Interesting article
Why is AI so useless for business?
201–210 of 391 posts
Re: Why is AI so useless for business?
#202AI gets such a bad rap. People only think of unsolved or sort-of-solved problems as AI, and don't give AI any credit for the problems it has solved, I guess because by definition those problems seem easy. Think how much Microsoft Office and competitors have amplified business productivity over the last 20 years (yeah yeah, make your jokes too). Word and Powerpoint and Excel are full of AI whether it's spellcheck or a…
>Finding routes for drivers and deliveries, planning schedules, optimizing store layouts, etc. -- that's AI. If a path-finding algorithm that I can write on paper is AI, AI has completely lost all meaning. Let's not call graph traversal and sorting "AI" please.
This.
A huge amount of stuff can and should be automated by mundane programming. Since that hasn't been done yet, AI isn't about to automate all of the stuff that shouldn't be automated by mundane programming.
Re: Why is AI so useless for business?
#203I’ve been working in the “real world business processes that companies are trying to AI-ify” realm for quite a while now. Pharma, cyber security, oil and gas production, etc. This article doesn’t mention a really, really straightforward factor for why AI hasn’t invaded these domains despite billions of dollars being dumped into them. An automated process only has to be wrong once to compel human operators to double o…
This is well put, and I've worked places where this has happened to customers. Our current domain is in augmenting humans with AI, which avoids the problem you're describing because it doesn't take humans out of the loop at all, but just makes them more efficient at what they were already doing by cutting out a lot of work. So jobs that would take an operator 30 minutes now take 10 because the AI has done most of the usual rote work.
Re: Why is AI so useless for business?
#204Earlier quoted context omitted.
The AI effect: AI gets a bad rap because once something exists and is practical it's no longer called AI. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect
This reminds me of the Tim Minchin song Storm. "Do you know what they call alternative medicine that has been proven to work?...Medicine." I've never thought of it that way before but alternative medicine and AI have a lot in common.
It is a problem with medicine.
Normally, we would not only want a proof that something works but also verifiable explanation of HOW something works.
Medicine is a problem because we don't understand how many of the chemicals work but the problem is so important (and also it is big business) that we just let it pass and we are happy that we can get some results even if we don't completely understand how we get them.
Re: Why is AI so useless for business?
#205The essay makes a very good point about the availability of documents/data, but from what I have seen working on ERP projects and business processes I don't think attacking this problem top-down from how businesses works is a good idea: a lot of documents produced can be mostly useless artifacts of human interactions, and most businesses have highly inefficient processes. Would you train an AI on current HR recruiting practices for example? At its worst you have businesses with so much sales power (a purely human process) that their internal processes can be an absolute mess and still go fine. What an AI trained on these data coud output? Meeting recaps that are never read from meetings with already questionable value in the first place? Random reports and strategies meant to praise egos?
A huge part of the business world is service over service over human interactions that are far removed from the core value production and are side effect of these very interactions. Sure at their core business must produce something, but apart from industrial or software processes, the enterprise world is mostly a giant social game, with success linked to the execution of sales, marketing and sometimes lobbying, so not much to AI-ify from that angle.
Edit: just to be clear on the tone it's not meant to be bitter, in fact after a hard time learning this world it can even be fun.
Re: Why is AI so useless for business?
#206Earlier quoted context omitted.
Everything you outlined is a use case that is powered by machine learning algorithms. You can discuss all of them without using the phrase "AI." They all likely started with rules engines that solved a real business problem and iterated over time to use more sophisticated back ends. The thing that I don't appreciate in this field is that companies seem more focused on discussing their "AI" than the actual problems th…
Machine learning is AI.
[deleted]
Re: Why is AI so useless for business?
#207Earlier quoted context omitted.
In those sorts of domains the best pitch for AI is as a failsafe. The model and the human probably make different errors, often a human will make mistakes due to simple inattention. This lets you substitute the model for some other process controls that you'd need to maintain 100% accuracy, e.g. instead of having the work reviewed by a second person, you can have model + person. In lots of business contexts, probably…
> instead of having the work reviewed by a second person, you can have model + person But the argument still applies then - if only one incident occurs where a catastrophic mistake was not spotted by the model failsafe, and if later investigations show that the mistake could've been easily spotted by a second human, a human will be installed as a failsafe for the failsafe. I think the general problem is the following…
Huh? In my experience, people who make a mistake tend to make the same mistake again and again. Whereas, when a machine makes that mistake, somebody fixes the bug and it doesn't happen again. If the machine can teach itself, then so much the better, but "has someone supporting it" is a sufficient form of "learning from itself in production" to address the concern you raise. In the industry where I've been working for the last past several years (finance), when something goes wrong, the first instinct everyone has is to bump up the prioritization of automating whatever human task was responsible for the human error. And the automation is pretty much only bounded by the amount that the company is willing to spend on programmers and its ability to find good programmers who are willing to work for it and its insistence on maintaining backwards compatibility with bad legacy systems.
Re: Why is AI so useless for business?
#208Earlier quoted context omitted.
The AI effect: AI gets a bad rap because once something exists and is practical it's no longer called AI. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect
Back in the early 90s, my grad AI class referred to AI as the "incredible shrinking field". The class kicked off with a black-and-white newsreel style interview from the 1950's with an MIT professor[1] who says, to eternal breathless infamy, something along the lines of "we'll have machines that can think within five years!" Part of the challenge is/was the line of thinking "surely if we can solve Hard Problem X, we'…
Maybe in a few years we'll have bridged the gap between computer and machine capabilities. Not by deciding computers think, but by realizing that what humans do is computing.
Re: Why is AI so useless for business?
#209I'm going to go against the flow of most comment here and say that it's not always business misunderstanding AI. Bad labeled data and unclear goals/expectations sure, but the latter one should be identifiable by a good ML/Data scientist, if you have any insight to what you can actually deliver. But most ML/Data Science people have no proper understanding of AI/ML, and when just traditional "coding" can solve the prob…
> have any insight to what you can actually deliver Maybe that's the problem. In lots of AI/ML problems you just CAN'T know ahead of time what can be deliver you need to spend the time and resources to do it and then see how well it works... The problem imo is on the business side, most businesses don't know how to transform unpredictable progress into profit (even if average on a large timeframe that progress might…
"most businesses don't know how to transform unpredictable progress into profit"
Unpredictable progress is lethal to businesses. As an example, it does not matter how brilliant Steve Jobs was or Elon Musk is, they both need to show regular results that build confidence from shareholders.
About the only time you may not care for steady progress is if you have abundance of resources and clear goal like Bill Gates with his foundation. This guy may believe in something and keep steady stream of funds just on basis of his beliefs that something is right.
But the funds themselves must have been gathered some other way.
It is difficult to get funds for unknown payoff at unknown time in the future.
Re: Why is AI so useless for business?
#210AI gets such a bad rap. People only think of unsolved or sort-of-solved problems as AI, and don't give AI any credit for the problems it has solved, I guess because by definition those problems seem easy. Think how much Microsoft Office and competitors have amplified business productivity over the last 20 years (yeah yeah, make your jokes too). Word and Powerpoint and Excel are full of AI whether it's spellcheck or a…
Everything you outlined is a use case that is powered by machine learning algorithms. You can discuss all of them without using the phrase "AI." They all likely started with rules engines that solved a real business problem and iterated over time to use more sophisticated back ends. The thing that I don't appreciate in this field is that companies seem more focused on discussing their "AI" than the actual problems th…
>this stereotype was built on pattern recognition over time.
How good was your input data and labels? ;)