Past Performance is Not Indicative of Future Results (2020)
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Re: Past Performance is Not Indicative of Future Results (2020)
#2Typo in the title, ought to be “Skeptic.” Unless, that is, his skepticism is also directly tied to handling sewage.
Re: Past Performance is Not Indicative of Future Results (2020)
#3Typo in the title, ought to be “Skeptic.” Unless, that is, his skepticism is also directly tied to handling sewage.
No, both spellings are good. The sewage thing would be "septic".
Re: Past Performance is Not Indicative of Future Results (2020)
#4Re: Past Performance is Not Indicative of Future Results (2020)
#5Typo in the title, ought to be “Skeptic.” Unless, that is, his skepticism is also directly tied to handling sewage.
Even if you look up "skeptic" on dictionary.com, it will suggest the alternative spelling.
https://www.dictionary.com/browse/skeptic
English is not just spoken in 'murica.
Re: Past Performance is Not Indicative of Future Results (2020)
#6I find his comment about hallucinating faces in the snow amusing given that humans hallucinate faces in things all the time. And then either post it to Reddit or have a religious experience.
Re: Past Performance is Not Indicative of Future Results (2020)
#7I found this to be a very succinct, sober analysis of ML ("AI") techno-solutionism. Cory is a great writer and knows how to explain ideas in a simple, no-nonsense way. This article reminded me of Evgeny Morozov's "To Save Everything, Click Here", where you can find many more examples of how focusing on the quantitative aspect of a problem and ignoring the social, qualitative context it around it often goes wrong.
https://bookshop.org/books/to-save-everything-click-here-the...
Re: Past Performance is Not Indicative of Future Results (2020)
#8Are there any approaches to artificial intelligence that do involve qualitative data or don’t rely entirely on statistical inference?
Re: Past Performance is Not Indicative of Future Results (2020)
#9This article is mostly a straw man, while still containing some valid ML criticism. I am a ML s(c|k)eptic too, in that popular conceptions of what ML is currently overpromise, often don't even understand what ML actually is, and are often just some layperson's imagination about what "artificial intelligence" might do.
This article is the opposite. He's treating ML as basically a simple supervised architecture that doesn't allow any domain knowledge to be incorporated and simply dead-reckons, making unchecked inferences from what it learned in training. Under these constraints, everything he says is correct. But there is no reason ML has to be used this way, in fact it is extremely irresponsible to do so in many cases. ML as part of a system (whether directly part of the model architecture and learned or imposed by domain knowledge) is possible, and is generally the right way to build an "AI" system.
I think ML has its limitations and will be surprised to see current neural networks evolve into AGI. But I also don't think the engineers working in this space are as out to lunch as the author seems to imply, and would not write off the possibilities of what contemporary ML systems can accomplish based on the flaws pointed out in relation to a very narrow view of what ML is.
Re: Past Performance is Not Indicative of Future Results (2020)
#10This article is mostly a straw man, while still containing some valid ML criticism. I am a ML s(c|k)eptic too, in that popular conceptions of what ML is currently overpromise, often don't even understand what ML actually is, and are often just some layperson's imagination about what "artificial intelligence" might do. This article is the opposite. He's treating ML as basically a simple supervised architecture that do…
> But I also don't think the engineers working in this space are as out to lunch as the author seems to imply.
Are you at all close to this space? It sounds you may be underestimating corporate politics and the lack of rigour and ethical thought with which these systems are applied. The example Cory puts on policing -- and the many other examples you can find in Evgeny Morozov's book or "The End of Trust" -- are solid proof of this.