[6gvONxR4sf7o]

That will be more true as ML gets more reliable, but we aren’t quite there yet. As ML gets more useful, people are going to use it more. As people use it more, people served by it will be more frustrated by unreliable/uncontrollable aspects of it.

A bug species detector that works almost all the time will get commoditized. A bug species detector that fails gracefully won’t get commoditized until later.

An insurance risk predictor will get commoditized. An insurance risk predictor that you’re confident is fair and unbiased won’t get commoditized until later.

A chat bot that gives you customers useful information about your topic will be commoditized. A chat bot that also never will say anything to tarnish your brand (e.g. sexist/racist/wrong) won’t be commoditized until later.

A last example illustrates it perfectly. The majority of automating driving was solved pretty quickly. That last mile of reliability has taken forever.

I’m convinced that knowing what’s going on under the hood will still be valuable for a while yet, because we are just not starting to really face ML failure modes at large scale.