Tech Giants, Gorging on AI Professors Is Bad for You
If industry keeps hiring the cutting-edge scholars, who will train the next generation of innovators in artificial intelligence?
Eat too much and there won’t be grass for anyone.
Photographer: William West/AFP/Getty ImagesIn an essay written in 1833, the British economist William Forster Lloyd made a profound observation using the example of cattle grazing. Lloyd described a hypothetical scenario involving herders who share a pasture, and individually decide how many of their animals would graze there. If few herders exercised restraint, overgrazing would occur, reducing the pasture’s future usefulness and eventually hurting everybody.
The sinister beauty of this example is that the rational course of action is to behave selfishly. That’s because the selfish herder’s cattle would be able to gorge on the pasture as long as considerate herders held their animals back. And there’d be no short-term benefit to selfless behavior: If other herders are selfish, overgrazing of the common agricultural land would occur anyway. This “tragedy of the commons,” in Lloyd’s words, is a prominent type of social dilemma, where unchecked self-interest on the part of individuals leads to poor outcomes for their group.