The AI Revolution Hasn’t Happened Yet

Well said:<p>&gt; Thus, just as humans built buildings and bridges before there was civil engineering, humans are proceeding with the building of societal-scale, inference and decision making systems that involve machines, humans and the environment. Just as early buildings and bridges sometimes fell to the ground — in unforeseen ways and with tragic consequences — many of our early societal scale inference and decision making systems are already exposing serious conceptual flaws.

The biggest challenge yet unconquered is getting your &quot;average&quot; business ($1-100m revenue, zero AI knowledge) using ML to help with <i>literally anything they do</i>.<p>I&#x27;d wager less than 1% of businesses outside of SV even have a clue where to begin, or what to use it for, my employer included. &quot;Do we hire some AI guys?&quot;<p>We&#x27;ll need to crack the 1%-using-it mark for me to consider the revolution &quot;begun&quot;...

I&#x27;m not an AI researcher (although from my internet reading that&#x27;s not a hard title to claim ;)) but I feel that ML&#x2F;DL can&#x27;t go much farther than they already have. The concept of &quot;we just need more power&quot; is an obvious fallacy to me.

The main problem with “AI revolution” today is that 95% of things that practitioners tell you it can do are just nowhere close to sufficient accuracy under the range of conditions they’d need to work in in the real world. Easily more than a half of them don’t even work at all outside a demo with hand picked examples. And nobody seems to care. This narrows down the scope of applicability to a tiny sliver where you can tolerate high error rates, and even there it’s a hard slog to get anything done, and AI is relegated to the role of the “cherry on top”, rather than baked into the pie.<p>There are a few areas where performance is good enough to be practically useful. One of those (facial recognition and tracking) is currently causing a “revolution” in China. I’m just not sure it’s the kind of revolution we want.

A related talk that Michael Jordan gave at a machine learning conference called Sys ML last month.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;4inIBmY8dQI" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;4inIBmY8dQI</a>

Most certainly we will see the comeback of &quot;logical&quot; AI too, including systems built on Prolog.

&gt; The problem had to do not just with data analysis per se, but with what database researchers call “provenance” — broadly, where did data arise, what inferences were drawn from the data, and how relevant are those inferences to the present situation?<p>Plug: I work at a company (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.pachyderm.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.pachyderm.com</a>) whose product is designed precisely to track data provenance across pipelines and through a company&#x27;s larger data-processing operation for this reason

What are we defining as AI now? It seems like AI has had a lot of hype in the past few years, but I really don&#x27;t think we&#x27;re even close unless it&#x27;s created by mistake. We don&#x27;t understand the brain fully, we don&#x27;t understand consciousness, we just know so little in the grand scheme of things.<p>Do we have the computing power to come anywhere close to what we need, will we have that computing power any time soon without a major breakthrough?

This sort of distraction arises whenever we try to adjust logic to words and not the other way around. It is said that this kind of distinction is only relevant to scientists. The article is very convincing though, that in the case of AI, the general public must be able to make those distinctions.

Where is the end game? The problem with this kind of AI revolution is that it relies on data about us. And this is responsible for the feverish attitude towards collecting or scraping data, sometimes from the public domain, but more than usually, from us. I for one, am having none of it.

Does anyone who&#x27;s working&#x2F;worked in the Healthcare &quot;Intelligence Augmentation&quot; have something to say about the challenges they&#x27;ve faced in setting up an &quot;Intelligent Infrastructure&quot;? Maybe someone who&#x27;s worked with the DeepMind Streams application?

An A.I revolution may not be happening but an &#x27;Augmented Intelligence&#x27; revolution is

I’ve been finding it difficult to find concrete examples of where AI is useful. Suggestion engines? Alg optimization? What would be something my parents would recognize that is being helped by AI?

...AND IT WON&#x27;T for a VERY LONG TIME. Those of us who know the origins of Ray Kurzweil, knew back then he was nothing special, and his ideas were derived from much smarter people around him.<p>As I recall, the article in WIRED from like 20 years ago, talked about how he missed his dad, and how in the future you would be able to take a room full of all his dad&#x27;s old crap, and AI would be able to recompile his dad into dad 2.0 in the cloud!<p>(he didn&#x27;t use these terms but that was the gist of the ridiculous and absurd WIRED article interview with him.)<p>Why do I bring up Ray? It&#x27;s because circus acts like Ray and the Singularity University, sold a bunch of people certain goods, which were VASTLY overestimated in terms of delivery times, and in terms of the good themselves.<p>First of all, many folks don&#x27;t want to admit this, but WE MAY NEVER BE ABLE TO CREATE A SYNTHETIC CONSCIOUSNESS! I think we will eventually, but it&#x27;s definitely not a certainty. It just may not be possible for a completely synthetic &#x27;consciousness&#x27; to exist.<p>This type of hype has become almost religious in nature, just like the folks who really think Moore&#x27;s Law is an actual scientific law and not just an observation and prediction based on very limited data.<p>In conclusion, you&#x27;ll get your AI just like those folks in the 50&#x27;s, or was it 60&#x27;s? ...well anyway, back when they had those world&#x27;s fairs and predicted flying cars.<p>We&#x27;re just not there yet. We don&#x27;t even have basic foundations to build this yet. There is always a possibility of a brilliant individual, who may leapfrog humanity, but for right now, it&#x27;s just vaporware.<p>AND YES. Even IBM&#x27;s Watson and Google&#x27;s GO winning &quot;AI&quot; are just vaporware machine learning and big data sets, it&#x27;s not AI even a little bit.<p>Sorry folks, I love futurizing, and inventing words ;) , just like everyone else, but... if AI is in the stadium, we aren&#x27;t even in the parking lot.<p>---<p>And now, after my rant, I shall read this article since it looks really interesting. I&#x27;m surprised it&#x27;s on Medium.

I saw Prof. Jordan give this talk in person, and the 2nd paragraph resonated with me. I wish there was more critical thinking involved in science&#x2F;research&#x2F;higher ed&#x2F;industry but unfortunately most there&#x27;s a lot of cheap money floating around with &quot;experts&quot; slurping it up without care for outcome.<p>&quot;But the episode troubled me, particularly after a back-of-the-envelope calculation convinced me that many thousands of people had gotten that diagnosis that same day worldwide, that many of them had opted for amniocentesis, and that a number of babies had died needlessly.&quot;

Can someone with more karma modify the title to be less click-bait-ey?

Michael Jordan is just mad he missed the boat on deep learning. Must be tough being that brilliant and at the same time get left in the dust by algorithms from the 90&#x27;s and just sheer brute force. The AI revolution is here, from Google search to Uber pool to auto correct to recommendation engines, it is just a slow process.

The AI Revolution is happening right now. There&#x27;s enormous proven potential which is materializing in ever increasing rates. The first generations of hardware accelerators are slowly coming out and they&#x27;re going to leave everyone astounded.<p>It&#x27;s a bit like the early days of the internet, it&#x27;s not always the most practical solution, but it definitely works.