Paul Graham calls A.I. ‘the exact opposite of a solution in search of a problem’

speaking of comments both unfair and incredibly common… this gross oversimplification does a disservice to all parties involved.

op lamented a lack of introspection and a nastiness to judge a thing as useless or bad based upon an individual’s success or lack thereof with the thing.

if you found it offensive, perhaps it’s worth thinking on.

What I think he is trying to say is that it is a solution that addresses a broad range of problems that are clear now but weren’t envisioned by its creators, which is both impossible given the early claims (its creators already billed it as a general solution with easentially no limits) and, even if you ignore those claims and reduce it to a question of it being broadly applicable as a solution, generally premature (most of the more specific things it is billed as a solution for it hasn’t solved, though some people might have ideas, not yet proven jn practice, of how it can be a component of a solution).

Good examples are typical courier service, or FedEX. Or companies like Amazon make their own delivery services.

They usually have standard boxes/envelopes with standard barcode markings for correspondence.

All these boxes/envelopes gathered from sending offices and concentrated into sort facility, where machine vision could sort them, to separate container for each destination branch office, or for some places, big central office have it's own container.

Than containers load to big truck and run to destination city, where unload at destination branch office.

In destination branch office next sorting distribute packages to containers of small offices.

Then smaller truck deliver containers to small offices.

Similar thing happen on returns, just in target office created new mark and placed over old mark.

What could be wrong? - Some delivery companies allow containers of free form, not just rectangular or envelopes, just limiting weight and sum of sizes, so you for example could send car body kit, or skis, not inside rectangular container.

For human, handling such things is trivial task, but for machine it is nightmare. But if this thing will see something like GPT-4, which claimed multimodal, possible it will detect it right and understand how to handle it.