I take offence to the expression ‘a camel is a horse designed by a committee’. Camels are incredible animals, possibly ideally suited to the desert. They have been instrumental in thriving civilizations and commercial breakthroughs which changed mankind forever. A camel is in fact an animal no European committee could ever imagine. Someone would argue it doesn’t look right, another would object to it’s saliva based on some european health guideline or other, for sure we would bicker for years about whether or not we can eat its meat; and with more than 100% certainty, the number of humps would become the bone of contention between heads of State for decades. In total, we would probably spend millions of euro in meetings, public hearings, research and other pleasantries and end up with …a horse.
An excellent recent example is that completely stupid button you have to “accept” when visiting websites. It is of course completely useless. A bit like making a sign reading “attention! If you get on this camel, a lot of people will see you because you will be higher up than before“. A paper sign. Which camel owners will have to put on the camel everytime a “new” rider comes along.
Perhaps the best illustration of the futility of approaching technology is carrier neutrality. To put it simply, this is the notion that Facebook has to “deal” with hate talk or sexism on its platform. Or that it is Twitter’s “fault” that some people spread false rumours via tweets or bots. In practical terms, this is like asking the telephone company to interfere if two or three of us start talking about building a bomb one day on our phones. Completely and utterly ludicrous. In fact, we could make telephone companies completely ban profanity on the telephone. All calls could go through voice recognition systems and when a swear word was recognised it could cut off the line or send you a fine.
There are two reasons we don’t do this and both are interesting. The first is that despite spending billions on automatic translation research, Europe still lags far behind in terms of real time machine translation. Things you can do for free on any Android phone, simply can’t be handled by any European infrastructure in technical terms to handle the task. Much like no French company could serve videos as well as YouTube. The second reason is of course that we could never all agree on what constitutes “profanity”. A French man’s “merd” is not exactly the same as a British “oh, poo!” or even a German “scheisse!”
In the same time Europeans would take to “initiate a working group to deliberate the need for a committee to address the issue”, Google staff would have solved it. In fact they did. Not for ethical reasons, but for commercial reasons, YouTube made video channels with profanity inelligible to take adverts. Problem more or less solved. Air BnB had a similar problem with users of their platform who refused tenants based on race or ethnicity. This is no easy problem to solve. It is virtually impossible to find a solution talking about it around a table. Air BnB didn’t “initiate research”. They tried, tested, improved and made it work.
Essentially the problem is one of friction. Technological networks operate on the premise that less friction is better. You want your phone to serve instantly. Search results at a the blink of an eye. What Silicon Valley does when presented with a challenge is usually to actuall add friction. That ludicrous european website button informing us about cookies is in essence an added step. It is meant to ensure we all understand cookies. Except it doesn’t. Compare it to Facebook trying to teach us about privacy. They constantly change the way messages pop up, the content of the messages, the way they try to make sure we are all on the same page concerning who sees what when we post on their platform. Other platforms have online mini lessons about hate speech. You start to post something and it pops up saying “hey! Do you know that this word you are using is considered negative in some parts of the world? Would you rather use one of the following suggestions:……” They even give mini history lessons relating to words or uses of words to help make sure you say what you want in a way which will actually get the message across.
Europe will never, ever catch up with Silicon Valley like this. Artificial intelligence is not about installing a “kill” button. I read through the blurb and it is a bit like bad French or Italian academic literature. Too much theory and mostly outdated. Impressive for headlines, useless in practice. In this particular phase of technological development we need to be building infrastructure and platforms. We need millions of experiments and we need to learn much faster.
Sir Alec Issigonis, designer of the legendary Mini, is often credited with coining the expression about horses, camels and committees. The question is whether today he would be enticed by a cushy university job, doing European research and enjoying European committees and funding, rather than building the iconic Mini car. I think he would prefer to work for Google and just get things done.