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Honest answer: I think it is hard to predict where the next ML/AI breakthrough will come from because almost all the algorithms are hard to predict and non-line

Honest answer: I think it is hard to predict where the next ML/AI breakthrough will come from because almost all the algorithms are hard to predict and non-linear. So they try one method, small improvement, try another, small improvement, try a third and suddenly they have a breakthrough in some field. Trouble is that right now you don't know what technique will work in what field. That means that it could be in Go, or learning what to eat, or driving cars, or cancer diagnosis etc. So wherever the next breakthroughs happen to be is probably where one of the "battles for AI" will be waged. The one exception to this rule is an AI that can create other AI. If that happens, the war for AI is over. Whether it has been lost or won depends on your POV.

joe_the_user 10y ago
It's fair to say we don't know how progress will go in increasing the effectiveness of the various algorithms. But it's there also the question of how much progress is possible in improving the answer to a given question. Some problems might present a situation where "you can't squeeze blood from a stone". There is also the factor that those situations where humans still do better than computers are situations where we know progress is theoretically possible at some level whereas in situations where computers already outperform human, it is harder to have a theoretical reason to think further progress is possible.
- vintermann 10y ago
  Your last point. Man, there are so many people who don't grasp that, who think AI is guaranteed to grow into the heavens.
  - joe_the_user 10y ago
    Well, Humans have made immense progress in the last 10K years, surpassing all other animals in capabilities, etc. And individual geniuses have at times pushed a given field forward beyond what was otherwise expected (For example Kary Mullis or Craig Venter in biology). That would lead one to imagine entity with a broad intelligence that surpasses humans could do amazing things. All that said "artificial intelligence" still isn't going to be a super box that you can point at a context-free stream of data and get magic predictions from.
    - JoeAltmaier 10y ago
      From our own viewpoint, we're doing really well. From the viewpoint of an organic microscopic cloud intelligence, we're a gnat on the landscape of life. We push dirt around and make piles of rocks and amount to less than a gigaton of protoplasm. Other animal kingdoms dwarf us in mass, in ecological niche penetration, in their span over aeons.
      - joe_the_user 10y ago
        I suppose it's circular since it's human view but I think whatever the biomass of humans, we have capabilities that other animals simply don't. We have the ability to talk of seeing things "from the viewpoint of an X" and possibly even imagine that viewpoint. But no one other animal or entity (that we know of) has the ability to talk about or imagine taking the viewpoint of another species. And such capacities seem to have been instrumental in the rise of humans as apex predators everywhere, etc.
        JoeAltmaier 10y ago
        Again from the human viewpoint. If they don't comprehend the world like us, they are not 'sentient'? It gets circular at some point.
    - vintermann 10y ago
      We know very little about intelligence, really. We don't know of any attributes that can reliably predict genial achievement. We can't even say for certain that what your geniuses of choice has more of, is the same thing we have more of than animals. It's easy to imagine supergeniuses, but as soon as you try to describe rigorously what they should be capable of, you're immediately on shakier ground. It's a bit like imagining future computer programs. We're doing a lot of things with our computers today that people couldn't have imagined 40 years ago, or outright rejected (my father's thesis advisor asserted that computers would get a lot more powerful, but would never become powerful enough to compute with images). But there are also a lot of things they thought would be easy, which turned out hard, or even impossible. In computer science, we have some ideas of the "hard limits", since the field started with Turing and computational complexity theory has progressed steadily. For human-like intelligence, or "general learning", we know very little (except that every hard limit we know from computer science applies to brains too!).

joe_the_user 10y ago

It's fair to say we don't know how progress will go in increasing the effectiveness of the various algorithms. But it's there also the question of how much progress is possible in improving the answer to a given question. Some problems might present a situation where "you can't squeeze blood from a stone". There is also the factor that those situations where humans still do better than computers are situations where we know progress is theoretically possible at some level whereas in situations where computers already outperform human, it is harder to have a theoretical reason to think further progress is possible.

vintermann 10y ago
Your last point. Man, there are so many people who don't grasp that, who think AI is guaranteed to grow into the heavens.
- joe_the_user 10y ago
  Well, Humans have made immense progress in the last 10K years, surpassing all other animals in capabilities, etc. And individual geniuses have at times pushed a given field forward beyond what was otherwise expected (For example Kary Mullis or Craig Venter in biology). That would lead one to imagine entity with a broad intelligence that surpasses humans could do amazing things. All that said "artificial intelligence" still isn't going to be a super box that you can point at a context-free stream of data and get magic predictions from.
  - JoeAltmaier 10y ago
    From our own viewpoint, we're doing really well. From the viewpoint of an organic microscopic cloud intelligence, we're a gnat on the landscape of life. We push dirt around and make piles of rocks and amount to less than a gigaton of protoplasm. Other animal kingdoms dwarf us in mass, in ecological niche penetration, in their span over aeons.
    - joe_the_user 10y ago
      I suppose it's circular since it's human view but I think whatever the biomass of humans, we have capabilities that other animals simply don't. We have the ability to talk of seeing things "from the viewpoint of an X" and possibly even imagine that viewpoint. But no one other animal or entity (that we know of) has the ability to talk about or imagine taking the viewpoint of another species. And such capacities seem to have been instrumental in the rise of humans as apex predators everywhere, etc.
      - JoeAltmaier 10y ago
        Again from the human viewpoint. If they don't comprehend the world like us, they are not 'sentient'? It gets circular at some point.
  - vintermann 10y ago
    We know very little about intelligence, really. We don't know of any attributes that can reliably predict genial achievement. We can't even say for certain that what your geniuses of choice has more of, is the same thing we have more of than animals. It's easy to imagine supergeniuses, but as soon as you try to describe rigorously what they should be capable of, you're immediately on shakier ground. It's a bit like imagining future computer programs. We're doing a lot of things with our computers today that people couldn't have imagined 40 years ago, or outright rejected (my father's thesis advisor asserted that computers would get a lot more powerful, but would never become powerful enough to compute with images). But there are also a lot of things they thought would be easy, which turned out hard, or even impossible. In computer science, we have some ideas of the "hard limits", since the field started with Turing and computational complexity theory has progressed steadily. For human-like intelligence, or "general learning", we know very little (except that every hard limit we know from computer science applies to brains too!).