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Why is AI so useless for business?

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Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#211

Post by noelsusman »

NalNezumi wrote: post #68

I'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…

>they had ample time to outline the scope, limitation and requirement before they even started collecting the data.

That would be great, but it's just not how data science works. You can't know the scope and limitations of a dataset that doesn't exist yet.

In general I agree that data science suffers heavily from the "when all you have is a hammer everything looks like a nail" effect. I see so many projects that attempt to use fancy models when they could be accomplished in an Excel spreadsheet in 15 minutes.

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#212

Post by Der_Einzige »

mywittyname wrote: post #115
lmilcin wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would add "AI" produces results that are hard to understand and work with. When you do "traditional coding" you are getting results that are easier to work with because you understand where they came form. Then it is easier to modify the model and understand the outcome. Your background is robotics. As a robotics example, training AI model to keep bipedal robot upright might be possible but having proper control mo…

I used to go with decision trees where possible for exactly this reason. It's easier to explain than a solution that uses PCA, but has roughly the same results. They are probably not what most people would call ML, but they are simple and solve a number of common problems.

Uhh, PCA is reversable so you can explain the solution of any PCA based transformation nicely, unless you have a different black-box somewhere in your pipeline.

If you're in sklearn, the method you want to use is the "inverse transform"

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#213

Post by mayankkaizen »

riantogo wrote: post #190
VBprogrammer wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Do you know what qualifies as alternative medicine? Anything that is not medicine.

What is medicine?

I mean if I take some herb and (successfully) use it to treat abdominal pain without knowing what that herb is or how it works, would that herb be classified as medicine or not?

I have read description of many medicines and found out that we still don't know how those medicines work. But they are still called medicines.

So what is medicine?

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#214

Post by afeller08 »

kgin wrote: post #102
ethanbond wrote: post #18

I’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…

The blame issue is huge. When humans are wrong, the business’ “ego” can be saved by blaming the employee who made the call, sometimes firing them. But the process goes on with the same error rate. But when software makes the wrong call, it feels like the business itself has done the wrong thing. With no way to externalize the blame for the decision, the blame gets placed on the decision to use ml in the first place.

This. This is strictly more accurate than the above comment.

It has nothing to do with accuracy or the repetitiveness of the mistake. It has to do with managers preferring to make sure that they can somehow avoid being personally blamed for their subordinate's mistakes, because most companies are designed to absolve everyone at the top and blame everyone at the bottom.

I've worked in an industry (prop trading) where the costs of mistakes were real, and it is the most heavily automated industry there is. I've also worked in another part of the finance industry (hedge funds) where mistakes are paid for in other people's money, and it's super obvious that managers there are way more interested in passing off blame than fixing problems relative to how interested they are in doing these things in prop trading, and there is correspondingly less automation.

It's not about people in the population at large believing that machines are more prone to repeating mistakes than humans. Look at how many people are excited about the concept of self driving cars. It's about managers trying to convince themselves that this is true, so they can go on being unethical.

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#215

Post by wutbrodo »

pathseeker wrote: post #196
bo1024 wrote: post #159

AI 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.

No, you're just projecting the modern bar for AI into the past. AI roughly means "things human brains can do that computers can't": when computing was primarily straightforward and analytical ("calculating"), then relatively more sophisticated algorithms that could "solve problems" like mazes absolutely were on the AI frontier. The fact that they've since retreated so far from "things computers can't do" is just a function of the fact that it was an early success in the field.

Your comment is just a crystallization of what the parent comment is talking about: claiming something isn't AI because "pft that's such an easy, solved problem" _after_ it's solved defines away the possibility that AI can solve problems.

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#216

Post by [deleted] »

riantogo wrote: post #190
VBprogrammer wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Do you know what qualifies as alternative medicine? Anything that is not medicine.

[deleted]

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#217

Post by bo1024 »

pathseeker wrote: post #196
bo1024 wrote: post #159

AI 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.

Couple issues.

(1) Optimization is much, much bigger than graph traversal and sorting.

(2) Modern route-finding algorithms are to your on-paper-Dijkstra what a rocket ship is to your bicycle.

(3) I think you're under the same misconception I'm talking about: graph traversal is absolutely a fundamental of AI. Ask anyone what the main AI textbook is, they'll tell you it's Russell and Norvig: http://aima.cs.berkeley.edu/

The first topic they cover is graph traversal and search.

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#218

Post by kilbuz »

mayankkaizen wrote: post #213
riantogo wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you know what qualifies as alternative medicine? Anything that is not medicine.

What is medicine? I mean if I take some herb and (successfully) use it to treat abdominal pain without knowing what that herb is or how it works, would that herb be classified as medicine or not? I have read description of many medicines and found out that we still don't know how those medicines work. But they are still called medicines. So what is medicine?

If your herb was shown to improve abdominal pain in a certain population through use of well-executed, replicated randomized control trials, I think it would count as medicine, yes.

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#219

Post by afeller08 »

SkyBelow wrote: post #105
ethanbond wrote: post #18

I’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…

>An automated process only has to be wrong once to compel human operators to double or triple check every other result it gives. This immediately destroys the upside as now you’re 1) doing the process manually anyway and 2) fighting the automated system in order to do so. I think this is the core of the problem. 99% isn't good enough. Even 99.9% isn't good enough when we are talking acceptable accepted error margins.…

>Even if humans make more mistakes than the AI, telling our customer it was a human error is much easier for our customers to accept than telling them it was a program error without our threshold tolerance.

The veracity of this statement greatly depends on whose mistake you are saying it was.

List of things by how hard they are to say (easiest to hardest):

1) Someone else messed up. We'll deal with him.

2) Our code is bad. We'll fix it.

3) I messed up. I'm sorry.

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#220

Post by chongli »

chrisfosterelli wrote: post #160
bo1024 wrote: post #159

AI 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…

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 is because intelligence isn't like most of the other words we use in computer science. It's a word with a history of deep philosophical debate and no clear answer. We haven't come to an agreement on what is intelligence in biological systems so it may be premature to call anything artificially intelligent.
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