Branching from yesterday’s post, I want to acknowledge something about technology.

Nothing will ever be perfect.

While discussing artificial intelligence and self-driving vehicles, I received unexpected blowback from some friends.

The issue I have with their arguments is that they seemed to focus solely on the flaws, and in doing so they negated any possible benefits.

From one critic, autonomous vehicles are programmed by humans and programming errors will result in car accidents. Regarding AI, the other critic pointed to the fact that the processing power of the technology is harmful to the environment.

Both of them are absolutely right in their arguments.

The problem is that such arguments can be expanded to almost anything. Nearly everything has the potential to cause harm. The mere existence of cars results in human deaths on a daily basis. While electricity production, shipping, and farming all have negative environmental impacts.

Throttling progress because it has downsides is nonsense.

Everything has downsides.

Instead, why not focus on the positives.

With autonomous driving, for example. Considering that upwards of 70% of car accident deaths are due to human error (alcohol, distraction, speed), that’s 70,000 out of every 100,000 people.

If self-driving cars, even with programming errors, can bring that down to 10%, is that not progress? Loss is loss, sure. And the goal should be zero. But shouldn’t we start somewhere?

As for AI, this comes with a different angle. Artificial intelligence is here to stay. The genie is out of the bottle. So rather than focusing on why it’s bad for the environment, why not focus on finding a solution?

The best part about this is that humanity can use AI as a tool to help us solve this very problem. AI is being used to solve incredibly complex problems that affect our world, why couldn’t it be used to solve its own flaws?

To disregard the benefits of technology because it is not perfect is a hindrance on progress. And as with all progress, we’ll continue to face new challenges.

But overcoming challenges is what we do as a species.

And, so far, we’ve done pretty well for ourselves.