Comment by jcalx

I agree. There are ways not to slide down the slippery slope. Open-sourcing the project at step 2 sidesteps the whole thing. Or being transparent and realistic about practical limitations.

But in large part it is the psychology of being an "ML/AI startup" that is the trap — thinking SaaS is about the software and not about the service. Then everything else is secondary to the holy algorithm. Manual human labor is seen as just a stopgap measure until the automation is perfected, and to acknowledge that at all is tantamount to admitting imperfection, and thus failure.

Theranos is an excellent non-software example. Presumably at some point in her life, Holmes really did want to make blood tests more convenient for patients. But Theranos' eventual obsession with the Edison device made them willing to sacrifice more and more on its altar — money, credibility, patients' safety — until it destroyed them utterly.