Fear of AI

Geertjan Wielenga: The other aspect of this is that in the '50s and '60s, there were many books and movies about how robots would take over our lives. Robots were understood to be large, clunky devices or externalized aliens. Now, we have washing machines, refrigerators, and comparable devices, which are all actually robots. Robots have taken over our lives, but in a good way. Do you think the fear comes from worrying about a loss of control?

Laurence Moroney: Yes, but also people generally are afraid of things that they don't know. Much of the job of an advocate is helping people to know. You need to be able to communicate to people that there's not a button that you press and suddenly there's a living creature in there. AI is just the new paradigm for programming that kind of emulates the way humans do things.

I often joke that sometimes, the way we name the tech kind of oversells it. We talk about something being a neural network, which makes people think that maybe this is emulating the human brain. The truth is it's only emulating it on the most basic of layers. Neurons in a neural network aren't the same as neurons in your brain. Training a neural network is not the same as how your brain trains. Setting those expectations is a big part of the job.

The company Gartner had this hype curve where there's a tech trigger and then there's a peak of inflated expectations, which falls into the trough of disillusionment. After the trough of disillusionment, there's a rise in productivity. AI is really interesting because there's this massive peak of inflated expectations and also a peak of paranoid expectations. My job is to tunnel people through to the trough of disillusionment so that they can start being productive. Ultimately, it's my job to make you disillusioned! If you look at any tech, it goes through a curve. When people get really productive and do great things, they start from the trough of disillusionment and not the peak of inflated expectations.

Geertjan Wielenga: Is this like going back to basics with tech?

Laurence Moroney: Yes. Let's take the smartphone as an example. When Steve Jobs went on stage and introduced the iPhone, the world went into a peak of inflated expectations. We could throw away our desktops and laptops. Then, we fell into the trough of disillusionment and we realized there are problems like battery life and tiny screens. Now, people have started getting productive. I see the same thing with AI, so I start my talks by saying, "Hey, I'm going to disillusion you today!"

Geertjan Wielenga: There are people who are independent developer advocates going to conferences who are not connected to any company. They can be completely authentic in the sense that they're not representing anybody. As I'm listening to you, it's clear that being tied to a vendor means that you can be an integral part of the developments that you're talking about. Does being right there in the engine room, where these things are happening, give you an advantage?

Laurence Moroney: I think there is still room for independent developer advocates, particularly in the open-source world. If you're an independent developer advocate not tied to a particular company, you can drive whatever the product is that you're advocating. If that product is open source, then you can be part of the engine room for that, too. But it's hard to be a fully effective independent advocate for a closed-source project because you don't have the ability to change the product directly.

Geertjan Wielenga: No matter how generic you make your pitch, ultimately, you're from a particular vendor; you're representing that particular perspective. Would you say that there's no getting away from that?

Laurence Moroney: There is no getting away from that, yes, but I will say that it's not an impenetrable barrier. I think the best companies that hire developer advocates always encourage them to be as independent as possible and let their authority speak for itself.

I'm lucky because one of our philosophies in TensorFlow and with Google AI is to try to be vendor-agnostic as much as possible. I'm under no pressure from my company to pitch Google Cloud as the best way of running these things, Android as the best operating system, or Chrome as the best browser. But when I do use a particular product, I will use it because of the merits of that product and I will talk through the merits of the product from my own experience.

Often, I'll use an iPhone for doing demos, for example, instead of an Android. If I'm doing the demos on a small form factor, I prefer Android. If I'm doing the demos on a large form factor, I don't know any Android tablets that I like as much as my iPad. I'm given that freedom.

Not every developer advocate who works with a vendor has that freedom; I agree with you on that. But what I've found from experience when working for vendors is that when the person can talk with authority about the tech and just focus on the tech, the barrier tends to dissolve a little bit. If you come with honesty and talk with technical authority, instead of being just a corporate mouthpiece, smart developers will see that. While developers may not trust you 100%, they won't trust you 0% either.

Geertjan Wielenga: If you're at conferences, there's always an interest in independent developer advocates for their unaligned voices, but there's also always an interest in what companies such as Google, Microsoft, and Oracle are doing. Would you agree that people do want to hear the official pitch from the official developer advocates working for an official vendor?

Laurence Moroney: Absolutely, and I think most developers are smart enough to see through corporate speak and to see through marketing speak. If a developer advocate only does corporate speak and marketing speak, they will get marginalized.