Curiosity’s Wager 8: Hubris: ordinary confidence, scaled up?
Part 8 of 10 in Curiosity’s Wager.
Hubris is mistaking what I'm able to attempt for what I adequately understand. With AI, I can build a prototype or a functioning website quickly. It's different from providing something people can depend on for a consequential purpose. I want to describe how that gap appeared in our salon work and the tension between ambitious attempts and acting with humility. To make our payroll and voice notes work useful, we needed to connect with tools the shop already used, but the existing platform didn't provide APIs we could use. Our features risk creating parallel work and adding friction to their day. So we decided to attempt a wider replacement, including building out scheduling, booking, and payments. Payments felt familiar. I'd set up Stripe checkouts before. We could use existing providers and infrastructure. We weren't building everything from scratch. But that familiarity concealed a lot. Apple and Android have different ways of supporting tap-to-pay and connecting to card readers.
There are security requirements, refunds, discounts, Bluetooth, and an auditable trail of transactions. Testing also changed when we needed to see what happened with real money. This took much longer than I expected. Repeatedly, we thought we were closer than the next step revealed. Sometimes taking that step was how we discovered what we still needed to understand. The tools could help me carry an idea forward before I'd adequately understood what carrying it through would actually require. This is ordinary builder's hubris with an expanded reach. There's tension here. We need to make attempts and take appropriate risks to learn what is possible. But the ability to proceed doesn't establish that our understanding is adequate or that others should bear the risk.
Shared curiosity gives us opportunities to expose our expectations to challenge. What might work? What is appropriate? Whether we're prepared to do it. The encounter needs to be able to change our commitments. Preparing this talk is another opportunity to do that. What am I overlooking? What have I become too confident about, including my own confidence in shared curiosity?
The hubris of thinking that I have something to say about responsible design and use of AI tools. I don't think humility requires giving up ambitious work. We can make assumptions visible, invite people to question them, and let what we learn change our direction. We can act and stay humble and curious.
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