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What were the highly profitable industries built around expert systems and logic computers in the 1980s? The fact that AI seems to be proving itself with real-

What were the highly profitable industries built around expert systems and logic computers in the 1980s? The fact that AI seems to be proving itself with real-world, commercially interesting results in the fields as disparate as advertising, facial recognition, and self-driving automobiles makes me think the comparisons with the 80s are premature.

pdkl95 11y ago
> highly profitable industries Those profits are not necessarily from AI. > advertising, facial recognition Yes, surveillance capitalism is highly profitable. AI may be enabling and magnifying that problem, but a lot of the profits at the moment are due to technology making it a lot easier to obscure business models and the difficulty in challenging "too big to fail"-sized accumulation of wealth. The point being that while AI has some really interesting uses (with more being discovered regularly), it's profitability is probably somewhat closer to the fad tech of the 80s. It's the internet combined with very cheap, portable computers - and the shady business models they have created - that are highly profitable.
YeGoblynQueenne 11y ago
>> What were the highly profitable industries built around expert systems and logic computers in the 1980s? I'm not sure there were any industries built around expert systems, as such, but don't forget that if there's a practical application of an AI system, it's not considered AI anymore. Accordingly, expert systems are widely used in the industry today still, first of all because there's tons of legacy software created in the 80's and '90s that is still lying around and being maintained. But also because the definition of an expert system is a database of rules encoding expert knowledge about a given domain and an inference engine to select the appropriate rules in any situation- and that is exactly what most entreprise applications are that manage business rules, for instance fraud detection at financial orgs etc (which I'm familiar with). And of course there's industries where you can't afford to use a machine learning system to do your work. Think of jet engine maintenance for instance. You don't want a system with 10% error doing that. So I'm told that this is the kind of job that the industry, even today, leaves up to a good old-fashioned expert system.
YeGoblynQueenne 11y ago
>> highly profitable industries Something else. There's a problem with taking profitability as a measure of the success of an AI technique, or anything really, if for no other reason than that profitability is transient, and much more so in technology where today's cutting edge is tomorrow's dull blah. Whether a given technology is successful or not has nothing to do with whether it works well or not; it has everything to do wth whether the way it is marketed works or not. Otherwise MS Windows would not be the most widely adopted OS, yeah? In the end, the only thing that having a profitable industry shows is that you have a profitable industry, nothing else. So some folks make money with machine learning systems and they hype them a lot. That's just marketing. If you understand the technology you realise there's a big difference between the hype and the actual hands-on results.

pdkl95 11y ago

> highly profitable industries Those profits are not necessarily from AI. > advertising, facial recognition Yes, surveillance capitalism is highly profitable. AI may be enabling and magnifying that problem, but a lot of the profits at the moment are due to technology making it a lot easier to obscure business models and the difficulty in challenging "too big to fail"-sized accumulation of wealth. The point being that while AI has some really interesting uses (with more being discovered regularly), it's profitability is probably somewhat closer to the fad tech of the 80s. It's the internet combined with very cheap, portable computers - and the shady business models they have created - that are highly profitable.

YeGoblynQueenne 11y ago

>> What were the highly profitable industries built around expert systems and logic computers in the 1980s? I'm not sure there were any industries built around expert systems, as such, but don't forget that if there's a practical application of an AI system, it's not considered AI anymore. Accordingly, expert systems are widely used in the industry today still, first of all because there's tons of legacy software created in the 80's and '90s that is still lying around and being maintained. But also because the definition of an expert system is a database of rules encoding expert knowledge about a given domain and an inference engine to select the appropriate rules in any situation- and that is exactly what most entreprise applications are that manage business rules, for instance fraud detection at financial orgs etc (which I'm familiar with). And of course there's industries where you can't afford to use a machine learning system to do your work. Think of jet engine maintenance for instance. You don't want a system with 10% error doing that. So I'm told that this is the kind of job that the industry, even today, leaves up to a good old-fashioned expert system.

YeGoblynQueenne 11y ago

>> highly profitable industries Something else. There's a problem with taking profitability as a measure of the success of an AI technique, or anything really, if for no other reason than that profitability is transient, and much more so in technology where today's cutting edge is tomorrow's dull blah. Whether a given technology is successful or not has nothing to do with whether it works well or not; it has everything to do wth whether the way it is marketed works or not. Otherwise MS Windows would not be the most widely adopted OS, yeah? In the end, the only thing that having a profitable industry shows is that you have a profitable industry, nothing else. So some folks make money with machine learning systems and they hype them a lot. That's just marketing. If you understand the technology you realise there's a big difference between the hype and the actual hands-on results.