Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

‘The discourse is unhinged’: how the media gets AI wrong

theguardian.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 76 posts

Re: ‘The discourse is unhinged’: how the media gets AI wrong

#11

Post by kilon »

niklasd wrote: post #8

The AI hype also seems to lead to sub-hypes in certain fields. E.g. in the legal profession there is a new buzzword called "Legal Tech". The hope is that AI-driven programs will eventually transform the field. While I think this is certainly possible and will eventually happen, it is astonishing how few programs there are admit the huge hype and countless workshops and conferences about the topic. And while it is pos…

I am a lawyer and a coder and I have to disappoint you that that hype is very real indeed.

The problem is two fold a) Lawyers completely underestimated the decision making abilities of software even without AI b) People who are not lawyers that completely overestimate the complexity of legal resolution.

(a) Happens because the software we lawyers use is basically... well... crap and most lawyers are clueless when it comes to technology, even ones that specialize on it. (b) Happens because of TV and Movies have created this fantasy legal world where lawyer, especially expensive ones can prove that they are elephants because of their virtue to win arguments.

Surprisingly and this was also a surprise to me when I started to study law, law and coding is much closer than people think because there is a lot more logic than there is tv drama in a real court room.

Not only AI should not have problem resolving legal issues , judging from its current achievements, but it can help with the most valuable skill for a lawyer which is pattern recognition. Our profession bombards us daily with tons of data that is extremely hard to organize and keep track of. This applies more on civil than criminal law , but most of law is civil law anyway (economical issues), and this data is documents used as evidence, case law (court cases that have created a precedence) and of course legislation.

Also there is no much of an option really, AI is pretty much unavoidable because the ever evolving immense complexity of modern society has made legal resolution so complex that court cases take up to decades to be fully resolved which of course is not a viable solution.

An example is the IT law which has been a huge suffering for courts and legislators to keep up with its rapid evolution in a profession where court cases and legislations take decades to move forward. In IT decades are in legal terms , centuries.

AI will replace lawyers , for that I have no doubt, cause law is a dying profession anyway for the reason I explained above. Obviously lawyers will still be around for a long long time but yes AI will fundamentally change the profession. The profession is in desperate need of modernization as it has barely evolved that last few thousands of years.

The problem was never what AI can do, it can do amazing thing, the problem is supply and demand. AI is a field of huge demand and minimal supply but then this is a problem that has rampaged the coding profession which is why freelancer coders make more money than lawyers.

Re: ‘The discourse is unhinged’: how the media gets AI wrong

#12

Post by slivym »

baxtr wrote: post #10

It is fascinating how the whole thing is following the classical hype cycle. This and blockchain will tank, and, then come back at a later stage, hopefully, matured. I don't think that is necessarily a bad thing. I did my masters' thesis in 2004 using evolutionary algorithms. No ordinary person would talk to me about that, even worse, I was easily labeled an outsider and a nerd. Today, people having AI skills are the…

I don't think it's right to say they will tank and then come back. In terms of opinion they went 'This is an idea' -> 'This will solve everything' -> 'Hang on that's rubbish, they won't solve anything!' -> 'Oh, yeah that's just another thing that exists in the world'.

Meanwhile, in reality, they went from 'This is an idea' -> 'Hey, we can solve a few interesting problems with this' and then split. The people who know how to develop technology built some interesting limited applications, and then scaled into more powerful stuff. The people who don't really know anything about technology will have bought into overhyped projects, they'll never go anywhere and get canned.

The second one is a pretty reasonable way for technology to evolve, the problem is that people aren't looking at what's happening, they're looking at 'influencers' and 'commentators' who are more interested in selling their opinions than talking about the technology.

Re: ‘The discourse is unhinged’: how the media gets AI wrong

#13

Post by davidgerard »

The Musk AI hype is quoted extensively - but these articles never get into Musk's line largely being reheated Yudkowsky. I had one of these discussions just a couple of days ago, where I had to point out that Musk was an accomplished businessman and engineering manager, but not actually a working engineer at any point ...

Re: ‘The discourse is unhinged’: how the media gets AI wrong

#14

Post by shawndumas »

‘The Gell-Mann amnesia effect is a theoretical psychological phenomenon, the term itself being coined by author, film producer and academic Michael Crichton after discussions with Nobel-Prize winning physicist Murray Gell-Mann.

Originally described in Crichton's "Why Speculate?" speech, the Gell-Mann amnesia effect labels a commonly observed problem in modern media, where one will believe everything they read from a journalist even after they come across an article about something they know well that is completely incorrect.

The conclusions found and perspectives portrayed by the author are entirely erroneous, often times flipping the cause and the effect. Crichton notes these as "wet streets cause rain" stories.

In short, most eloquently put by Thomas L. McDonald, the Gell-Mann amnesia effect defines the idea that "I believe everything the media tells me except for anything for which I have direct personal knowledge, which they always get wrong."’

— https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect

Re: ‘The discourse is unhinged’: how the media gets AI wrong

#15

Post by panic »

kilon wrote: post #11
niklasd wrote: post #8

The AI hype also seems to lead to sub-hypes in certain fields. E.g. in the legal profession there is a new buzzword called "Legal Tech". The hope is that AI-driven programs will eventually transform the field. While I think this is certainly possible and will eventually happen, it is astonishing how few programs there are admit the huge hype and countless workshops and conferences about the topic. And while it is pos…

I am a lawyer and a coder and I have to disappoint you that that hype is very real indeed. The problem is two fold a) Lawyers completely underestimated the decision making abilities of software even without AI b) People who are not lawyers that completely overestimate the complexity of legal resolution. (a) Happens because the software we lawyers use is basically... well... crap and most lawyers are clueless when it…

> Also there is no much of an option really, AI is pretty much unavoidable because the ever evolving immense complexity of modern society has made legal resolution so complex that court cases take up to decades to be fully resolved which of course is not a viable solution.

Instead of turning law into a computer game where the company with the most TPUs wins, why not simplify or reform the system so that human beings can understand it? Isn't the point of the legal system to resolve conflicts between people, not computers?

I'm worried that we're driving off a cliff of incomprehensibility, where things happen but nobody can understand why. Or even if they do, they don't have the authority to override the system which is making the decision. Reforming the system outright is always too risky -- it's been working OK so far, right? But what happens when it stops working? How can you fix a system you don't understand?

Re: ‘The discourse is unhinged’: how the media gets AI wrong

#16

Post by rumianteolor »

niklasd wrote: post #8

The AI hype also seems to lead to sub-hypes in certain fields. E.g. in the legal profession there is a new buzzword called "Legal Tech". The hope is that AI-driven programs will eventually transform the field. While I think this is certainly possible and will eventually happen, it is astonishing how few programs there are admit the huge hype and countless workshops and conferences about the topic. And while it is pos…

My fuzzy mind when from AI and legal to google for Stuart Sierra (just to see how is clojure evolving nowadays), the link "is clojure dying" was irresistible, then appcanary from clojure to ruby transition and happiness for programmers, then Stuart "Do not" about combining lazy evaluation with side effects and the comments there seems to justify that clojure "Simplicity over easyness" is a problem. When the AI hype expand from deep learning to other techniques I think we'll see a better scenario to apply AI to real world. Yesterday the "How is Haskell in 2017 and 70-100 full time programmers in Haskell in the US" give us an idea of how is the tech world evolving. The velocity of the expanding radius of technology and IA is decreasing.

Re: ‘The discourse is unhinged’: how the media gets AI wrong

#17

Post by sievebrain »

davidgerard wrote: post #13

The Musk AI hype is quoted extensively - but these articles never get into Musk's line largely being reheated Yudkowsky. I had one of these discussions just a couple of days ago, where I had to point out that Musk was an accomplished businessman and engineering manager, but not actually a working engineer at any point ...

They may well be partly true but when setting up SpaceX he immersed himself in rocket physics and basically became a self taught rocket scientist. He isn't just a manager.

Re: ‘The discourse is unhinged’: how the media gets AI wrong

#18

Post by amelius »

shawndumas wrote: post #14

‘The Gell-Mann amnesia effect is a theoretical psychological phenomenon, the term itself being coined by author, film producer and academic Michael Crichton after discussions with Nobel-Prize winning physicist Murray Gell-Mann. Originally described in Crichton's "Why Speculate?" speech, the Gell-Mann amnesia effect labels a commonly observed problem in modern media, where one will believe everything they read from a…

No wonder influencers get paid so well ...

Re: ‘The discourse is unhinged’: how the media gets AI wrong

#19

Post by gaius »

kilon wrote: post #11
niklasd wrote: post #8

The AI hype also seems to lead to sub-hypes in certain fields. E.g. in the legal profession there is a new buzzword called "Legal Tech". The hope is that AI-driven programs will eventually transform the field. While I think this is certainly possible and will eventually happen, it is astonishing how few programs there are admit the huge hype and countless workshops and conferences about the topic. And while it is pos…

I am a lawyer and a coder and I have to disappoint you that that hype is very real indeed. The problem is two fold a) Lawyers completely underestimated the decision making abilities of software even without AI b) People who are not lawyers that completely overestimate the complexity of legal resolution. (a) Happens because the software we lawyers use is basically... well... crap and most lawyers are clueless when it…

law and coding is much closer than people think because there is a lot more logic than there is tv drama in a real court room.

I've a friend who abandoned her engineering career at 30 to become an IP lawyer (she is incredibly senior in her firm now) who says the law is just a program that you run on a judge.

Re: ‘The discourse is unhinged’: how the media gets AI wrong

#20

Post by jokoon »

Success in developing working AI is not so much of a big step in progress for AI in general.

It would be more interesting if we could understand what happens in those black boxes, and synthesize it. All we see is showcase projects and services, but never something you can run on a client computer.

It really looks like machine learning is just brute forcing problems until you have a partial solution key to a problem, without understanding how it works internally. Granted, it's progress, but why isn't it possible to use the data of a trained ML network for further analysis? I see many models of learning, but not a lot of analysis or simplification of the resulting data.

I would have thought AI would help science understand what intelligence is, but obviously it's always money first, science later. You often see a lot of tools and models, but not a lot of good insights.

Post reply on HN