Nilay Patel

You can ruin that guy's reputation if you would just say his name.

And Bridget, I invite you to say his name out loud right here, if you would.

Nah, not important.

It was important enough for me to ask.

Anyway, that's a system that people understand about humans, right?

They have reputations.

They have histories.

They have experiences.

You can Google them.

And then sometimes they die, right?

And they just go away.

You get some new ones.

And at least the system replenishes and evolves.

An AI system running on a cloud service that you can't see on a data center that you might have hated being put in your community does not feel accountable to you in that way.

And maybe it's getting it right more often on whatever metric that someone who is not you has decided is important.

But you can't actually hold it accountable.

And that to me feels like the biggest gap in all of these automated decision systems that no one wants to account for because the efficiency gain is so high.

My wife, as it happens, is a divorce lawyer, and I do think an agent of her just talking her clients through the decisions that were made a long time ago over and over again would actually be very helpful for her in many ways, because that seems like a lot of her job.

I understand what you're saying there.

You said this thing to me the first time we met that, again, I've just been thinking about ever since.