François Chollet is the cofounder of Ndea, an intelligence science lab, and the author of Deep Learning with Python[135]. He sparked an interesting conversation on X that we followed [136], posting “The idea that we will automate work by building artificial versions of ourselves to do exactly the things we were previously doing, rather than redesigning our old workflows to make the most out of existing automation technology, has a distinct ‘mechanical horse’ flavor.”
His reference to the mechanical horse evokes the infamous quote about breakthrough innovation attributed to Henry Ford (which he actually didn’t say [137]): “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” Chollet continued [138], “You see, the killer advantage of mechahorses is that you don’t need to buy a new carriage. You don’t need to build a new mill. The mechahorse is a drop-in horse replacement for all the different devices horses are currently powering – thousands of them.”
This reminds us of a famous quote often attributed to Albert Einstein (though the source is unknown [139]): “We cannot solve the problems using ...
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