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Why is AI so useless for business?

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Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#331

Post by angry_octet »

bo1024 wrote: post #224
ComodoHacker wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Imagine taking someone who didn't know English words or sounds, sitting them down with a document and dictionary, and asking them to spell-check it. If they could figure out that "butiful" should be "beautiful" in less than a week I'd call that really freaking intelligent. AI researchers of 40 years ago would be astounded by what Word can do. Route planning is essentially "the" fundamental AI problem. You need to get…

Just because you were taught routing in your AI class doesn't make it AI. It is a topic in graph theory and combinatorics. Dynamic programming is a useful technique for solving traditional AI problem formulations, but it isn't AI.

In contrast, your example of the human is like modern AI, specifically unsupervised learning. I'm sure I could get a human doing that kind of pattern matching quite good at it quite quickly.

If I didn't have a learning system I could still write an algorithm for it quite quickly, by computing the Levenshtein distance. But that algorithm would notoriously not understand the context of the sentence, probabilities of words, etc. And indeed Word/Android/iOS spell correct still gets it really wrong much of the time. But the AI used is quite different from old timey backtracking.

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#333

Post by sabujp »

The best thing about technology is that it seems to be getting more and more sophisticated in the industry. It seems like there is some sort of big disruptive force working at this point, but the big innovation seems to be the technology that is being used to create and manage the most values.. For example for a video game I imagine if a team of people working on this game could create games using some AI (maybe with 3D games) to generate the most value and then get some of the benefits of those games out there and then get real value out of it.

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#334

Post by kazinator »

angry_octet wrote: post #322
tathougies wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But this very much was the main focus of AI only a few decades ago. If AI has changed that much such that AI 20 years ago is no longer AI now, perhaps modern AI researchers should find a different name? I very much mean this. Previous-generation AI was very much about graph algorithms, whether via LISP, Prolog, RDF, reasoning expert systems, parsing, etc. These are all graph concepts

What you're picking up on is that the old school vision of how AI would be achieved (Minsky, Chomsky etc) had some early success with simple games (which they then touted as the forerunners of AI) and then stopped. Data driven ML approaches are completely different. Physics once held that there was a substance called aether rather than vacuum, and chemistry that fire came from phlogiston, but we didn't need to rename…

The existence of the aether isn't borne out by experiments; rather, we have justification in believing in its non-existence.

The algorithms of AI of decades past still work.

That's a big difference.

E.g. SHRDLU can be built today and you can have a conversation with it about its world of blocks.

Algorithms are artifacts of mathematics. To calculate distance between two points, we still use sqrt(dx^2 + dy^2); it doesn't go out of fashion due to advancements in topology.

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#335

Post by kazinator »

tathougies wrote: post #307
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.

But this very much was the main focus of AI only a few decades ago. If AI has changed that much such that AI 20 years ago is no longer AI now, perhaps modern AI researchers should find a different name? I very much mean this. Previous-generation AI was very much about graph algorithms, whether via LISP, Prolog, RDF, reasoning expert systems, parsing, etc. These are all graph concepts

Everything we have ever done in AI is still AI. "AI" does not denote the current fashion in algorithms.

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#336

Post by sabujp »

Because humans aren't very good at doing what they think they do, and people who have little idea how to do it are going to make a good choice. So, it's a good choice to have something that works on a large scale, even if it is just an AI but that doesn't require that you use it for a lot of other things, you will probably end up with lots of other things just to make the machine go into something less complicated.

If the AI is so good that it can actually be useful for anything, people will probably stop giving it advice on how to do what they want from a simple and simple and simple task; this is the key difference between the AI and humans at work.

In fact, when I asked about what people really want from a simple task and it wasn't really a good one, I was very disappointed because it was so complex. That is why I've come to believe it's really not that useful for anything other than a little bit more automation.

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#337

Post by sabujp »

The reason seems fairly obvious to me. It's the same thing as how we do things and do them in a good manner - and that's very different from other things in the industry. For example, why would a doctor call you if he says you are not doing a diagnosis, but he isn't doing a doctor: you have to be a software engineer. A doctor could go to you and ask a question about the symptoms you are experiencing and find out if the doctor is doing a diagnosis. He has to understand that the doctors use the AI to do everything he can to avoid that problem. His job seems to be to get insurance and medication coverage.

You might think about this a few times - if you are able to make an AI out of the box, maybe you have all of the necessary knowledge to get it out as well. Just as a computer can make a database out of a document. A programmer, however, could do all the necessary knowledge to get that system working. But most software engineer is like a carpenter - no amount of math or programming will change that. They probably also have all of the necessary knowledge necessary to make a car, so how about a car that can take a picture, and a car, that can run the calculations of the wheels

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#338

Post by mark-r »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #319
mark-r wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point is that without a monetary payout at the end, you're going to have trouble incentivizing someone to do the study no matter how cheap it is. And don't forget the opposite, if there's a current medical treatment for the condition you're testing they will try to block you at every step.

You can pester scientists, they have their own separate set of perverted incentives - academic status - which, in this case, works in your favor. As for the opposite case - if there was a thing you wanted to test that had a strong effect, then the company that owns the current treatment would happily fund you the tests in exchange for dibs if the tests pans out.

Did you read my GP comment? The dibs don't do you any good unless you can get a patent on the new treatment.

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#339

Post by Semiapies »

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

Every time someone write software, someone comes along after-the-fact to try to claim it as "artificial intelligence", no matter how little (or absolutely nothing) the software in question has to do with whatever's being sold that year as "AI".

AI used to be sold as human-like or even superhuman intelligence. Now, it just means "running software".

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#340

Post by jdm2212 »

afeller08 wrote: post #214
kgin wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The blame issue is huge. When humans are wrong, the business’ “ego” can be saved by blaming the employee who made the call, sometimes firing them. But the process goes on with the same error rate. But when software makes the wrong call, it feels like the business itself has done the wrong thing. With no way to externalize the blame for the decision, the blame gets placed on the decision to use ml in the first place.

This. This is strictly more accurate than the above comment. It has nothing to do with accuracy or the repetitiveness of the mistake. It has to do with managers preferring to make sure that they can somehow avoid being personally blamed for their subordinate's mistakes, because most companies are designed to absolve everyone at the top and blame everyone at the bottom. I've worked in an industry (prop trading) where…

> It has to do with managers preferring to make sure that they can somehow avoid being personally blamed for their subordinate's mistakes

You can't fire a crappy AI and replace it with one with better judgement. If it does something weird or bad or inexplicable, you can't ask why it did that and tell it to how to be better in the future. Blame is a tool that organizations and people; you can't blame AI because you mostly can't teach AI.

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