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The AI Misinformation Epidemic

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Re: The AI Misinformation Epidemic

#121

Post by ramblerman »

TuringNYC wrote: post #48

Here is my annoyance with AI Hype: people seeking extra tailwinds pitch their startups as "ML companies" even with the most tangential usage of ML. It drowns out real ML companies. Most people cannot tell the difference. At a hackathon recently, someone pitched their app as an "ML-driven app" though the only ML in there was some 1-line language translation feature they were consuming off Watson REST services for a ta…

Your focus on "effort" and "real" sounds a bit exclusive at the behest of your own job security.

The ML boom (specifically DL) is so interesting because of the applications. Computers recognising images better than humans for instance.

Surely outside of academia its a means to an end like anything else. If Team A wires together some high level Keras components with 30 lines of code, and does something really cool with it, is it less valuable?

Re: The AI Misinformation Epidemic

#123

Post by visarga »

nostrademons wrote: post #69
lottin wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed, FI -for fake intelligence- would be more accurate :)

I think AI is accurate, but it's actually short for "aggregated intelligence". Most AI algorithms can't actually generate "intelligence" as we know it. Rather, they aggregate the intelligence of the humans who contributed to their training data, and then generalize it to situations where those humans are not present. If the humans are stupid (as we saw with Microsoft's Tay chatbot), the AI is going to be pretty stupi…

> Most AI

AlphaGo would be an example. It was trained by self play.

Re: The AI Misinformation Epidemic

#124

Post by nostoc »

ThomPete wrote: post #115
Fricken wrote: post #17

Welcome to the club. Now you know how Economists, healthcare professionals, skateboarders, basket weavers and anybody else whose domain knowledge runs deeper than the average joe's feels whenever their area of technical expertise becomes the subject du jour for the public at large.

In Danish we have a word "fagidiot" which means idiot of your field. It's the kind of things that make it impossible for someone who's been in the army to enjoy a movie if they don't use the machine gun properly or a designer to appreciate the casting in the end if the typography is not kerned properly. The things that matter to someone who spent a lot of time in any given field are rarely the important things to any…

What a beautiful word.

Re: The AI Misinformation Epidemic

#125

Post by gone35 »

VHRanger wrote: post #116
iwintermute wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not op, but also from economics background - the issue with economics in public perception for me is that is't became modern "religion"/ideology and moved far from proper science. Especially "mainstream" economics theory. So the issue is not that it's getting misinterpreted due to lack of understanding. The issue there is that it's getting unscientific and politicised purposefully.

Is you "economics background" a BA, by any chance? The people who say economics "became religion" are usually those whose only exposure to economics is through secondhand knowledge (ie. they read about it in media) or took a handful of undergraduate classes. Take a look at what modern economics research looks like [1]. Seriously, read __any__ of those articles and come tell me with a straight face it's not doing norm…

Sure. The first NBER paper in [1] features the following jewel (p.34):

"B. Calibration

To quantitatively decompose the contribution of different factors to the growth of shadow banks and fintech firms, we first have to calibrate the model to the conforming loan market data."

I can tell you with a straight face that is not normal science. Economists themselves increasingly recognize so-called "calibration" is a farce.

Re: The AI Misinformation Epidemic

#126

Post by notahacker »

FabHK wrote: post #105
iwintermute wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not op, but also from economics background - the issue with economics in public perception for me is that is't became modern "religion"/ideology and moved far from proper science. Especially "mainstream" economics theory. So the issue is not that it's getting misinterpreted due to lack of understanding. The issue there is that it's getting unscientific and politicised purposefully.

Great book on this is James Kwak's "Economism" - the abuse of purported economic insight for political purposes. As just one simple example, good old Hekscher-Olin trade theory (a neat general equilibrium model with 2 countries, 2 goods, and 2 factors of production, capital and labor) "shows" that free trade is a good thing, leading to a Pareto improvement. But of course, that's predicated on a whole host of assumpti…

Popular economics and popular "AI" as described in the article both seem like situations where everybody with an idea to push cites popularisation of research conclusions without understanding the limitations to the models and people with actual expertise in the field are often happy to play along with these hyperbolic, caveat-free popularisations because it helps their end goals.

Sure, the economics profession and its popularisers might be a little more incentivised by political aims and AI research and AI's hypers and commercialisers a little more by money, but both fields suffer from the fact whilst researchers agonise over tradeoffs between tractability and predictive accuracy and fitting and overfitting and wonder whether the class of problem they're looking at is even soluble, the people with the most confidence in their assertions tend to get the column inches, even if they barely know what they're talking about.

I only wonder whether it will ultimately lead to similarly widespread middlebrow dismissals[1] of the entire field of AI...

[1]for the avoidance of doubt, not an accusation I'm levelling at the poster above

Re: The AI Misinformation Epidemic

#127

Post by eli_gottlieb »

ExactoKnight wrote: post #87
paperpunk wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it's reasonable to equate 'technologies that existed since the 60s' with 'technologies that are ubiquitous today'. I'm in the bottom 15% of my country (UK) by income and I have access to things like: near-instantaneous hot water at all times, affordable next-day delivery services from a pocket-sized device I carry around with me, international air travel that is affordable for me, efficient fridge/freez…

Almost everything you listed there already started becoming common by the 1960's. Step back and forget about informational technology. Look at the world of atoms, not at the world of bits. Since the decommissioning of the Concorde, our fastest commercial means of transportation has actually been getting slower , not faster. Man hasn't reached farther out in space than the moon missions of the 1960s. The first half th…

>The second half of the 20th can't even come close to this level of technological growth.

The Green Revolution was a thing. Mass starvation was prevented by technical means.

Re: The AI Misinformation Epidemic

#128

Post by cm2187 »

paperpunk wrote: post #78
Banthum wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True that. 1880-1950 (70 years) took us from train-and-telegraph to jet-and-atom bomb. Horse and carriage was the top-tier tech for personal transportation in 1880, and they were just starting to understand that diseases are often caused by these little blobby creatures called germs. 1950-2020 (70 years) will take us much less distance. Almost everything we're developing seems to be about information processing. If y…

I don't think it's reasonable to equate 'technologies that existed since the 60s' with 'technologies that are ubiquitous today'. I'm in the bottom 15% of my country (UK) by income and I have access to things like: near-instantaneous hot water at all times, affordable next-day delivery services from a pocket-sized device I carry around with me, international air travel that is affordable for me, efficient fridge/freez…

And you can buy a super-computer (Raspberry PI, compared to the 50s or 60s) for some change.

Re: The AI Misinformation Epidemic

#129

Post by jacquesm »

thearn4 wrote: post #118
jacquesm wrote: post #104

A lot of start-ups are hyping themselves as deep-learning or something close to that in order to make themselves appear 'hot'. Recently I looked at a company that had absolutely nothing to do with deep-learning or even any kind of machine learning whatsoever and that still managed to sprinkle the various buzz-words with great regularity throughout their investor targeted docs. What I don't get about this behavior is…

What were the technical buzzwords that companies used to signal hotness in the industry before the ML hype train (startup or not)? I know on the process & management side for large organizations, there's been a revolving door of Lean/Agile/6 Sigma/ISO 9000, each with their own set of certifications, colored belts, and army of advisors/consultants. I like the idea of always being retrospective and asking what can be i…

Web 2.0, Semantic web, cloud, async, big data... you could keep this up for quite a while.

Re: The AI Misinformation Epidemic

#130

Post by dragonwriter »

Banthum wrote: post #28
ExactoKnight wrote: post #26

The AI and Singularity hype irks me, because I'm genuinely in agreement with Peter Thiel's argument that technological progress is actually decelerating relative to how it was moving 60 years ago once you look beyond the advancements we have experienced in information technology and finance.

True that. 1880-1950 (70 years) took us from train-and-telegraph to jet-and-atom bomb. Horse and carriage was the top-tier tech for personal transportation in 1880, and they were just starting to understand that diseases are often caused by these little blobby creatures called germs. 1950-2020 (70 years) will take us much less distance. Almost everything we're developing seems to be about information processing. If y…

Robots and remote drones do things in the physical world, and in pretty much every area of life from medicine to scientific research to manufacturing to search and rescue to war. While there was some of that around in the 1960s, the actual use and effect on the way people work and live has been radically transformative.
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