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Why is AI so useless for business?

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Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#281

Post by currymj »

mehrdadn wrote: post #268
currymj wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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) medic…

I can't think of any of those from recent history. Medicine has gotten pretty good.

Exceptions may be in mental health. Somebody else mentioned psychedelic drugs, which might be FDA-approved for some conditions soon, but all official medical sources currently treat them as extremely dangerous.

However, I do think cherry-picking the effective treatments from naturopathy and TCM and turning them into mainstream medicine is similar in spirit to cherry-picking the successful approaches from 80s and 90s AI research and turning them into "just algorithms". But there are a lot more successful old-school AI techniques than there are effective alternative medicine treatments.

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#282

Post by mehrdadn »

biddlesby wrote: post #273
mehrdadn wrote: post #263

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

I'm not so sure. I think the task is to find a treatment and a point in time where the treatment was considered alternative medicine, was then proven to work, and thereafter was considered medicine. The conclusion then is that there are things we consider medicine today that used to be alternative medicine.

> I'm not so sure. I think the task is to find a treatment and a point in time where the treatment was considered alternative medicine, was then proven to work, and thereafter was considered medicine.

That would imply examples from 400 BC would have the same relevance as examples from 50 years ago. I assumed it was obvious that that's not the case, but it seems I was wrong.

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#283

Post by mark-r »

mehrdadn wrote: post #277
mark-r wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Human nature is what defines the difference between alternative and regular. It also defines what is a double standard. You didn't need to explicitly mention it for it to be relevant to the discussion.

Okay, I won't stop you. Go ahead and bring up examples from Hippocrates's time then. Human nature hasn't changed much on these timescales so you will be making a very strong point about modern medicine with such examples.

I haven't brought up examples that old, and neither has anyone else in this thread. Typical straw man. I just pointed out that you were being unnecessarily restrictive and that this would hinder the effort to get the examples you seek.

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#284

Post by gwern »

Being in a human-minimum seems to be part of it. AI and software could do far more than they do, but the problem is that everything around it assumes human-evolved systems, which destroys the potential for software. So if you look at just what AI can be wedged into the cracks, you'll conclude it's largely useless, but then if you can replace whole systems, you get much larger gains: https://www.overcomingbias.com/2019/12/automation-as-coloniz...

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#285

Post by contravariant »

Avicebron wrote: post #171
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 same note, people are calling every automated feature AI and it no longer means what the words actually mean.

Well arguably an automated feature is one that is at least somewhat more intelligent than the manual version (e.g. spell-check vs. a dictionary).

Whereas on the other end of the scale people are aimlessly using subtle AI-related techniques like neural networks and calling the result "intelligent" even if it is anything but.

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#286

Post by cameldrv »

simonh wrote: post #123
cameldrv wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Humans are hardly ever 99% accurate instantaneously on classification problems either. Humans have the ability to know when they should collect more information though, and can often perform some sort of hedging action when they are unsure.

This is interesting to reason about because it's may even be true that the human and AI error rates could be the same. In fact the human error rate might even we worse, but the kinds of errors and their impact makes a big difference. I can only speculate, but while it's true humans can fail when following a process, it's also true they can sometimes spot a potential failure even then there is no process to prevent it…

I agree. Humans are interactive agents, they have broader knowledge about the world, and they can (to a degree) diagnose their performance and compensate.

Think of a DL powered, visually guided robot vs. a human on a production line.

One task might be to do QC inspection at the end of the line. Suppose something gets on the camera lens. In general, the DL system will keep chugging along and the accuracy will degrade. The human will notice this and clean his glasses.

If he sees something ambiguous as it passes on the line, he might give it a bit more attention or adjust the angle he's looking at it from. If he sees a series of the same anomalies, he will notice a pattern. Perhaps one of the machines up the line from him has started to introduce a new type of defect.

Suppose in assembly a worker has a sore muscle. He might adapt his motions to compensate, slow down, go to the doctor, take some pain pills, or take a day off. Unless programmed or trained to detect this, a robot will keep driving its failing motor harder until it breaks.

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#287

Post by woeirua »

ethanbond wrote: post #18

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…

I wish I could upvote this twice. This is the exact problem preventing widespread adoption of "AI" throughout most businesses. A model that is 99% accurate is not good enough for most mundane business tasks because they will fail in ways that no human ever would. Additionally, when you consider how much it costs upfront to hire a team of engineers and data scientists, build a training dataset, develop the code, maintain it etc, it quickly becomes clear that except for the most costly processes internally there is no way that AI is going to be cheaper than hiring a bunch of people in India by the hour. Not to mention that the people in India can be retrained to do something in hours that would take your super specialized team of engineers months to reproduce with code.

Let's also not forget that most business processes are bespoke to each corporation. Finding a single process that can be successfully targeted across multiple companies is hard. Some people like AWS and Google are trying with Textract and some of these other AI-as-a-service products, but they're not having a lot of success. They still fail all the time.

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#288

Post by woeirua »

syllogism wrote: post #21
ethanbond wrote: post #18

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…

In those sorts of domains the best pitch for AI is as a failsafe. The model and the human probably make different errors, often a human will make mistakes due to simple inattention. This lets you substitute the model for some other process controls that you'd need to maintain 100% accuracy, e.g. instead of having the work reviewed by a second person, you can have model + person. In lots of business contexts, probably…

Except that in most practical scenarios, most models make basic mistakes that no human would ever make. In most cases, people have a very low tolerance for errors that humans would not make.

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#289

Post by lqet »

afeller08 wrote: post #207
lqet wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> instead of having the work reviewed by a second person, you can have model + person But the argument still applies then - if only one incident occurs where a catastrophic mistake was not spotted by the model failsafe, and if later investigations show that the mistake could've been easily spotted by a second human, a human will be installed as a failsafe for the failsafe. I think the general problem is the following…

Huh? In my experience, people who make a mistake tend to make the same mistake again and again. Whereas, when a machine makes that mistake, somebody fixes the bug and it doesn't happen again. If the machine can teach itself, then so much the better, but "has someone supporting it" is a sufficient form of "learning from itself in production" to address the concern you raise. In the industry where I've been working for…

> Whereas, when a machine makes that mistake, somebody fixes the bug and it doesn't happen again.

Well, that is kind of the problem with AI. How do you fix a "bug" (if you can even call it that) in a model you cannot fully understand? Do you re-train it on the catastrophic mistake and somehow give it more weight? How can you be sure that this won't lead to any problems where previously there were none? How do you explain to a customer that your model now doesn't make mistake A anymore, but now mistakes B and C frequently occur? The only safe bet is to write some auxiliary code, which first uses the AI as a black box, and afterwards explicitly checks the result for this particular mistake. If this happens again, and again, and again, you need a human to maintain and extend this auxiliary code and also adjust it to changes in the underlying model, at which point I am quite certain just using a person of average intelligence instead of AI will be cheaper, more reliable and more flexible.

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#290

Post by woeirua »

amcoastal wrote: post #34
ethanbond wrote: post #18

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…

Do you do any work with uncertainty estimation with neural networks? There are many different ways to estimate uncertainty depending on your application, such as ensemble-training or dropout during testing to produce ranges of predictions that you can then use to get boundable error measurements.

The problem with this is that NN are in general, overconfident in their predictions, even when they are wrong. This is a well known problem in the AI/ML literature. Using ensembles of overconfident predictors is not the same as getting an unbiased estimate of the uncertainty.
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