I am an AI researcher but and I would love to investigate useful systems for business, but I have no idea about the business processes that this article mentions.
Why is AI so useless for business?
41–50 of 391 posts
Re: Why is AI so useless for business?
#42Our immediate goal should be to set our sights lower; forget ML, instead improve and expand technologies like RPA ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robotic_process_automation ), which is only "AI" in the narrowest sense. Example: my wife is an admin in a school office, and a ludicrous amount of her and her colleagues' time is spent on replicating data entry between a multiplicity of different incompatible systems. The…
RPA can be a dangerous band aid. It often uses screen scraping or similar brittle interfaces that are known to change. Or, it doesn't know about certain error conditions, etc.
Also, if it's been running for months before it breaks, the humans that used to do the work are gone, or have forgotten how to do it.
Re: Why is AI so useless for business?
#43Many real world business processes assume a certain knowledge of the world and the relationships between entities, and not just a limited set of data points about the task at hand. Such kind of knowledge is not yet incorporated into today's ML systems.
Re: Why is AI so useless for business?
#44The problem goes much deeper than researchers not having enough PDFs. If you look at where machine learning is successful it’s usually processing spatially related data. The pixels in a photograph have a spacial component where points near each other are more related than points far apart. Same goes for audio, and even text. Words in a paragraph that are close to each other are usually more related than words far apa…
IMO machine learning has nothing to do with learning. It might be able to find out some patterns in the data set which can be very useful to recognize something like license plates etc. But unfortunately finding out patterns does not mean understanding them which is the fundamental of learning. Then the result is quite obvious and simple: you don't know what you don't know and you cannot transform something you don't understand.
Re: Why is AI so useless for business?
#45People try to apply AI to high-risk problems that smart people can't solve. When AI is applied to lower risk probelms that are usually easy for people to solve, we seem to get great results (i.e. recommendation engines).
Never in my life I encountered a good recommendation engine, let alone a great one.
I seem to emit some kind of anti-AI field - voice recognition works about 40% of the time so is basically useless, recommendation algorithms seem to recommend stuff I have already watched or seem completely random and as for the mechanisms that select adverts - Youtube seems to be taking the approach of showing me the same adverts again and again and again (and yes, I do click thumbs down on them) until I passionately hate the products being advertised to me (because I watch videos about cars does not mean I want to watch the same BMW 8-series advert for a few months).
Re: Why is AI so useless for business?
#46People try to apply AI to high-risk problems that smart people can't solve. When AI is applied to lower risk probelms that are usually easy for people to solve, we seem to get great results (i.e. recommendation engines).
Never in my life I encountered a good recommendation engine, let alone a great one.
Pandora, LibraryThing and Criticker can definitely keep up with me, a human, when it comes to recommending stuff within their specific domains.
Re: Why is AI so useless for business?
#47> Why Is Artificial Intelligence So Useless for Business?
Because it doesn't make money? A big enough revelation?
Re: Why is AI so useless for business?
#48Our immediate goal should be to set our sights lower; forget ML, instead improve and expand technologies like RPA ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robotic_process_automation ), which is only "AI" in the narrowest sense. Example: my wife is an admin in a school office, and a ludicrous amount of her and her colleagues' time is spent on replicating data entry between a multiplicity of different incompatible systems. The…
RPA can be a dangerous band aid. It often uses screen scraping or similar brittle interfaces that are known to change. Or, it doesn't know about certain error conditions, etc. Also, if it's been running for months before it breaks, the humans that used to do the work are gone, or have forgotten how to do it.
I've always found rpa a very curious thing. In some corners you have people really hyping it and how much value it can bring and everything e.g ui path and other products. But I can never imagine it to be a very good solution, the thing must be extraordinarily fragile and rule based clicking automation is a real pain to put together.
Re: Why is AI so useless for business?
#49> why can't it read a PDF document and transform it into a machine-readable format? > why can't I get a computer to translate my colleague's financial spreadsheet into the format my SAP software wants? Because you probably expect it to be 100% or maybe 99.999% accurate, and we can't do that. Imagine "AI" translating someones financial spreadsheet into a different format and dropping a zero somewhere. Oops.. but your…
If school grades are indicative, even a 90% accuracy is commendable for human driven tasks. The big difference is that when a human double checks their own work, they may not make the same mistake twice. Or even better, when a second person checks the work. Mistakes are tolerable, but you need to be able to recover from them somehow, and recovery from an AI mistake seems to be something that people like to pretend is…
School grades are testing something very different from data entry. We know as a species that our learning process is slow and error prone, so doing decently at that is good, and we don’t need to have 100% knowledge in a school subject. Meanwhile, yes, if my bank is copying account values, or even just account ledgers with history, I want them to have 100% accuracy. Not 99.99999% or 99.9% or 99%, let alone 90%.
Re: Why is AI so useless for business?
#50Because the very concept of "business" is supposed to be boring and not very intelligent (which doesn't mean it doesn't require knowledge in its field, it's just not... alive).
What?