Interviews and documents show that One Concern, which wants to use AI to help emergency responders in disasters, dangerously exaggerated its tools' abilities
Sheri Fink / New York Times : Tweets: @random_walker , @nytimes , @jimmyjwu , @robreich , @jswatz , @kellyhereid , @kellyhereid , and @kellyhereid Tweets: Arvind Narayanan / @random_walker : The fake-it-till-you-make-it culture of Silicon Valley has no place in domains where people's lives are at stake. How many repeats of Theranos are we going to have? https://www.nytimes.com/... HT @Aaroth. https://twitter.com/... @nytimes : Cities are turning to an A.I. start-up to help save lives during natural disasters. But some fear its promise has been dangerously exaggerated. https://www.nytimes.com/... Jimmy Wu / @jimmyjwu : When you try to do ethical machine learning under capitalism but end up funneling data to insurance companies for a living: https://twitter.com/... Rob Reich / @robreich : And the standard of “don't be Theranos” is not a high bar. https://twitter.com/... John Schwartz / @jswatz : “The usual start-up attitude of ‘fail fast and try something new’ was inappropriate to apply to disaster response because, ‘If you fail fast, people die.’” Eye opening story from @sherifink https://www.nytimes.com/... Kelly Hereid / @kellyhereid : The insurance industry uses cat models to make realistic estimates of how damaging a whole suite of natural perils will be - hurricanes, floods, wildfires, earthquakes, and so forth. Thousands of years of hypothetical events, and huge catalogs of historical “as-if” scenarios 3/n Kelly Hereid / @kellyhereid : So to wade in... What One Concern has built is a catastrophe model. We can quibble about how it's done it, whether it uses public data/AI/magical fairy dust/whatever, but that's what it is - a model that predicts damage from a disaster 2/n Kelly Hereid / @kellyhereid : So, I imagine @oneconcerninc is currently formulating a response to this @nytimes piece, but here are some personal thoughts, from yours truly, sitting in a space that intersects with its field fairly closely. https://www.nytimes.com/... 1/n