We could talk about this for multiple hours over drinks, but in short, you have touched on a lot of what we have been discussing at home. Re: just reading the documentation, sure...until documentation gets incredibly clouded by LLMs. Already documentation for many businesses/orgs is poorly maintained and organized, if it exists (although open source is probably significantly better). Ben's experience in that realm is that many businesses are being sold AI as a solution when the real solution is "hire people to maintain, write, and train documentation", aka, librarians. As for the "real question," yes. I was thinking about this while manually reading crash stats and reports, and from there ended up with a way more interesting question and concern re: what crashes we do/don't "count" towards Vision Zero goals. If I had been using just the raw stats that get sent over to dashboards or had the AI tell me something, I would just...not have thought of some of the issues I analyzed. Human eyes are good! Critical thinking is good!
Thinking about documentation being replaced by AI slop is...heartbreaking. But to your other point, I so agree about the value of just reading data. I mean literally just reading it. That's something my boss taught me early in my career. There's no substitute for getting up to your elbows in something, rather than just reading the summary statistics. Or, as seems to be the case today, reading an AI-generated summary.
We could talk about this for multiple hours over drinks, but in short, you have touched on a lot of what we have been discussing at home. Re: just reading the documentation, sure...until documentation gets incredibly clouded by LLMs. Already documentation for many businesses/orgs is poorly maintained and organized, if it exists (although open source is probably significantly better). Ben's experience in that realm is that many businesses are being sold AI as a solution when the real solution is "hire people to maintain, write, and train documentation", aka, librarians. As for the "real question," yes. I was thinking about this while manually reading crash stats and reports, and from there ended up with a way more interesting question and concern re: what crashes we do/don't "count" towards Vision Zero goals. If I had been using just the raw stats that get sent over to dashboards or had the AI tell me something, I would just...not have thought of some of the issues I analyzed. Human eyes are good! Critical thinking is good!
Thinking about documentation being replaced by AI slop is...heartbreaking. But to your other point, I so agree about the value of just reading data. I mean literally just reading it. That's something my boss taught me early in my career. There's no substitute for getting up to your elbows in something, rather than just reading the summary statistics. Or, as seems to be the case today, reading an AI-generated summary.