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Why is AI so useless for business?

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Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#321

Post by angry_octet »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #309
bo1024 wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Couple issues. (1) Optimization is much, much bigger than graph traversal and sorting. (2) Modern route-finding algorithms are to your on-paper-Dijkstra what a rocket ship is to your bicycle. (3) I think you're under the same misconception I'm talking about: graph traversal is absolutely a fundamental of AI. Ask anyone what the main AI textbook is, they'll tell you it's Russell and Norvig: http://aima.cs.berkeley.edu…

> (2) Modern route-finding algorithms are to your on-paper-Dijkstra what a rocket ship is to your bicycle. Let's not get ahead of ourselves. Modern path-finding algorithms are Dijkstra + lots of heuristics piled on top. > graph traversal is absolutely a fundamental of AI. I agree. But being a fundamental of AI does not make it AI itself.

Dijkstra + hacks is a rather unjust simplification...

Some good examples of modern approaches, though a bit dated now: http://algo2.iti.kit.edu/routeplanning.php

Relevant conf: https://icaps20.icaps-conference.org/

(ML techniques are increasingly being used to solve these problems, and graph algorithms are used in ML, but are not AI/ML.)

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#322

Post by angry_octet »

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

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 discipline when reasoning evolved.

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#323

Post by mkl »

perl4ever wrote: post #293
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…

'drawing algorithms like "fill with color"' What? You mean this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flood_fill Who ever called that artificial intelligence?

When the shapes are hand drawn, and the boundaries have gaps in them, heuristics are needed. Same if filling an object in a photo - where are the edges, exactly? That kind of object recognition is familiar ML stuff. The pictures in this paper show quite a few examples of filling problems: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.655...

I don't know about MS Office, specifically, though.

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#324

Post by eindiran »

SkyBelow wrote: post #291
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.

>"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 of this process (eg MDMA for PTSD).

That's not same thing as saying that there isn't anything which is currently considered "alternative medicine" that works. Rather, once an alternative medicine has sufficient evidence going for it (and is better understood), it becomes less mystical and is accepted as mainstream medicine.

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#325

Post by perl4ever »

gnulinux wrote: post #315
perl4ever wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'drawing algorithms like "fill with color"' What? You mean this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flood_fill Who ever called that artificial intelligence?

The classical, as in old fashioned, 70s, 80s definition of AI is solving any problem using heuristics. This is contrasted with algorithmic problem solving; which is impossible to do if your problem is intractable (you can't have an efficient 3SAT solver if you don't use heuristics). The canonical example is CSP (constraint satisfaction problem) solvers: people legit thought, encoding knowledge in a Prolog-like CSP so…

Perhaps, it just jumped out at me because I've implemented one of the classic algorithms and it didn't involve heuristics.

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#326

Post by tathougies »

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…

> 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 discipline when reasoning evolved.

The key difference being that physical theories based on aether never actually worked, whereas computer programs based on graph algorithms solved many problems they set out to solve.

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#327

Post by mkl »

keenmaster wrote: post #154
euix wrote: post #146

I have been in this space in the financial sector for two years. I think this article is mostly spot on. There is one other piece, typically the places that can most benefit from innovation can get most of it just through automation and RPA as it is now called. Basically some guy filling a spreadsheet and copying it someone else, replace that with a bot. But even that and other processes are difficult because a lot o…

Microsoft recently developed a modular form of Microsoft Office which allows you to integrate a modifiable spreadsheet into things other than .xlsx files. Automation may be easier if disparate systems all used the same modules. This is especially true in the finance sector where everyone uses Excel.

Recently? That sounds like OLE [1], which has been around since the 1990s. Have they redone it?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object_Linking_and_Embedding

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#329

Post by AlexandrB »

fauigerzigerk wrote: post #129
lqet wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> instead of having the work reviewed by a second person, you can have model + person But the argument still applies then - if only one incident occurs where a catastrophic mistake was not spotted by the model failsafe, and if later investigations show that the mistake could've been easily spotted by a second human, a human will be installed as a failsafe for the failsafe. I think the general problem is the following…

But the parent's point is that "the model and the human probably make different errors". That is frequently true. Take the job of a lifeguard for instance. A single mistake can be catastrophic, and yet we know that people have trouble staying completely focused for hours on end. AIs have no trouble staying focused and they can be trained to spot drowing swimmers pretty well even on a crowded beach. Having a human lif…

> Having a human lifeguard plus an AI that alerts the lifeguard when it spots something suspicious could lead to better outcomes than employing two lifeguards.

I disagree. I think you'll see the same thing as with drivers falling asleep while Tesla autopilot is running. The lifeguard will let the computer do all the monitoring since a low false negative rate combined with a low incidence rate means that most bodyguards will experience the computer being 100% reliable for weeks or months at a time. In fact it's not unreasonable that if the lifeguard sees someone drowning but the computer doesn't register it as such the lifeguard may question their own judgement based on experience.

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#330

Post by sabujp »

The author suggests that AI is _something_.

That is, if you think you have a better idea of what you want to do that isn't the right question. I would say that if you actually get better than an AI based version of a product then it's actually a useful tool and it can be improved to be used.

For example, if you say this is AI because a particular feature that is useful does not exist then you are actually talking about AI because someone is using it, just that it's useful.

But that statement only has a part of what you mean. That is, if your idea isn't useless in the sense that it is useful in a specific way, you are simply asking how you did it.

So to answer the question is: Why is AI useless for business?

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