This was the approach Douglas Englebart took in the lead up to the Mother of All Demos (MOAD) and it's unfortunate people have forgotten that bit of history.
There is so much that can be done to improve the lives of people if we simply focus on how to optimize a variety of things that have to happen every day. This doesn't mean we should forsake longer-term goals like fully autonomous vehicles or other things, but it does mean that some of those who are most capable of making a very real and significant impact in the lives of thousands of people are forsaking that opportunity.
There is also often the argument that such near-term thinking will lead us to a local optimum in terms of technology advancement, but I don't see that there has been significant evidence to support that claim. After all, Englebart's demo of version control and collaborative editing (among other things) was over 50 years ago and that didn't seem to stall technological progress.
Who’s we? I can throw machine learning at practical real world problems right now.
Augmenting human intelligence? I’m not aware of any work in this area.
Speaker also argues that we should focus on leveraging ML-human collaboration to surpass human performance, instead of falling into a "robots will replace us" narrative
I didn't watch the full video, so I am only responding to your summary. These kinds of sentiments, where technologists profess that technology will always make everything OK, while not at all addressing how our current economic system will fail large swaths of our society if automation comes to fruition (beyond "new jobs will come up!" or "ignore the luddites!") strikes me entirely as a "Let them eat cake" attitude.
Here's a thought experiment: What would happen if, by the end of 2019, true, 100% self-driving cars became a reality. I know this is not going to happen, but it no longer seems a far-fetched fantasy. In the US, driving is the number one job for the majority of states. What are all of these people supposed to do, become self-driving car programmers?
I am a big believer in technology but I am very worried for the future of society.
