There are costs to even temporarily shutting down Bing Search. Microsoft would take a significant reputational hit—Google’s stock price fell 8% after a minor kerfuffle with their chatbot.
Doesn’t that support the claim being made in the original post? Admitting that the new AI technology has flaws carries reputational costs, so Microsoft/Google/Facebook will not admit that their technology has flaws and will continue tinkering with it long past the threshold where any reasonable external observer would call for it to be shut down, simply because the costs of shutdown are real, tangible and immediate, while the risk of a catastrophic failure is abstract, hard to quantify, and in the future.
What we are witnessing is the beginning of a normalization of deviance process, similar to that which Diane Vaughan documented in her book, The Challenger Launch Decision. Bing AI behaving oddly is, to me, akin to the O-rings in the Shuttle solid rocket booster joints behaving oddly under pressure tests in 1979.
The difference between these two scenarios is that the Challenger explosion only killed seven astronauts.
Doesn’t that support the claim being made in the original post? Admitting that the new AI technology has flaws carries reputational costs, so Microsoft/Google/Facebook will not admit that their technology has flaws and will continue tinkering with it long past the threshold where any reasonable external observer would call for it to be shut down, simply because the costs of shutdown are real, tangible and immediate, while the risk of a catastrophic failure is abstract, hard to quantify, and in the future.
What we are witnessing is the beginning of a normalization of deviance process, similar to that which Diane Vaughan documented in her book, The Challenger Launch Decision. Bing AI behaving oddly is, to me, akin to the O-rings in the Shuttle solid rocket booster joints behaving oddly under pressure tests in 1979.
The difference between these two scenarios is that the Challenger explosion only killed seven astronauts.