The Driver Seat

The Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Than has a meditation on driving cars.

Before going into the car, he meditates on the sentence, “When I’m in the car, I’m one with the car; when the car goes fast, I go fast.”

You know the feeling in the driver's seat. Essentially, you’re sitting in a chair. And yet, you’re speeding down a street with a force that can crush a tree, all while sitting. For us humans, that feels quite unnatural.

It makes us systematically underestimate the impact we can have. And yet, we’re driving, we’re responsible.

When we deploy machine learning systems, we carry the same bias. We systematically underestimate the impact we can have. When we start a tool based on AI, it’s the same. We systematically underestimate the impact.

And yet, we are responsible.