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At Risk of being downvoted to oblivion and out of a very well-meant interest: what if you'd replace AI with Chinese traditional​ medicine in the post above? Why

• AlexCoventry 10y ago
  Has Chinese medicine solved any long-standing problems recently? Are there new developments which suggest that factors contributing to its previous disappointments are about to be overcome? Is there a clear path for its development? The answer to all these questions, for AI, is yes.
  • itcrowd 10y ago
    Hi AlexCoventry, Please don't get me wrong: there is no future for CTM. You are 100% correct about this. However, quackery is still not a thing of the past. Therefore, I would ask of you not to debunk CTM or to point to its weaknesses (which has been done infinite times). I would like to know the AI-specific answers to your three questions (in your words or in a linked essay / paper). In a way, I don't want AI to be the "quackery of computer science": people use and believe it but it has no advantages. I would love it to be real. I am all for a future in which we can have AI/machine learning/deep learning if it actually makes a difference. But I would love to know your opinion on what difference that could be and a little on how to achieve that. Obviously it seems I am missing something since YC is eager to invest in this field (or fields).
    • dnautics 10y ago
      Your CTM analogy is not the best choice: I'd hazard to say probably around 90-95% of CTM is utter nonsense (and 99.9% of the internal justifications are), but, without CTM they'd have never discovered artemisinin, which is being deployed as a first-line treatment for malaria in areas where there is resistance to chloroquine.
• antons_ghost 10y ago
  Also at risk of being downvoted: If I had general_ai.exe or worlds_best_nlp.py, what should I do with it? It isn't even clear to me how they would be useful.
  • tommynicholas 10y ago
    Why do you expect people will be trying to build a general_ai.exe? Vertical applications of machine learning and light-AI are what most private comapnies that are getting traction are doing today, while big-cos and universities (and things like OpenAI!) are funding the research that could lead to more generalizable AI.
    • antons_ghost 10y ago
      People certainly talk about general_ai.exe. Often I imagine I had a technology such as general artificial intelligence or world-class NLP. Perhaps I lack imagination, but I have not yet thought of an exciting application. These are tools, much like Perl scripts, and it is not clear to me which will displace more jobs during my life.
      • tommynicholas 10y ago
        Not serious people in any near-term way. Even bullish AI folks think general AI is MINIMUM of 10, more likely 50-100 years away.
  • dontreact 10y ago
    Turn it on and ask it your question? But seriously, narrower forms of AI are useful for things like self-driving cars.
    • antons_ghost 10y ago
      In this thread, I have posed the question to general (biological) intelligence, since I do not have access to general artificial intelligence.
  • 10y ago
• chrisfosterelli 10y ago
  Recent advances in AI/ML (i.e. deep learning) have shown ground breaking progress in a number of fields especially in computer vision problems, natural language processing, and audio processing. AI is a tool that we are now seeing solve many problems which computers couldn't even touch 10 years ago with better than human accuracy today. This field is very new and there is significant room for improvement and new approaches. IMO, a lot of the excitement comes from the really impressive progress in a short time and a very wide open field of problems still to be explored.
  • itcrowd 10y ago
    Thank you for the serious reply. I would like to ask you and anyone reading this: what exactly gives AI/ML the "edge"? I mean, faster computers are a given these days compared to any other time in humanity. They are giving us simulations so accurate that people in the 80's would be extremely jealous. However, my question is why these new techniques are superior to the established techniques. Why would an AI solution be better? In what sense would it be different from any other method? Again, I am not anti-AI or anti-ML but I'm interested in hearing opinions. If you could give me concrete examples where AI or ML is better in a way that is different from "faster computing" I would be sort-of satisfied. For the ones pursuing the CTM line, forget that. I know it's BS and I hope nobody​ falls for that stuff. However, s/AI/TCM/g in the post would not make clear what the "edge" of AI is over conventional computers. Thanks for the civil discussion.
    • chrisfosterelli 10y ago
      The imagenet competition is a great concrete example. This is a massive dataset of images and the competition is to identify correctly the object in the image (truck, person, etc). The results the past few years look something like this: https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/0FLG_HLy-dHk5kPFIocPMHn5jchJJa4Sb2kALdlb8Y7kSDmuw-XCVAubXnlM_cVO7G6urGVDdGuoA4ppbpaTYYJV7ndCwUXp9Zj2CY3pudtJaez_sLUWL1PZae6QqqPtYg https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/0FLG_HLy-dHk5kPFIocPMHn5jc... Prior to 2012, this was done using traditional computer vision algorithms with hand picked features. The accuracy was often around 30-40%, until the first deep learning model beat the 2nd place competitor by near half the error. Today, almost every single competitor is deep learning based and accuracy is equal to human classifiers. Since deep learning has so many applications, it's hard to generalize what the "edge" is against all other approaches. In my opinion, other approaches often require handpicking features (where a ANN learns them) and struggle to recognize patterns in many areas (where a ANN does).
• ganfortran 10y ago
  Because there is dumped model out there, and you can download and run it and see the accuracy yourself. If you cannot even do this, then your question or suspicion is worthless
• edblarney 10y ago
  AI works. Chinese medicine is mostly not scientifically validated, though it may have some other merits.