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Why is AI so useless for business?

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Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#251

Post by com2kid »

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.

PowerPoint has an AI feature to do slide layout and design. Drop a few elements on a slide and it'll style + arrange them for you.

Works really well even if it is a bit repetitive.

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#252

Post by trhway »

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…

artemisinin. Has been used for millenia to effectively treat a lot of things (naturally so because of its being super-peroxide), anecdotally/personally - the wormwood was part of the folk medicine toolbox of my Ukrainian grandmother, yet

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artemisinin

"It was discovered in 1972 by Tu Youyou, who was co-recipient of the 2015 Nobel Prize in Medicine for her discovery.[2] "

There are "scientific/medicine" results these days what it even works against cancer, for example https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6347441/

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#253

Post by the_jeremy »

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…

These aren't "finding loopholes in the question". Most "alternative medicine" things that work aren't new information. Humans have had literal millenia to figure out how to deal with ailments. The easiest methods that people can think of to try to solve a problem have been done by someone, and were passed around when they worked.

There's things like "gargle with salt water to cure a sore throat". That's commonly done remedy that was done forever and we now understand the science behind it. This page[0] labels it under an "alternative medicine" tag, as does this page[1]:

[0]: https://www.webmd.com/cold-and-flu/features/does-gargling-wl... [1]: https://www.sharecare.com/health/alternative-medicines/artic...

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#254

Post by mark-r »

mehrdadn wrote: post #243
VBprogrammer wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Why doesn't it count? Your restriction seems very arbitrary and makes it much harder to find an answer. There are too many counter examples muddying the space, such as vitamin C curing colds.

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#255

Post by vslira »

rscho wrote: post #17

I'm at a hospital where someone at long last got authorized to try ML on the clinical database. The ethical committee required that prior to using any data, you have to make a static copy in another database. Their argument is 1. They don't want excel files flying around (which will happen regardless) and 2. To perform any analysis, you "obviously" have to have "structured data", which "obviously" means that you have…

I'm trying to imagine the kind of org that uses MongoDB and has someone on the ethical board with enough technical knowledge to understand the difference between sql and nosql and at the same time believe that nosql can't hold structured data, and that data for an analysis that probably won't have more than some megabytes must be put in a specific-purpose database instead of being consumed as CSV, a format this same person appears to be familiar with.

I mean, what a weird combination of tech (un)savviness

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#256

Post by currymj »

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…

Artemisinin is an antimalarial drug derived from a plant used in traditional Chinese medicine to treat fevers, including malaria. First discovered and isolated in 1972.

St. John's Wort started out as alternative medicine but is now officially approved and prescribed for treating depression in many European countries -- I believe this got started in the 1990s.

I think this kind of thing is quite rare in medicine, though. Whereas it's not hard to find stuff that was done by AI researchers that somehow no longer counts as AI.

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#257

Post by jmiserez »

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…

>Information retrieval is one million percent AI.

You can add AI of course, but the basics are just math and statistics, e.g. take a look at this book: https://nlp.stanford.edu/IR-book/information-retrieval-book....

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#258

Post by waterheater »

mehrdadn wrote: post #240
EliRivers wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The modern medical field has authorities who largely determine what is medicine and what is "alternative medicine." I can't imagine anything which today is considered "medicine" that isn't approved by the FDA; can you?

AI doesn't have such an authority. New AI methods can be deployed without asking for permission from a governing body.

19th century views on medicine is actually a better comparison than something from the last fifty years, because advancements in modern medicine is largely shaped by governing authorities.

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#259

Post by currymj »

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.

i mean, these kinds of simple CS201 algorithms are still at the core of a lot of things that definitely count as AI by any reasonable definition.

In particular, the best superhuman poker-playing systems use counterfactual regret minimization, which is literally just traversing a tree and updating small arrays of numbers at each node, augmented with some clever heuristics to make it scale to realistic poker scenarios. there aren't even any neural networks involved.

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#260

Post by mehrdadn »

mark-r wrote: post #254
mehrdadn wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Why doesn't it count? Your restriction seems very arbitrary and makes it much harder to find an answer. There are too many counter examples muddying the space, such as vitamin C curing colds.

The entire premise of this discussion was that modern medicine currently has a flaw/double-standard/whatever about what it considers alternative medicine. Bringing up examples where medicine was flawed a century ago isn't exactly proving anything. I would've hoped this would be obvious but apparently it was not.
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