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Why is AI so useless for business?

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Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#361

Post by hnick »

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.

Perhaps that is the point. If we can understand it, it's not intelligence. We're trying to make computers do things we can't understand, and if we do, we've reached our goal.

Until then we have Machine Learning or gradient descent or whatever else.

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#362

Post by VBprogrammer »

mehrdadn wrote: post #301
kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Australian doctor who proved ulcers and stomach cancer could be caused by bacterial infection was dismissed until he inoculated himself and cured it with antibiotics. https://www.discovermagazine.com/health/the-doctor-who-drank...

That is incredible and terrifying. Thanks for sharing!

I'm personally very grateful to that doctor. I used to suffer from quite painful stomach ulcers in my teens. I was scheduled for an endoscopy but the doctor I was referred to had obviously heard of this research. One week of antibiotics later and I have never suffered from it again.

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#363

Post by Izkata »

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…

I have an interesting one from within the past month, although I don't think the phrase "alternative medicine" was used:

Trump was mocked in the media for asking if getting UV light inside the body was a possible treatment for covid19, as if he was suggesting an alternative medicine treatment. And light therapy does have that long a history.

Thing is, this is not only a known treatment used in the past (only falling out of favor in the 50s), there are studies from the past few decades about how well UV light works on viruses, and it really is being investigated today for use on SARS-CoV-2.

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#364

Post by afiori »

mark-r wrote: post #283
mehrdadn wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In many ways modern medicine changed a lot in the last half century. Similarly to how modern culture changed a lot. In particular the way in which we believe we have discovered everything there is to know is constantly evolving.

Not all hyperbole are straw men, the original question was about how the current distinction between medicine and non-medicine works. Historical examples are relevant, but not what intended in the question.

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#365

Post by BaronSamedi »

leto_ii wrote: post #11
Macuyiko wrote: post #4

In my opinion, most of the issues leading about AI "failing" in traditional organizations are due to the following: (1) Inflated expectations from higher/middle management which trickle down the organization. AI is seen as a high-profile case which has to lead to success (and a larger budget next year for my dept.) (2) Data quality issues. The data itself has issues, but the key issue is lack of metadata and disperse…

I pretty much agree with all of your points, but I also think there may be a more fundamental issue at play here. ML doesn't actually "understand" things - it can do very sophisticated and accurate pattern matching without actually "knowing" the logic of the patterns it's matching. This in turn means that it may fail catastrophically when faced with adversarial examples or with examples that are drawn from a differen…

I think of the current neural net based approaches as more "artificial instinct" than "artificial intelligence". The goal of the older, expert system AI paradigm was to create software that could reason about a problem, and it therefore produced systems that could answer the question "why?". ANN systems cannot answer that question. Both approaches seem useful to me, but for different problem domains.

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#367

Post by plaidfuji »

This article is really focused on the question “why is AI so bad at data extraction from PDFs when it can beat humans at Go?” and it does answer its own question toward the end. AI is very good at inverting simulations (chess, Go) because you can generate an infinite corpus of perfectly labeled data. It is bad at inverting document creation because there is no exhaustive MS Word simulator. Soon people will realize that applied AI is really an exercise in simulation design.

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#368

Post by leto_ii »

duckmysick wrote: post #299
leto_ii wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Optical illusions indeed highlight limitations in human perception. However, the dress illusion seems to me far less of a problem than mistaking noise for an object. More relevant however is that we humans can understand that we're faced with an optical illusion and we can make adjustments accordingly. We have formed the concept of an "optical illusion" and we just place "The dress" in that category. A machine needs…

> More relevant however is that we humans can understand that we're faced with an optical illusion and we can make adjustments accordingly. Broadly speaking, yes. At the same time that's not what happened in 2015. It produced so much polarizing content with people deeply entrenched in their believes. They might have recognized it as an optical illusion, but they refused to make adjustments. > A machine needs to be sp…

I would say that there are indeed many examples of things that are hard to categorize for humans. Sometimes there isn't even a way to categorize things perfectly (there may be a fuzzy boundary between categories). It is for example really hard to train people to figure out if a certain stock is going to be profitable or not - there are many other such examples.

This doesn't mean that the kind of thinking that goes on in the human mind is the same as the pattern-matching that goes on in an ANN (for example). Think about how ppl learn to talk. It's not like we expose infants to the wikipedia corpus and then test them on it repeatedly until they learn. There are structures in the brain that have a capacity for language - not a specific language, but language as an abstract thing. These structures are not the same as a pre-trained model.

The truth is I don't know enough about cognitive science to properly express what I'm thinking, but I'm pretty sure it's not just pattern matching :D

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#369

Post by astrophysician »

EthanHeilman wrote: post #167
ganstyles wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like many things it can be. And has been used in that way a lot, like other hyped things (blockchain comes to mind). But unlike blockchain, ML has a real use and can be unreasonably effective at certain things. It's not a grift when used for the purposes for which it is effective.

Blockchain has a real use, in that people use it and it lets people do things they could do before. Blockchain has an expectation problem, its most breathless promoters promised things that no technology can deliver and then when it fails to deliver on those very high expectations it creates the impression that Blockchain failed. Blockchain, for instance, can't fix journalism, but it shouldn't be expected to, anymore…

You could say the exact same thing about AI: people who don’t really understand it can dominate a given “AI” culture at a given company, and then others come away with the wrong impression of what it is and what it can and can’t do. To say AI is a grift is a bit silly, but at the same time it’s quite understandable that a lot of people would have this opinion.

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#370

Post by SkyBelow »

eindiran wrote: post #324
SkyBelow wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>"Do you know what they call alternative medicine that has been proven to work?...Medicine." I don't like this quote. It is mostly true, yet it is not completely true. But because it is mostly true so many treat it as if it is completely true and thus miss the edge cases where it is not true. Take for example certain substances that are deemed by the US federal government to have no medical value. They cannot be medi…

The medical establishment doesn't think that eg marijuana is "alternative medicine" or without medical value: the DEA does. The fact that the medical establishment now accepts marijuana as a therapeutic tool is evidence of the quote: it was "alternative medicine" until there was sufficient evidence that it worked. Other drugs which are Schedule 1 (ie without medical value _according to the DEA_) are in various stages…

>The medical establishment doesn't think that eg marijuana is "alternative medicine" or without medical value: the DEA does.

Does the DEA and the FDA not play a role in what is considered a medicine or an alternative medicine?

>The fact that the medical establishment now accepts marijuana as a therapeutic tool is evidence of the quote: it was "alternative medicine" until there was sufficient evidence that it worked.

This is effectively making the claim that while there were problems in the past, the fixing of past problems can be taken as evidence that current problems do not exist. I'm arguing the opposite. That problems in the past, without fixing the systematic causes of those problems, is a reliable indicator that we are still at risk of those same problems.

Think of it like code. If your code had bugs but you fixed them, should you assume that A: my code had bugs but now they are gone and my code is bug free or B: the process by which I write code allows for bugs, and while I have fixed those bugs I haven't fundamentally changed how I write code so I am still at risk for having bugs. I find the latter the more reasonable approach.

>That's not same thing as saying that there isn't anything which is currently considered "alternative medicine" that works.

When people use that quote, I find that this is exactly what they are saying in the majority of cases. That if something is currently considered alternative medicine, it doesn't work because otherwise it would be considered medicine.

A claim that as our knowledge progresses alternative medicine that works becomes medicine is a much more reasonable claim, because it recognizes there is a timeline and since we aren't at the end of that timeline we allow for some alternative medicine actually work with the recognition in the future it will be refined into medicine.

And if someone wanted to make the claim that the majority of alternative medicine doesn't work, I would also fully agree. My issue is people taking a guideline that is generally true and applying it as if it is always true.

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