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Why is AI so useless for business?

mebassett.info

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Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#221

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?

Knowing how something works is better than not knowing. But you can still have a pretty good idea that it does have the desired effect (i.e. verify cause and effect) via randomized controlled trials.

Of course, alternative medicine proponents rarely do randomized controlled trials.

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#222
I forget who first made this argument, but it basically was a response to critics of philosophy. Critics would challenge the field by asking if philosophy has made any real contributions to human knowledge. Has it actually discovered anything that's both non-obvious and conclusively true?

And apologists would that philosophy has made huge, unambiguous contributions. Only once this happens, those fields tend to be no longer considered "philosophy". Astronomy, physics, economics, and logic were all sub-domains of philosophy originally. Once they were formalized, with rigorous, specialized methods they moved into their own standalone fields. But it was philosophers who laid the foundation. Consequently when we think of "philosophy", there's a lot of selection bias, because it's basically the subset of open unsolved problems that remain.

I think there'a a close analogy here with what we think of as generalized "business problems". There are many specialized sub-fields like finance, logistics, marketing, industrial psychology, and accounting. All of those things used to be thought of as a generic part of business. But eventually domain-specific methods and technologies led to the point where specialized practitioners unambiguously out-performed generalist C-suite executives.

Think of techniques like Markowitz portfolio optimization, or five factory personality testing, or applying Benford's law to profile for accounting fraud. Those are all examples where something like AI/ML solved what at the time was a generic business problem. But afterwards it was now just considered a success of the respective sub-field that those techniques helped create.

The point I'm making is that formal rules-based processes (I won't use AI/ML here because it's so ambiguous, especially in a historical context) have had a long history of success in business. We just don't recognize it because we're begging the question. What we think of as "generalized business issues" is mainly those open problems that haven't yet succumbed to specialized formal techniques.

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

You're proving the point of the original post. Today's mundane programing used to be considered AI. See: search, fuzzy logic, character recognition. Or even more mundane: object-oriented programming, interpreted languages, and tons of generic algorithms used in daily life, all of which came out of AI labs.

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#224
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…

You can't stretch definition of AI that wide. Where's AI in Microsoft Office? Where's AI in spellchecking? Where's AI in route planning? Demand planning, maybe.

Imagine taking someone who didn't know English words or sounds, sitting them down with a document and dictionary, and asking them to spell-check it. If they could figure out that "butiful" should be "beautiful" in less than a week I'd call that really freaking intelligent. AI researchers of 40 years ago would be astounded by what Word can do.

Route planning is essentially "the" fundamental AI problem. You need to get from A to B and there are 2^100 ways to do it. How do you pick the best one?

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#225

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…

From what I've seen of attempts to apply AI to the cyber security domain, a big impediment tends to be the lack of cohesion between the AI experts and the domain experts. There's often decades of work on the domain of study, and it's important that you use this information to inform your algorithms/ML models. I once worked with some ML researchers on trying to apply machine learning to some netflow data we had. These researchers were quite good at their field, but didn't know much about netflow data analysis. I remember them being all excited in a meeting because their models found some pattern in the data. It turns out they had discovered the difference between high ports and low ports...

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#226
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.

[deleted]

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 i…

Apologies, I didn't communicate what I meant clearly. I meant that our customers would accept us blaming human error easier than they would accept us saying it is by design.

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#228
post #161
post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I would love to learn how unpredictability can be leveraged as a positive. Any tips?

How does insurance work?

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#229

Earlier 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.

> song

You mean 9 minute beat poem.

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#230

Earlier 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.

What're some examples of things that were called "alternative medicine" but that were later proven to work and regarded as "medicine"?

Edit: Since people are bringing up ancient examples and kind of missing the point of the question: I'm not looking for examples from the Roman Empire here. Let's stick with the past < 50 years. Maybe something your parents might actually remember being dismissed as "alternative medicine" (whatever that meant at the time) but which now is clearly just accepted "medicine". Basically, try to find something that's in the spirit of the question. The goal is obviously to find things that modern medicine actually previously dismissed and later accepted, not to find a loophole in the question.

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