Ted Chiang probably has an uphill battle convincing people here of his take, precisely because he thinks the engineering approach may be wrong. Or in his words:
> Arguably the most important parts of our lives should not be approached with this attitude. Some of this attitude comes from the fact that the people making AI tools are engineers viewing everything from an engineering perspective, but it’s also that, as a culture, we have adopted this way of thinking as the default.
I tend to agree with Chiang, but he is preaching to the anti-choir here. Even though many HN-ers seem to like his fiction (and why wouldn't they, Chiang is top of the cream!), they will probably chafe at the idea some problems cannot and shouldn't be approached from a pure engineering side.
I remember the -- now rightfully ridiculed -- phase of startup entrepreneurship which became a meme: "I found a problem, so I created an app to solve it" (where the "problem" was something like "world hunger", "homelessness", "poverty", "ending war", etc).
That Chiang is also criticizing capitalism and wealth accumulation as a primary driver will probably win him no friends here.
I've always complained that engineering relies on a lot of stolen valor from its adjacency to science. There is nothing scientific about treating everything in life as an optimization problem. And yet engineers often act like they are noble pursuers of truth in the same vein as scientists.
For example, take the Tesla vs. Edison dichotomy that became popular on the internet in the mid 2000s. The narrative was that Edison was an idea stealing hack, while Tesla was a brilliant visionary scientist and engineer.
The reality was that Edison was a brilliant inventor and a shrewd businessman, while Tesla was only the former and he made brilliant inventions that made other men like George Westinghouse very rich. But a scientist? Tesla was a crank who doubted the existence of electrons and distrusted Albert Einstein.
Tesla makes a good patron saint of modern engineers, but not of engineering's self image. He had a victim complex, he constantly commented on topics outside his area of expertise, and his lack of business acumen was seen as proof that he was a true outsider genius whose ideas were actually too good.
> Arguably the most important parts of our lives should not be approached with this attitude. Some of this attitude comes from the fact that the people making AI tools are engineers viewing everything from an engineering perspective, but it’s also that, as a culture, we have adopted this way of thinking as the default.
I tend to agree with Chiang, but he is preaching to the anti-choir here. Even though many HN-ers seem to like his fiction (and why wouldn't they, Chiang is top of the cream!), they will probably chafe at the idea some problems cannot and shouldn't be approached from a pure engineering side.
I remember the -- now rightfully ridiculed -- phase of startup entrepreneurship which became a meme: "I found a problem, so I created an app to solve it" (where the "problem" was something like "world hunger", "homelessness", "poverty", "ending war", etc).
That Chiang is also criticizing capitalism and wealth accumulation as a primary driver will probably win him no friends here.