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This AI Boom Will Also Bust

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291–300 of 320 posts

Re: This AI Boom Will Also Bust

#291
post #245
post #141

I understand that most people working with deep learning wouldn't want this type of thinking to spread amongst the public, and I surely don't want it either. But you have to be totally unaware of reality to think that DL is the definitive tool for AI. Most impressive results in DL in the past 2 years happended like this: >deepmind steals people from the top ML research teams in univerisites around the world >these pe…

Agree generally. Except being unimpressed unless performance is achieved on sub Google scale hardware. Today's Google supermachine is tomorrow's raspberry pie. No need to artificially constrain our bounds. There is, after all, the inevitability of Moores law.

> Today's Google supermachine is tomorrow's raspberry pie

No it isnt.

I really hope people stop spreading this myth.

Re: This AI Boom Will Also Bust

#292

Here's why the pipes metaphor is a bad one: we already are doing everything we can and ever will do with pipes. Pipes have been around for a really long time, we know what they are capable of, we've explored all of their uses. OTOH, the current progress in AI has enabled us to do things we couldn't do before and is pointing towards totally new applications. It's not about making existing functionality cheaper, or inc…

>we already are doing everything we can and ever will do with pipes.

How about a space elevator ?

Re: This AI Boom Will Also Bust

#293

One of two eventualities exist: * The article is correct and the current singularity (as described by Kurzweil) will hit a plateau. No further progress will be made and we'll have machines that are forever dumber than humans. * The singularity will continue up until SAI. So help them human race if we shackle it with human ideologies and ignorance. There is no way to tell. AlphaGo immensely surprised me - from my pers…

I think you are making a false dichotomy here. It is perfectly possible for the article to be right, and there is still a future with general artificial intelligence and a singularity. If you believe the singularity is inevitable then you should read the article as saying that we are woefully misjudging where the asymptote is -- yes current progress looks impressive, but there are some really big steps that we are currently ignoring, and real human level AI is a century or two out, not a decade or two out. That's perfectly possible, and most philosophers who work in consciousness and philosophy of mind (as well as a very large portion of the machine learning community) will tell you that there is still some big hurdles that we don't even have the faintest idea how to cross (the whitehouse report on AI described it as a "chasm").

Re: This AI Boom Will Also Bust

#294
post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't downvote you, but the TL;DR of the article is that most ML demonstrations to date have been toys and there are no known real-world applications that would justify the "40% of jobs lost!" hype. And you're trying to rebut this by referencing an AI-generated Christmas jingle . I think the author rests their case...

The '40% of jobs lost' figure is reachable without any Singularity-style event. That's what you can get just by applying modern automation techniques to low hanging fruit. Self-driving vehicles, automatic checkouts at supermarkets, fully automated fast food places, robotic warehouse storage/retrieval etc. If you used to have 10 people working at a supermarket and you now have 6 with self-checkouts, that's your 40% jo…

Self driving vehicles are not a low hanging fruit. We are far, far away from fully autonomous vehicles that don't need a human backup driver. This is despite massive investment by Google and others.

Re: This AI Boom Will Also Bust

#295
post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good question. Just one anecdotal data point here ... So take it for what it's worth. I'm a grad student focusing on reinforcement learning but have a lot of interaction with many deep learning folk. I'd have to say that they seem mostly motivated to learn how to make deep learning even more powerful and how to apply it. Not so much solving what's going on inside the box.

We do understand in general, just not every neuron and input weight in particular, because they are too many for limited human working memory to hold at once. An automated labyrinth could be solved by hand up to a size, but if it becomes larger, it would become "impossible to understand". We'd need to rely on computers to find the route for us. It's not computer magic, just an ability to hold more data at once. We're…

For many researchers, "understand" relates more to the underlying math. Things like "what kind of convergence properties and guarantees are there" and "formality, what can this model learn and not learn"?

Re: This AI Boom Will Also Bust

#296
post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree generally. Except being unimpressed unless performance is achieved on sub Google scale hardware. Today's Google supermachine is tomorrow's raspberry pie. No need to artificially constrain our bounds. There is, after all, the inevitability of Moores law.

Moore's law has been dead for a while now. Most of the chip in your phone is powered off because otherwise it would burn up. Highly recommend watching this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_9mzmvhwMqw

True, but even without Moore's Law, using neuromorphic chips instead of general-purpose CPU/GPUs would likely be much more efficient. In the meantime it makes sense to use large server farms to emulate candidate neuromorphic architectures.

Re: This AI Boom Will Also Bust

#297

By the way this earth will be bust in millian years, so what. Please stop wasting your time on these idiotic blog post and do something good for society. To HN: Please stop encouraging these kind of idiotic blog post there are better content on internet to rank higher on HN.

Please don't post empty generic dismissals on Hacker News. They don't contain any information, and that's what we're all here for.

Re: This AI Boom Will Also Bust

#298

I think this field is suffering from some confusion of terminology. In my mind there are three subfields that are crystallizing that each have different goals and thus different methods. The first one is Data Science. More and more businesses store their data electronically. Data Scientists aim to analyze this data to derive insights from it. Machine Learning is one of the tools in their tool belt, however often they…

> I feel like this post is essentially someone from the first group criticizing the last group, saying their methods are not applicable to him. Probably more accurate to say that it's the first group criticizing others in the first group who try to act like people in the third group. Data scientists who use deep learning for everything, when a more interpretable model would do just as well.

Sounds very familiar in pattern to those people who were part of the 'big data' hype who would attempt to use Hadoop for everything.. even work that could have been accomplished with an Excel sheet and an hour.

Looks like us Engineers have a common pattern in running towards the next shiny thing ;-)

Somewhere along the journey/career some of us wise up and learn when to say No, and use the right tools for the job, and ignore the "cool" factor.

Re: This AI Boom Will Also Bust

#299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not suffering from hype. There is too little hype. People are vastly underestimating what is about to happen. See my comments here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13079598 under our recent article " Artificial Intelligence Generates Christmas Song". Basically, if there is no pixie dust that makes humans intelligent, and instead it is a matter of the architecture of the brain and the first few years of sup…

I read your consciousness post and will reply here because that thread is already locked. I think the problem of consciousness comes from its definition. The word consciousness is too large, encloses too many aspects of cognition, religion and philosophy to be useful. It's a suitcase word, reifying various meanings into one name. What we need instead of "consciousness" is a set of concepts: - "perception" - means rep…

>Consciousness is a balancing system for the colony of cells that just want to pass their genes into the next generation.

is there anything in that which requires that it be a physical biological substrate rather than a model? Can't computer models follow the same behavior as long as that's how their environment / system is set up? (More specifically, can't they also have brains made up of cells connected to each other, in a way closely analogous or even an exact simulation of chemical pathways?)

Re: This AI Boom Will Also Bust

#300

Most firms that think they want advanced AI/ML really just need linear regression That's how AI always looks in the rearview mirror. Like a trivial part of today's furniture. Pointing a phone at a random person on the street and getting their identity is already in the realm of "just machine learning" and my phone recognizing faces is simply "that's how phones work, duh" ordinary. When I first started reading Hacker…

> Open the first edition of Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach and there's a fair bit of effort to apply linear regression selectively in order to be computationally feasible.

Does the book mention linear regression at all? The term doesn't appear in the index.

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