Some things I realized about AI while contemplating slide rule prices on eBay
Having read the article but not the comments, I thought I&#x27;d share some things that jumped out to me.<p>&gt;  I am sure that his engineers also use simulation, because as I said, that is what engineers do these days, but my guess is that Musk&#x27;s executive insights have successfully minimized that in order to save huge amounts of time and money.<p>My title these days is roughly equivalent to what most people here seem to mean when they speak of &quot;staff engineers&quot;. Granted, I&#x27;m relatively new to the title, but I feel like I&#x27;ve been approaching problems like a staff engineer would most of my career (~15 years).<p>I have no idea if the author&#x27;s guess is correct about Musk, but my own experience tells me that when solving a problem, many people get stuck on trying to accurately estimate how much effort&#x2F;time&#x2F;money a given solution would require. Whenever I find myself analyzing a problem, I follow a set path:<p><pre><code>    1. Brainstorm potential solutions, without regard for how wild they might appear.
    2. Roughly outline the potential positive and negative impacts of each - i.e., find the &quot;upper and lower bounds&quot; of each solution&#x27;s impact
    3. Classify the potential solutions into rough categories, by identifying the &quot;decision points&quot; where work toward each solution no longer also progresses toward the other solutions. This builds an informal conceptual &quot;decision tree&quot;
    4. Choose what path to take immediately. Often, all of the potential solutions require or would benefit from the same groundwork. If so, no decision needs to be made yet.
    5. Once I reach a &quot;fork in the decision tree&quot;, refine my estimates of each solution only as much as is necessary to determine that one path down the tree is preferable
    6. Continue this process until the solution ultimately presents itself.
</code></pre>
This seems complicated when I write it out like that, but the gist of it is that I see estimation as non-productive work, and minimize it to the extent that I can. If there are two potential solutions, both of which provide similar benefits, and I can ballpark solution A as probably taking 10-20 hours while solution B will take 50-100 hours I see no reason to spend my time trying to refine my estimate for solution B. It doesn&#x27;t matter if where it really is in the range; as long as I&#x27;m reasonably confident in the estimated ranges, the choice is clear.<p>I will say that this approach has had mixed results for me. In some environments, I feel like not being able to provide more accurate estimates for all options has led to leadership seeing me as lazy and impulsive. My time at those places has been short and not very enjoyable. In other environments, I&#x27;ve built enough trust with my colleagues that they generally trusted my judgement. My time there has been longer on average, and much more fulfilling.<p>As I&#x27;ve matured as a professional - and as a person - I&#x27;ve increasingly made the effort to explicitly state the thought process that I use to my peers. I accept (and even <i>seek</i>) disagreement. When I find it, I try to set my perspective aside and focus on understanding the process through which they arrived at their positions. In all cases, this has been because one of us was operating under a starting condition that wasn&#x27;t shared. _Usually_ this has been a more junior person missing something due to not having encountered it before, but not always. When I&#x27;m right I try to be gracious about it. I&#x27;m wrong I readily admit that and then go the extra mile later to recognize the person who led me the right direction, preferably by quantifying the impact of their perspective: &quot;We expected that the solution we were pursuing would have taken two weeks to implement; the solution presented by so-and-so reduced that to three days.&quot;<p>&gt;  Over-simulation is a issue in many of our industries, and I think it is one of many reasons that our standard of living has gone down over the last six decades.<p>I don&#x27;t know that I agree with this statement at all. Regardless of whether or not it&#x27;s true, the premise of the article as a whole remains valid.<p>&gt; Why am I even asking these questions? I have lived long enough to know the answer to all of them. Yes! If foolishly placing faith in artificial intelligence is the great existential filter implied by the Fermi paradox, then we may be about to filter ourselves out of existence. Even if it is not, we may further bankrupt ourselves in more ways than monetarily while looking for something to do the thinking for us that we are too lazy and too irresponsible to do for ourselves.<p>I totally disagree with this conclusion.<p>AI is just another tool, and knowing when to apply it will be the difference between efficiency and inefficiency. &quot;Placing faith&quot; in a tool is not something I would say that I do. In fact, I don&#x27;t believe that a person can have &quot;faith&quot; at all - only &quot;convictions&quot; - but that&#x27;s a conversation for another time... :)