Making AI Better by Making it Slower

Marianne Bellotti
Software Safety
Published in
8 min readJun 19, 2020

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The difference between beneficial and destructive AI may be whether making fast thinking faster has any utility for the user.

A couple of months ago I left my job at Auth0 to join a defense and national security company founded by some friends of mine. It was a risky decision both because the company is new and because when one is working with the military, one is inevitably building technology that will either directly or indirectly kill people. It is an environment rich with ethical dilemmas and most technologists prefer to keep their hands clean by simply opting out of any involvement at all.

There were lots of reasons why decided to take the risk, but the most relevant one to this blog post is that everyone in the tech community lately is talking about building “ethical” products and no one can really define how a software development process that produced ethical products is different from a process that produced normal products. Just “don’t be evil” may no longer be Google’s motto, but it is definitely still how Silicon Valley thinks about things.

I’m not the kind of person that believes that outcomes are determined by the quality of the people. The best engineers sometimes build shitty technology together. Teams are not a sum of their parts. Simply assembling a collection of thoughtful people (and Rebellion has employed A…

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Marianne Bellotti
Software Safety

Author of Kill It with Fire Manage Aging Computer Systems (and Future Proof Modern Ones)