dispel the feeling that our brightest minds are working on ads.
Secondly, this really seems like the initial phases of product development and fit — agencies would be foolish to simply rely on a startup like this to coordinate 100% of disaster response, I’m sure FEMA has similar models. With startups, especially ones tackling more “serious” domains (for lack of a better word) I’m willing to have a longer leash and proceed with caution.
Re: High-Tech Solution to Disaster Response May Be Too Good to Be True
#4“We really think we can enable a disaster-free future.” That statement gave me pause since it's quite the unrealistic claim to make.
Yeah that's bizarre. Managing disasters well, maybe.
Re: High-Tech Solution to Disaster Response May Be Too Good to Be True
#5anyone up for a relevant xkcd?
Re: High-Tech Solution to Disaster Response May Be Too Good to Be True
#6“We really think we can enable a disaster-free future.” That statement gave me pause since it's quite the unrealistic claim to make.
maybe a disaster is a poorly managed incident. You perhaps cant stop incidents but can stop poor management of them
Re: High-Tech Solution to Disaster Response May Be Too Good to Be True
#7anyone up for a relevant xkcd? https://xkcd.com/2128/
Spent some time around the CMU robotics labs in the mid 2000s. This is way more real than most can imagine...
Re: High-Tech Solution to Disaster Response May Be Too Good to Be True
#8Wow. "AI" and emergencies are such a bad fit. ML is great at probably being almost right. That's not how you want to run critical systems.
Re: High-Tech Solution to Disaster Response May Be Too Good to Be True
#9Wow. "AI" and emergencies are such a bad fit. ML is great at probably being almost right. That's not how you want to run critical systems.
Turns out, humans are also pretty good at probably being almost right. Luckily though, they've figured out how to build systems with higher fault tolerance than their own.
Re: High-Tech Solution to Disaster Response May Be Too Good to Be True
#10Wow. "AI" and emergencies are such a bad fit. ML is great at probably being almost right. That's not how you want to run critical systems.
Turns out, humans are also pretty good at probably being almost right. Luckily though, they've figured out how to build systems with higher fault tolerance than their own.
It's easy for an ML model to do great in the average case but horribly in the worst case, so you're correct if "fault tolerance" is a simple loss function to be minimized, but wrong if "fault tolerance" actually means what we care about. That's much harder and not something we uniformly know how to do with ML. Like the costco example in the article.
To do that with ML, they'd need a loss function that captures what we care about and data it sounds like they don't have.
We do know how to build systems with high fault tolerance the old fashioned non "AI" way.