It’s an unusually beautiful written article, well worth the read just for the prose. As for the main sentiment that we have a new AI winter, I’m not so sure. My lay person view is that we see quite a lot of commercial success with these systems so the current wave will be well funded for at least a decade.
What are the big successes? Speech recognition? Which still seems rather bad to me. Language translation (which for the languages I’m interested in (Japanese) is still almost totally unusable? Self driving cars? Which are not yet in production (and where the social issues are probably far harder than the technical ones, and likely have been since the 90s). Is there some big application if ML that I’m missing that is…
For safety reasons, self-driving cars on the road don't rely on ML as much as you may think. It's much better to run algorithms with provable guarantees rather than black-box neural nets on a multi-ton vehicle. When the judge asks your company if you did everything in your power to prevent the death at hand, it helps to point to decades-old well proven techniques, rather than band new unproven, untested, trends.