RedMonk Tech Events
1 HN recommender · recommended in 3 months, 2023–2025
40:27 · 24K views · Nov 17, 2023
Bryan Cantrill's Monktoberfest 2023 talk takes on AI doomerism, weighing the theoretical existential risks against the reality on the ground. He takes a skeptical but thoughtful view of how to balance AI's potential against its risks.
Recommended as a thoughtful Cantrill talk on embracing failure and curiosity in engineering, and as a skeptical counterpoint to AI doom narratives.
3 comments from Hacker News
I saw Bryan Cantrill's talk on [Intelligence is Not Enough][0] opposing some opinions on AI/ML is gonna do to the industry... but I felt like it touches on some ideas that can relate the topic of mental health as well. Many software shops/enterprises don't value the necessity of embracing failure and making space for curiosity . That's fine, but then these shops should be strict about using Boring Technology they can just buy support for. If such companies have too much product ambition in the mix, then you need to give devs the ability to be engineers by giving them space to fail, try new things, refactor, rewrite. We can't do that when the pressure is on to ship in unsustainable ways! Failure is not an option. We spent all that money writing that MVP, what do you mean you need a team to just maintain it? We have features to build!! Not everyone is competitive enough to work with excellent engineering culture and we trade mental health in for it sometimes. [0]: this video
I am glad to see that many people are being correcting you, but just to put a sharp point on it: I am using that metaphor to condemn Ellison, not to condone or accept him. Unfortunately, since that talk in 2011, what was an aberration (albeit a broadly unspoken one) has since -- tragically -- become the norm. I refuse to accept this, however: I will continue to speak my truth about the moral decay in tech, and why we must hold ourselves to a higher standard.[0][1][2][3][4] And I obviously agree with your indignation that poor corporate behavior should not be the status quo! [0] Principles of Technology Leadership , [LINK] (2017) [1] Andreessen's Corollary: Ethical Dilemmas in Software Engineering , [LINK] (2019) [2] (Anti-)application Video for YC120 , [LINK] (2019) [3] Coming Of Age , [LINK] (2022) [4] Intelligence is not Enough , this video (2023)
the strong needs to just take whatever it wants, and so be it? there's no separating technology from context, as in consequences. yes, all the talk about bombing datacenters is crazy, but oversight is not. this video