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The Healthy Habit Of Removing All The Rules
Proceed with caution, but please proceed nonetheless
Something remarkable happens when we remove all the rules and filters: a torrent of information flows freely and threatens to overwhelm us. The need for rules and filters is so evident that we don’t question it. The problem is we often stop questioning the rules too. The fact we need them doesn’t mean the ones we have are correct. It is a disturbing realisation: we need a dam, but is the one we have optimum? Is it even functional anymore?
Opening the floodgates is terrifying, even if the goal is to install new ones. We are married to a system, and divorce is a nightmare we seek to avoid. I remember attending a conference in which one of the speakers stated changing systems was the last thing a business wanted to do. Naturally, that doesn’t mean it isn’t the first thing a company should do when the need arises. A broken system serves nobody, not even those on top of it, not in the long term.
The leaps and bounds we are seeing in AI are due to a critical change in how humans trained it: we went from feeding it rules and methods to simply dumping all the available information on it and letting it learn for itself. Some AIs have even created new programming languages that facilitated more efficient learning. When we have enough…