Chris Dwan (he/him)

Achievement unlocked: Keynote speaker.

Opinion | Sorry, Sam Altman, A.I. Is Not Good at Real Writing When we let computers write our stories, we lose something essential.

Most of the time, for me at least, the struggle and growth of writing is more important than the actual work product.

www.nytimes.com/2025/03/23/o...

Good thread on why AI for peer review (as described in this Nature piece) is a terrible idea.

bsky.app/profile/carl...

For me, at least, it’s time to exit the phase of #AI hype where we all were putting raw ChatGPT* outputs in our presentations and talks.

It’s like time travel in fiction. If the story isn’t -about- time travel, then including time travel is just sloppy writing.

(*) or whatever #genAI tool.

Top left, from the original Buddy’s Pizza just off 6 Mile in Detroit if I can get it.

Spring is on the way!

Depends on how we’re using the words.

Ethics and morals are dual concepts. They exist only in relation to other things.

Tech in the sense of an artifact laying inert and unused on a table? Yes. Tech as in ‘the tech industry?’ or science as in ‘the culture of academic research?’ No.

File under ‘no, I do not want to listen to some nerd say what they think the code did. I want to copy and paste it.

Ani Difranco said, "any tool is a weapon if you hold it right."

We're the engineers. We're holding the tools.

It's our job to infuse ethics into this an-ethical system.

Nobody else will.

Don't work on shit that will make things worse. That's my Saturday morning message.

12/12

If you are a young sprout of an engineer, I urge you to think on ethics. Don't fool yourself that you'll be able to outsmart capitalism and somehow infuse ethics into a public company. That's not what companies do.

Just ... don't work on things that you can see will make shit worse.

11/?

The option to -stop- most of the harm is not, so far as I can see, available to individuals anymore. These gears are huge and powerful and inhuman.

Individuals can at best choose to not directly contribute to the harm. Perhaps we can make stuff that will help instead.

That's what we get.

10/?

Bringing the threads together: We've got massively wealthy individuals and (more dangerous) an-ethical constructs who have more than enough power to create world ending technologies - and all the top-line incentives point towards "move fast and break shit."

That's true right now.

9/?

Here's another ratchet: Corporations are, by design, an-ethical machines that turn capital into more capital.

If you let that one run without any counterbalance, you get trans-national megacorps.

8/?

Here's one of the ratchets: Once you have money, it's easier to make more money.

If you just let that one run for a while, you get billionaires and an oligarchy. It's easy to get distracted by the antics of any particular billionaire, but they're symptoms, not causes.

7/?

I think a lot about root causes and systemic / emergent behaviors.

The most powerful gears driving the world (or organizations) are ratchets - they turn in only one direction. If you have a system where all the incentives turn in the same direction, the outcome is basically inevitable.

6/?

It’s been almost 30 years since I took that engineering ethics course. Now I’m the grizzled consulting engineer who has Seen Some Shit.

I pivoted away from military R&D and to bioinformatics not least in the hope that my work would help more people … or at least not hasten Skynet.

5/?

It bugged me enough that I enrolled in a graduate class at the University of Michigan titled ‘Engineering Ethics.’

One of the core theses of the class was that technology itself is amoral and an-ethical.

It’s what we do with it, and to whom, and why. That’s where the ethics lives.

4/?

When I was just a young sprout of an engineer, I worked on a project training neural nets to do real-time target selection on tactical missile platforms.

Having watched both Terminator, and War Games, the possibilities were immediately clear to me.

3/?

I’m keenly aware that this is not a new conversation. The development of atomic weapons is the foundation of the genre. The thing is, nukes are super hard and expensive to get working.

Synthetic biology is not quite mass-market accessible, but it’s damn close.

2/?

A ‘Second Tree of Life’ Could Wreak Havoc, Scientists Warn Research on so-called mirror cells, which defy fundamental properties of living organisms, should be prohibited as too dangerous, biologists said.

The call for a pause in development of ‘mirror’ organisms is yet another in an accelerating series of cases in which we see the terrible risks posed by thoughtless use of new technologies, and yet are seemingly powerless to prevent harm.

1/?

www.nytimes.com/2024/12/12/s...

If I can tell that your AI assistant is reading and (incorrectly) responding to my emails, I will supplement future messages with long, derailing passages from The Lord of the Rings or The Stand.

Tip 6: Final one for this thread - gardening and management are both disciplines of maintenance. If you are not the sort who enjoys checking in regularly and making small adjustments most days - maybe gardening (and management) are not for you.

7/7

Tip 5: Pruning is essential. Most plants, and all teams, benefit from an occasional inspection to remove unneeded branches, vines, meetings and responsibilities.

Done skillfully, the plant redirects its energy in the desired directions without any need for command and control.

6/?

Tip 4: There’s plenty of blame to go around without blaming the plant itself. We needed more rain, less rain, less early heat, later frost …

It’s a poor gardener who blames the plant, and it’s a poor manager who blames their report.

5/?

Tip 3: Sometimes you have to thin out perfectly good seedlings to establish appropriate spacing.

The gardener looks after the whole garden, and sometimes that means it’s just bad luck for a perfectly good sprout that happened to come up too close to its sibling.

4/?

Tip 2: Repotting is stressful. Even if a plant is terribly root bound and needs that larger pot, it’s going to drop leaves and look sad for a bit before the benefit hits.

This is also true with re-orgs and promotions.

3/?

Tip 1: Every plant has conditions where it will thrive and suffer. Some need full sun, some need shade. Some need to dry out, some need wet toes.

If a plant, or a team member, is struggling, consider whether they’re just in the wrong environment before deciding that they’re the wrong person.

2/?

Good morning! Here’s a quick thread of management tips, metaphors, and aphorisms I learned as a gardener.

1/?

My only two interests in AWS reinvent are (a) who’s playing the shows and (b) which former partners will be The Sacrifice, paraded out to show the reactions on their dumb little faces as Lord Bezos cannibalizes his former ‘partners’ by launching native AWS services that destroy them.

I'm getting lots of inquiries these days about finding a compbio job. This is the worst job market I've seen or heard of, and possibly the worst market since Bioinformatics became a field of its own.