| I think your unpopular view is very true. Worse, it's the key to finance and politics. I used to know someone who had nothing but contempt for developers and the IT team, because while he was busy playing the corporate ambition game, they just wanted to do a good job. As far as he was concerned, this made them easy prey. Guess which kind of person runs the world? Engineering and science won't teach you this. You can finish your PhD with a completely unrealistic view about how politics works, and how political outcomes are generated. Neither science nor engineering are immune to this. Popular beliefs and high-status areas of research are decided politically, not dispassionately. It's tempting to say that things would be better if we had dispassionate objective AIs deciding policy, instead of individual and tribal ambition - but of course one of the challenges of AI is that instead of simply automating math, AI has the potential to automate and amplify influence and persuasion. When you don't really understand influence and persuasion - but others do, in practice if not in theory - that's not necessarily a good place to be. |