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Why is AI so useless for business?

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Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#231

Post by [deleted] »

mehrdadn wrote: post #230
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.

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 medici…

[deleted]

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#232

Post by VBprogrammer »

mehrdadn wrote: post #230
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.

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 medici…

I guess it depends how you define alternative medicine. The bark of a willow tree, a traditional remedy, from which aspirin is derived is given as an example in the beat poem.

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#233

Post by EliRivers »

mehrdadn wrote: post #230
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.

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 medici…

Sanitation guided by germ theory might never have been explicitly called "alternative medicine", pre-dating common use of the term, but when Miasma Theory was dominant germ theory was just that.

Does rely on accepting "cleaning things" as medicine. It's certainly a great way to prevent disease. Does it count as "alternative preventative medicine"?

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#234

Post by xz0r »

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…

> Logistics companies rely on huge amounts of optimization and problem-solving.

Having worked at the largest tech based Logistics company in India, I can say, we did rely on optimization and problem-solving, but none of them involved AI, they were mathematical models and not black box.

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#235

Post by colechristensen »

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…

By that definition, it would be hard to separate out anything a computer does which isn't AI, which is I think not very useful.

AI "gets a bad rap" because it is past its hype peak. The number of people realizing that slapping an AI sticker on your product is largely BS and doesn't impress any more is growing, and AI isn't magic to everybody that can solve every problem. It's the same overhype cycle which happens with just about everything.

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#236

Post by mehrdadn »

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

Eh, I think we still have the Turing test, and AFAIK it hasn't had a case where it's passed without raising eyebrows for potentially trying to cover up for deficiencies. I think the threshold needs to be high (maybe "beyond a reasonable doubt"?) and reproducible with high probability: I'd say at least X% (I don't know what X should be, but it should be much higher than 50%) of the adults that engage in or read the conversation would need to be convinced it's between two typical humans in their societies. Certainly nothing that leaves room for e.g. excuses like the computer being a 13-year-old from another country, or that leaves inadequate time for the participants to gauge the plausibility...

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#237

Post by nocitrek »

Der_Einzige wrote: post #212
mywittyname wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"

How is PCA reversable? Aware me?

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#238

Post by donio »

ComodoHacker wrote: post #178
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…

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.

RIP Clippy

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#239

Post by colechristensen »

xz0r wrote: post #234
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…

> Logistics companies rely on huge amounts of optimization and problem-solving. Having worked at the largest tech based Logistics company in India, I can say, we did rely on optimization and problem-solving, but none of them involved AI, they were mathematical models and not black box.

There's my bet on a less hyped but very prevalent future. Really good real mathematical models of things, that is, deriving systems for your product which can predict and control from scientific laws, not just black box automation.

Of course this isn't new, but a broad focus on specializing on developing talent to create these models and methodology and tech to help would be.

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#240

Post by mehrdadn »

EliRivers wrote: post #233
mehrdadn wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 medici…

Sanitation guided by germ theory might never have been explicitly called "alternative medicine", pre-dating common use of the term, but when Miasma Theory was dominant germ theory was just that. Does rely on accepting "cleaning things" as medicine. It's certainly a great way to prevent disease. Does it count as "alternative preventative medicine"?

By "alternative medicine" I'm not talking 19th century views here, especially given the comparison to AI. Can you pick something from like the past half-century or so? Which people called alternative medicine but which now they call medicine?
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