It is strange to read this, remembering how Microsoft has been lambasted time and again for doing so many interesting things with Microsoft Research and hardly ever taking any of them to the product stage. Is Microsoft unique in it's too much R and not enough D approach?
What AlphaGo Zero teaches us about what’s going wrong with innovation
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Re: What AlphaGo Zero teaches us about what’s going wrong with innovation
#22The big question this fails to ask is: full employment of what kind? Recent research has found that nearly all of the net job growth is in "alternative work", meaning temporary jobs, contract workers, freelancers, etc: https://qz.com/851066/almost-all-the-10-million-jobs-created...
Now think about the kind of innovation that companies like Uber and Deliveroo represent. While ostensibly they might be tech companies, in reality their business models revolve around a workforce of contractors who lack employment benefits and job stability. Their innovation is primarily in making more people work for less and take on all the risk.
Re: What AlphaGo Zero teaches us about what’s going wrong with innovation
#23It is strange to read this, remembering how Microsoft has been lambasted time and again for doing so many interesting things with Microsoft Research and hardly ever taking any of them to the product stage. Is Microsoft unique in it's too much R and not enough D approach?
I feel Microsoft accelerated the D phase recently. F#, I remember some typed OS after Midori being mentionned.
Re: What AlphaGo Zero teaches us about what’s going wrong with innovation
#24A simple solution would be for the government to fund more fundamental research. Research results should be public goods. It seems hard to encourage companies to do public research, as they have no short / middle term interest to do so
Companies have at least as much interest to do research as they have to do any other charitable activity. The private sector does plenty of charity. Not sure the government should be involved. Not because basic research ain't great---in an ideal world we'd all get ponies from the government---but because budgets are finite and there are other opportunities some of them with more definite benefits. (Like eg funding ed…
The problem is private companies generally being for-profit enterprises they tend to fund only those research projects that they believe will have a positive return for them. They also have a strong incentive to keep the products of their research secret and only divulge them when they discover a concrete application that is suitable to be patented. This is all very well, but it's not a socially optimal way to conduct research.
Re: What AlphaGo Zero teaches us about what’s going wrong with innovation
#25This article is off in so many dimensions. Fundamental research is not less active, but it's happening in different places (e.g. the Google Brain team). Find the most profitable companies and you'll find the research. And to suggest a computer Go player, taught in a few days, is a "marginal improvement" over decades of "AI research": as my kids say, "wut?" If anything, today's deep learning driven AI is a prime examp…
And to suggest a computer Go player, taught in a few days, is a "marginal improvement" over decades of "AI research": as my kids say, "wut?"
Maybe I'm the one that has it backward, but I'm pretty sure that Harford would not agree with the statement that Alpha Go Zero is only a "marginal improvement".
To the contrary, he says that Alpha Go is an "outlier", and uses it as an example of the sort of "speculative research" we should be doing more of: "Productivity and technological progress are lacklustre because the research behind AlphaGo Zero is not typical of the way we try to produce new ideas."
Apparently he should have been clearer, but I took the article as a call for more real research of the type that produced Alpha Go, and fewer of the "pragmatic shortcuts" and "brute-force approaches that taught us little but played strong chess"
Re: What AlphaGo Zero teaches us about what’s going wrong with innovation
#26Mmmh, I am not a specialist and I don't know the numbers, but it seems to me that fundamental research is not less active than it used to be. Physics made a lot of progress in materials (nano tech, weird polymers, and so on), in building batteries, in finding the higgs boson and gravitational waves, and I'm sure plenty of other fields. Medical research has advanced a lot with the invention of CRISPR. CS has grown a l…
Cryptography has also been progressing well. Same for various encoding formats; Opus is both better quality per bit & uses less CPU than Vorbis
Re: What AlphaGo Zero teaches us about what’s going wrong with innovation
#27This article is off in so many dimensions. Fundamental research is not less active, but it's happening in different places (e.g. the Google Brain team). Find the most profitable companies and you'll find the research. And to suggest a computer Go player, taught in a few days, is a "marginal improvement" over decades of "AI research": as my kids say, "wut?" If anything, today's deep learning driven AI is a prime examp…
> Fundamental research is not less active, but it's happening in different places (e.g. the Google Brain team). Find the most profitable companies and you'll find the research.
Aren't you contradicting yourself a bit there? If it's only/mainly the most profitable companies and the topics of interest to them, then that hardly indicates fundamental research is very active. There can't be that many fundamental research positions across those companies.
(caveat: the article is currently unavailable "Error establishing a database connection" so i'm not entirely clear if it's just about fundamental research in AI areas or not).
Re: What AlphaGo Zero teaches us about what’s going wrong with innovation
#28A simple solution would be for the government to fund more fundamental research. Research results should be public goods. It seems hard to encourage companies to do public research, as they have no short / middle term interest to do so
Companies have at least as much interest to do research as they have to do any other charitable activity. The private sector does plenty of charity. Not sure the government should be involved. Not because basic research ain't great---in an ideal world we'd all get ponies from the government---but because budgets are finite and there are other opportunities some of them with more definite benefits. (Like eg funding ed…
> there are other opportunities some of them with more definite benefits
I dispute the implication of this -- that there is less certain benefit from fundamental research. There's clear historical evidence that fundamental research has massive societal benefits. We wouldn't have our modern society without it.
It's just that it can only be understood in "statistical terms". If you place bets on fundamental research then in the long term you get big payoffs. It's a bit like investing in the stock market. You can't predict the pay-off for any one particular bit of fundamental research, and its actual pay-off usually isn't obvious in the short-medium term.
From the other direction, there's a lot of claimed definite benefits to more applied work that doesn't actually pan out. Just because it's easier to claim that there's some particular benefit to doing something doesn't mean that benefit actually exists.
Re: What AlphaGo Zero teaches us about what’s going wrong with innovation
#29I don't think there is a very sharp distinction between results oriented R&D and "basic research". In the article, IBM's deep blue is dismissed as a dead-end victory but apparently alphago is not? Why? They both seem identical to me in goals and research methodology. On a side note, I cannot wait for general super intelligence. It cannot come soon enough. I'm tired of being poor and stuck in a fucking rut, and contem…
I think the point was that Deep Blue was using brute force, where as Alpha Go had taught itself and Alpha Go Zero has gone the full distance to require zero outside help.
So Deep Blue wasn't such a big step in terms of General Artificial Intelligence because it was heavily dependent on the human optimisations and was just showing the power of number crunching rather than learning.
Re: What AlphaGo Zero teaches us about what’s going wrong with innovation
#30Currently giving 'Error establishing a database connection'
An article about AI revolution and we still having problems keeping a database alive. Isn't that a bit ironic?
Even more ironic is using a database for static content at all.
Right now, we (as a society/industry) are unable to deploy well-known best practices of 5 years ago:
https://www.martinfowler.com/bliki/EditingPublishingSeparati...
(In software development, it is even worse. I can't find the source to cite, but the saying is along the lines of: The mainstream programming languages and paradigms are mostly at the state of research of the 1970s, and right now we are evolving towards the state of research of the 1980s.)