Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why is AI so useless for business?

mebassett.info

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

241–250 of 391 posts

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#241

Post by bulldoa »

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.

what kind of mathematical models do you guys use (like convex optimizations?), I am very interested in this subject and would hope to learn more.

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#242

Post by zeveb »

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…

ISTR that seaweed was a folk remedy for goiter. It contains relatively high amounts of iodine, which prevents thyroid conditions.

I also vaguely recall that the doctrine of signatures wasn't a complete and abject failure, but some cursory Googling indicates that maybe it was after all.

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#243

Post by mehrdadn »

VBprogrammer wrote: post #232
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…

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.

The point was you don't have to define it at all. You just need some things that were previously dismissed as "alternative medicine" in the past (say) 50 years, but which are now widely seen as ordinary medicine. I'm looking for examples a lot of people might actually remember from their own lives here... if you have to go back a century to find something then that doesn't count (sorry).

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#244

Post by Barrin92 »

wutbrodo wrote: post #215
pathseeker wrote: post #196

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.

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 fu…

If anything the opposite is true. When Minsky et al set out to define AI what they really meant was 'thinking machines'.

If anything the opposite has happened. In a painful attempt to push forward notions of success in AI almost purely mechanical tasks have been claimed to be AI, while there is virtually no progress on building machines that can think.

I mean sure you can claim all day that the navigation system in your car calculates you a billion routes per second and if that's intelligence my smart-toaster is probably more intelligent than everyone here together, but it completely misses the point, and the reason why people have expanded the term so much is because there has been so little progress on genuine intelligence.

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#245

Post by mehrdadn »

zeveb wrote: post #242
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…

ISTR that seaweed was a folk remedy for goiter. It contains relatively high amounts of iodine, which prevents thyroid conditions. I also vaguely recall that the doctrine of signatures wasn't a complete and abject failure, but some cursory Googling indicates that maybe it was after all.

Is that an example from the 15th century? Is there nothing more modern?

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#246

Post by Melting_Harps »

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.

> 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.

I was going to say the same thing, but I worked at BMW and VW and spearheaded several initiatives with Corporate partners that relied more on optimizing via mathematical models/data sets within the warrantied parts/Takata airbag recall at BMW and the Tdi Diesel-gate buy program at VW. It entailed lots of data analysis and some trial by error on my part that eventually got us a favourable result, not AI.

AI can be useful, one day, but I'm returning back to Supply Chain analytics and Logistics and not much seems to have changed in those years. I submitted my proposal for a Supply Chain Analytics course as my final project that I drew up in 2017 at BMW and got 99.7% for my thorough, and more importunately to me, relevant analysis and execution of a scheme to optimize leadtime and overall turn over using the means and methods available back then.

A part of me wishes I could just run an algo/AI protocol with predictive modeling to do that all for me, as it almost got me fired several times trying to deploy it and I had to go over managements head and straight to the owners and corporate to get them to try it.

Luckily, I was able to negotiate a return to VW as result of my scheme, who were hemorrhaging Billions, were getting execs thrown in prison at the time so were way more receptive to ideas of cost cutting. Crazy days...

* AI initially inserted 'trail,' instead of a commonly used phrase 'trial by error' perhaps proving how autocorrect/spellcheck AI usecases are still not where they need to be to prove the point of the aforementioned post.

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#247

Post by glaugh »

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

Similarly:

“Technology is a word that describes something that doesn’t work yet.”

Douglas Adams

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#248

Post by [deleted] »

afeller08 wrote: post #219
SkyBelow wrote: post #105

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…

[deleted]

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#249

Post by mam2 »

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…

Mdma in the future

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#250

Post by mark-r »

hikarudo wrote: post #221
mayankkaizen wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If the alternative medicine is widely known, you won't be able to get a patent on it. Without a patent you won't be able to make a profit. Without a profit there's no incentive to spend the enormous money required for a randomized controlled trial.
Post reply on HN