Or Both. But Mostly Latter..

Once upon a time, to build a website, you had to buy a computer. One day, someone had the brilliant idea to buy many computers that nerdy people like myself could pay to use — we called them servers. Almost 20 years ago, AWS had an even more brilliant idea to buy many servers and let less nerdy people pay to use them — we called it cloud compute. Today, everyone can host a website with a few clicks or sentences. Sound familiar?

As some of you may know, with the help of many very talented and kind people, I alone with others have been building out a teeny tiny SaaS platform apiobuild.com in the past several months - A low code platform enabling everyone to create automation software at ease. We started the project as pandemic hit, people were getting creative with their career (out of necessity or exploration), we saw a healthy demand where people really needs some form of very niche software yet have no clue how to get started.

Almost in every AI or Machine Learning conferences I’ve been to lately, there’s a track dedicating to biases or “injustices” in algorithmic decisions. Books have been published (Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor, Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism etc.) and fear has been spread (Elon Musk says AI development should be better regulated, even at Tesla ).

The fear of unknown is, perhaps, more persuasive than a realistic survey of the state of AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) development. Admittedly, from the very beginning of my career, I despised those who lacks the imagination of how data and algorithms can improve the quality of human decisions - I have always believed that human intelligence could be drastically improved when augmented with the right information at the right time.