AI Solutionism – Towards Data Science

THE GIST: Although media headlines imply we are already living in a future where AI has infiltrated every aspect of society, this actually sets unrealistic expectations about what AI can really do for humanity. Governments around the world are racing to pledge support to AI initiatives, but they tend to understate the complexity around deploying advanced machine learning systems in the real world. This article reflects on the risks of "AI solutionism": the increasingly popular belief that, given enough data, machine learning algorithms can solve all of humanity's problems. There is no AI solution for everything. All solutions come at a cost and not everything that can be automated should be.