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Why is AI so useless for business?

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Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#261

Post by wutbrodo »

Barrin92 wrote: post #244
wutbrodo wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 y…

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

Yes, there's two word senses, the theoretical and the colloquial. You're referring to the former, and I'm referring to the latter; the latter is a lot more relevant to this thread's topic, which is public perception of AI and its value. Wikipedia actually has a pretty good concise description of these two senses:

> Leading AI textbooks define the field as the study of "intelligent agents": any device that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its chance of successfully achieving its goals.[1] Colloquially, the term "artificial intelligence" is often used to describe machines (or computers) that mimic "cognitive" functions that humans associate with the human mind, such as "learning" and "problem solving"[2]

(The [2] citation is of Russell & Norvig's '09 edition, substantially predating the recent mass-interest in AI)

> if that's intelligence my smart-toaster is probably more intelligent than everyone here together

The leap from "this is reasonably described as a step on the road to intelligence" to "being really good at this step means you're _really_ intelligent" is obviously nonsense, though I suspect you know that. The fact that a cat has the ability to orient itself and navigate home and am amoeba couldn't is a sign of relative intelligence; but if your cat has a better sense of direction than you, it obviously doesn't make it smarter than you.

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#262

Post by ryanhuff »

saidajigumi wrote: post #181
chrisfosterelli wrote: post #160

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

Back in the early 90s, my grad AI class referred to AI as the "incredible shrinking field". The class kicked off with a black-and-white newsreel style interview from the 1950's with an MIT professor[1] who says, to eternal breathless infamy, something along the lines of "we'll have machines that can think within five years!" Part of the challenge is/was the line of thinking "surely if we can solve Hard Problem X, we'…

Was the video titled “The Thinking Machine”?

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#263

Post by mehrdadn »

the_jeremy wrote: post #253
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…

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…

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 is very much finding a loophole and missing the point of the question.

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#264

Post by mark-r »

mehrdadn wrote: post #260
mark-r wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Do you really think human nature has changed that much in the last century?

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#265

Post by mehrdadn »

mark-r wrote: post #264
mehrdadn wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Do you really think human nature has changed that much in the last century?

I'm pretty sure I didn't say anything about "human nature".

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#266

Post by xondono »

AI has become specially hard to define nowadays that we see companies using advanced ML techniques for solving issues that were perfectly solvable through linear regression modeling, just because that’s the path for that sweet investor money.

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#267

Post by w1nk »

jerzyt wrote: post #22

A better question would be why AI works great for some business (e.g. Netflix, AirBnB, Uber, Waze, Amazon) yet fails miserably for other (JC Penney, Sears). In my view, the older companies are trying to strap on AI on top of a traditional dataset, which never collected any useful signals. The new companies designed their entire business concepts around data, and collected what's needed from the get-go. Sears may have…

Your post makes some really salient points, and then misses the head of the nail in my experience. Sure, most of the information Sears historically collected is probably junk for supervised learning models. That isn't what makes this hard. High cardinality categorical features aren't what makes this hard. Re-engineering the business processes aren't what makes this hard.

What makes this hard, is that for all of these companies, machine learning models are essentially used in place of heuristics of varying degrees of complexity. The models are being used to incrementally improve heuristics that in some cases are tuned quite well. Couple that with the issue that a machine learning model is only one piece of an actual product improvement for these websites/companies (ie: now you have a prediction, what are you gonna do with it to effect the product?), and all of the sudden you have actual incremental improvements completely misaligned with moonshot expectations.

We've had plenty of rankers and recommenders for decades, the current wave of deep learning variants are improvements, but they're incremental from a high level. If your business wasn't successful/is failing using simple heuristics (sears, jcp, etc), a machine learning model isn't going to magically correct that.

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#268

Post by mehrdadn »

currymj wrote: post #256
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…

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, thou…

Awesome, thanks for the examples. It got me going in a direction I didn't expect the discussion to go though: were these examples of traditional medicine or alternative medicine? They seem to be the former whereas this discussion was about the latter - alternative and traditional medicine are not the same thing [1]:

> Complementary medicine refers to therapies that complement traditional western (or allopathic) medicine and is used together with conventional medicine, and alternative medicine is used in place of conventional medicine. Alternative medicine refers to therapeutic approaches taken in place of traditional medicine and used to treat or ameliorate disease.

The difference (as I've understood it anyway) is "alternative medicine" implies you contradict modern medical practices, which was the basis for the comment I replied to. And which (I guess not surprisingly) medical experts recommend against. So I think the kind of example you'd want is a medical treatment that modern medicine previously recommended against, but that ended up vouching later. Because this was all a response to a comment that suggested people had a double-standard and were moving the goalposts or something like that (hence the AI comparison). Merely showing the science went from "we don't know if X is a good idea" to "we know X is a good idea" isn't finding an inconsistency.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3068720/

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#269

Post by zoomablemind »

chongli wrote: post #220
chrisfosterelli wrote: post #160

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 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.

I was wondering what happened to the 'Computer-aided' notion? It was very representative of the utility and provenance. Noone claimed intelligence but literally just the help side of the computers. AI as well could stand for 'Assisted Inference'.

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#270

Post by muldvarp »

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

That effect is explained by the fact that the problems in AI research are thought to be solvable only by intelligent agents. This can often turn out to be false. Many problems that seemingly require intelligence don't actually require it.

Nick Bostrom wrote the following few lines in his book "Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies" (which I absolutely recommend reading):

> There is an important sense, however, in which chess-playing AI turned out to be a lesser triumph than many imagined it would be. It was once supposed, perhaps not unreasonably, that in order for a computer to play chess at grandmaster level, it would have to be endowed with a high degree of general intelligence.

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