Machine Learning: The High-Interest Credit Card of Technical Debt

Machine Learning: The High-Interest Credit Card of Technical Debt

Machine learning offers a fantastically powerful toolkit for building complex systems quickly. This paper argues that it is dangerous to think of these quick wins as coming for free. Using the framework of technical debt, we note that it is remarkably easy to incur massive ongoing maintenance costs at the system level when applying machine learning.

Machine Learning is eating code - but that doesn’t mean it’s a free lunch. This paper highlights the challenges and types of technical debt you’re likely to encounter and under-estimate. ML has all of the complexities of normal code - but also a larger level system complexity (changing anything changes everything).