The Ideology of Computer Science Biases Towards Substitution
The Ideology of Computer Science Biases Towards Substitution
- The academic and tech worlds often have a built-in bias toward substitution over complementarity.
- This is because computer science research often focuses on breaking down human capabilities into specialized tasks that can be conquered by computers one by one.
- Trendy fields like "machine learning" and the obsession with "big data" often reinforce this ideology, creating an illusion that with enough data, computers can solve any problem alone.
- This focus on what computers can do alone causes us to miss the much larger opportunities in what humans and computers can do together. Big data is often dumb data without a human analyst to interpret it and provide actionable insights.