8 ms·

The media are unwittingly selling us an AI fantasy

92 points by chobeat 8y ago

YeGoblynQueenne 8y ago
>> Why do people believe so much nonsense about AI? That is the central question. Why is it that people are prepared to believe in all the wild fantasies that the marketing arms of the tech industry come up with? Shouldn't the expectation be that the majority would instead be more cautious and avoid believing all the overblown promises, especially when they repeatedly fail to be fulfilled?
- yters 8y ago
  The materialist philosophy of mainstream science and academia makes this palatable.
- matte_black 8y ago
  They want to believe.
- pfortuny 8y ago
  Today we believe in SCIENCE (whatever that means). Hence, we believe what any of its priests says unless countered by other (more famous) priest.
  - scottlegrand2 8y ago
    That seems counter to the narrative that led to the current holder of the highest office in the United States, no? Because if his fans believe in unquestioningly science then why do they disbelieve in a tapas selection of the following: climate change, evolution, vaccines, gravity, a round Earth, and/or whether the moon landing happened?
    - chobeat 8y ago
      It's a hot topic. One very good argument I've read recently is that most of what pro-science people label as "anti-scientific" statements like anti-vax stuff are made by people that don't refuse science as a whole but just science coming from what they perceive is a corrupted establishment. Clearly this involve cherry-picking that validates their ideological positions, or it's just following the twisted narrative of some political group. Science, with the capital S, is still society's reference framework for truth (and this is a huge problem, but not the one we are talking about) but these people refute the priests and the religion, not the God. New priests are bending the same God to their interests and the times favor them over the previous priests.
  - c1ccccc1 8y ago
    Speak for yourself. I personally prefer to evaluate the statements of scientists on a claim by claim basis.
  - mwfunk 8y ago
    I wish I could say that people believed in science. Priests (literal ones, not metaphorical ones like your strawmen) seem to have more influence over public policy in much of the world though, including America, and more often than not to the detriment of all.
    - noobiemcfoob 8y ago
      The benefit about being more honest about their role in society: they get to exploit it more thoroughly.
- dmreedy 8y ago
  Agreed. My pet theory is that it boils down to how superficially accessible AI is. A conversation about AI is kind of like Bikeshedding, except no one realizes it's actually a conversation about the Nuclear Power Plant. Everyone's got practical, direct experience with sentience, with thinking, with speaking a language, with seeing things. Everyone can introspect for a little bit and make genuine claims to having contemplated the fundamental problems of AI. And since so little genuine progress on the really fundamental parts of the problem (the Hard Problem, as Chalmers would say, versus the somewhat more tractable 'parsing problems' that Deep Learning has made such great gains on), the most frustrating part is that it's really hard to prove some amateur thinker's conclusions wrong. You can bury them with the technical jargon of three thousand years of philosophers, but no one's been able to build a formally verifiable model for the whole thing so far, and so amateurs and experts are in some sense separated only by how impressively technical they sound when talking about the matter. This problem is amplified by the technical jargon being painfully close to the technical jargon for philosophy of the mind, and to straight lay terminology. So a person with technical knowledge can talk about, say, 'training', and a person with no technical knowledge can think they understand, because the word is so ill-separated from their own internal, non-technical definition. It's so easy to have an opinion about AI, the fundamental ideas are so prevalent in day-to-day discourse, and it's so hard to prove any given opinion wrong.
- Barrin92 8y ago
  >Why is it that people are prepared to believe in all the wild fantasies that the marketing arms of the tech industry come up with? Because very influential people have thrown their weight into the discussion I would say. You have Kurzweil who basically predicts that the singularity is imminent every five years, and you had Musk and Hawking painting apocalyptic scenarios about AI. That dominated the AI pop news headlines for weeks if not months. On the other hand people like Andrew Ng or Kai-Fu Lee who actually work in the industry and draw attention to the socio-economic impact of AI, which is very real, seem to only find an audience within the community itself, if at all. The reason is probably twofold. Terminator-esque stories are more interesting than talking about the economic impact of AI, and the industry has a lot more to gain by distracting people with grandiose scenarios than by talking about the negative impact they have on the lives of working people and society at large.
  - tim333 8y ago
    >You have Kurzweil who basically predicts that the singularity is imminent every five years Kurzweil has always predicted the singularity for 2045. He may be wrong but I don't find that prediction or Musk and Hawking say AI may be dangerous as wild fantasies. You can make reasoned arguments for all that stuff.
matt4077 8y ago
I guess such „counter-hype“ feels like an attractive position to many. Just like general cynicism seems to be the mindset of our times. Maybe because people think being contrarian and/or negative makes them appear smart? I don’t necessarily buy into any predictions of what machine learning will accomplish in the future. But just the examples already available today are quite stunning, especially in images and language. In any case, I don’t see how „the media“ is at fault here. I see far more „hype“ of AI among the tech community than the larger media outlets. The possibility that AI could transform our economies certainly exists, and it would seem prudent to nurture the debate about the future of work even in the abscence of certainty.
- peterdavenport 8y ago
  Your exactly right. This is just contrarian click-bait leveraging general cynicism.
- chobeat 8y ago
  What is the tech community? The CEOs or the engineers/researchers/data scientists? Because they are not by any means the same entity.
peterdavenport 8y ago
This sort of nonsense bothers me. So the guardian, a member of the media, is telling us that the media are unwittingly selling an AI fantasy? And the fantasy is that it's positive? Most of the news I see about AI is handwringingly pessimistic about AI being a disaster that will wipe out jobs and maybe the human race, which is the opposite of the thesis of the article. This sort of article is just trying to grab attention and took no thought to write, it has no substance, and took no research or deep insight to write. And the idea that somehow we can get Law before we work out the Ethics of AI? You cant just have fiat law pulled out of a hat that works? How can you possibly expect the law to proactively regulate AI before we know what it is? Because at this point we don't know what it is, its an evolving thing just like the internet was when it first came out. Frankly it's disappointing that drivel like this can make it onto the front page of HackerNews.
- rchaud 8y ago
  > So the guardian, a member of the media, is telling us that the media are unwittingly selling an AI fantasy? No, it is an opinion piece written by an academic that summarizes the findings of a research study of how media outlets covered AI in their articles.
chobeat 8y ago
I suggest this reading to anybody interested in this topic: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3078224 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3078224 It tracks the history of this narrative and explains who profits from it. This phenomenon has a clear political and ideological root and both journalists, politicians and engineers should fight against it together. If you want to explore more related topics there's plenty of related content in a reading list I've been developing in the last few months: https://github.com/chobeat/awesome-critical-tech-reading-list https://github.com/chobeat/awesome-critical-tech-reading-lis...
- klibertp 8y ago
  From the abstract: > In practice, the confusion around AI’s capacities serves as a pretext for imposing more metrics upon human endeavors and advancing traditional neoliberal policies. The revived AI, like its predecessors, seeks intelligence with a “view from nowhere” (disregarding race, gender, and class) — which can also be used to mask institutional power in visions of AI-based governance. Later: > The manufactured AI revolution has created the false impression that current systems have surpassed human abilities to the point where many areas of life, from scientific inquiry to the court system, might be best run by machines. However, these claims are predicated on a narrow and radically empiricist view of human intelligence. It’s a view that lends itself to solving profitable data analysis tasks but leaves no place for the politics of race, gender, or class. Meanwhile, the confusion over AI’s capabilities serves to dilute critiques of institutional power. If AI runs society, then grievances with society’s institutions can get reframed as questions of “algorithmic accountability.” This move paves the way for AI experts and entrepreneurs to present themselves as the architects of society. This is implausible, to say the least. Isn't this basically a conspiracy theory? Not to mention, huge tech companies were already huge before the AI hype. I'm 4 pages in and I still don't know what's the author's point, other than promoting conspiracy theories and spreading FUD about AI.
  - chobeat 8y ago
    They are not conspirancy theories because they don't assume a concerted effort from these entities but just a common interest and their action converge to reinforce the same phenomenon. The author is a system biologist writing about sociology, so the paper should be read with the vocabulary of sociology, not of colloquial language.
NarcolepticFrog 8y ago
I agree with the sentiment that the discussion about AI and Machine Learning should not be entirely driven by industry. At the same time, this article seems to be a bit down on AI itself, and part of their message is that AI doesn't provide "relevant and competent" solutions to problems. It also sounds like they are writing off real work (both in industry and academia) focusing on real ethical concerns with AI and what can be done to address them (e.g., the FAT* conference, a growing number of sessions on fairness, privacy, and other related topics at NeurIPS and ICML, etc). I think the most important issue is educating the general public about AI and giving them familiarity with what types of things are automatable, what things can be learned from their data, where and how AI is being used in the real world currently, etc. A big part of this is to have the mainstream media be a bit more self-guided. A final thought: one of the suggestions from the Reuter's article is that we should hear more from scientists and activists in the media. This seems a bit troubling to me, since in ML and AI research there are very strong ties between academia and industry (and often people move fairly freely between the two). I'm not sure we would hear a significantly different narrative if we talked to researchers in academia...
- CuriousSkeptic 8y ago
  there is this humor show (the fix, on Netflix) where they were supposed to “fix” AI. I think it’s quite telling that the entire show instead ended up talking about robotics. I don’t think any of the participants reflects at all on how AI is used today in the systems they interact with. So that’s probably the first step in educating the public. Find a basic mental framework for thinking about AI that doesn’t involve robots or skynet.
  - NarcolepticFrog 8y ago
    That's a really interesting point - it does seem like most people immediately jump to skynet or our robot overlords whenever the topic of AI comes up. I don't have any really solid suggestions for what a good mental framework for thinking about AI would be, but I think giving an alternative to these unrealistic versions would be super helpful.
chobeat 8y ago
The problem is that researchers and engineers rarely engage in the public debate except if they need to drive corporative interests. The debate sees corporations and the tech elite on one side and artists, activists and philosophers on the other, with journalists split between the two. Engineers are used by either side but they don't have their own voice and mostly because they don't have informed opinions or the cultural means and interest to join a non-technical debate as a cohesive force. The result is that the whole debate is conducted mostly by people that has no idea how this stuff really works and cannot separate marketing mumbo jumbo from the actual practice of building "AI" systems. It's therefore very refreshing to see the work of artists like Hito Steyerl or ssbkyh that actually learn how to work with Deep Learning or other techniques to actually create critique of the existing narrative.
- NarcolepticFrog 8y ago
  I whole-heartedly agree. This is one of the reasons I think that education about AI and ML is important (and, on the flip side, I also think that it wouldn't hurt to educate AI and ML researchers/engineers about humanist issues so that they can participate in non-technical debate).
  - sanxiyn 8y ago
    I found there's not much to learn about "humanist" issues, in the sense of background knowledge of consensus of the field. United States and North Korea agree on nuclear physics: they use the exactly same number for cross section. They don't agree much on humanist issues.
    - RodericDay 8y ago
      the USA is the only country that has murdered innocent people with nuclear weapons
    - chobeat 8y ago
      "humanist issues" are about the management (not the solution) of unsolvable disagreements. The knowledge is different in nature from scientific knowledge but for no reason should it be considered inferior. By thinking this way you just exclude yourself from any discourse and just hinder your condition.
dwiel 8y ago
Replace AI with Science and the articles points are all pretty much the same. The media reports on cancer cures, new batteries and energy tech, etc all the time. It's the same thing. Grand visions, money to be made, stories to sell.
thanatropism 8y ago
I'm just going to leave this picture of the elephant in the living-room: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubert_Dreyfus%27s_views_on_artificial_intelligence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubert_Dreyfus%27s_views_on_ar...
- B1FF_PSUVM 8y ago
  Eh, this week Scott Adams' Dilbert has been going that way: https://dilbert.com/strip/2019-01-10 https://dilbert.com/strip/2019-01-10 https://dilbert.com/strip/2019-01-12 https://dilbert.com/strip/2019-01-12
jayd16 8y ago
Is this a real issue though? The article skips past what the problem is and focuses on why it exists by accusing the tech industry of writing articles about tech. Besides the philosophical argument of whether pattern matching counts as AI is there really a problem here? I have not heard of anyone effected by AI becoming a buzzword. Products are still evaluated on what they can actually do, so who cares? Siri and Google can now take voice commands. I don't know of anyone who actually expected an intellectual conversation. They were never marketed as such.
- skywhopper 8y ago
  Actually it is somewhat dangerous in that once politicians buy in, they start pursuing policies built around the assumption that this sort of thing is real. Billions will be wasted on military projects pursuing AI-enabled features that are nowhere close to being ready; police are blowing money on facial recognition systems based on misleading stats; and we already see local and national governments salivating over self-driving cars as a solution to public transportation woes. Tax money is and will continue to be given away to corporations who are selling the snake oil of self driving cars rather than that money being invested in real solutions for public transit, or even basic maintenance.
throw2016 8y ago
Everyone reading here knows there is no 'AI' but are happy to peddle or sit back and watch as pattern matching used to identify nudity is wildly hyped up as 'AI'. This is the same kind of fraud as Theranos was guilty of. There is nothing in the current programming paradigm to create an 'AI' as the 'world understands the term' but individuals and groups blinded by profit and greed are 'growth hacking' redefining and blurring the meaning of words to suit their commercial agendas. The technical community at large would come out against this kind of widespread misinformation and abuse but they don't as everyone is looking for a gig, job, contract or more ominously some 'illusory power'. But that doesn't make it any less abusive of discourse. How can we make an AI when we don't even understand human intelligence properly. What in current programming language allows you to create anything that can 'think' and make decisions. How is processing data and matching patterns 'thinking' or AI is any way or form? A culture of hubris is seeing programmers constantly engaged in hype and overestimating their tools while underestimating basic human intelligence required for even mundane tasks like driving. But once you redefine and twist words they lose all meaning for communication and in the end you lose all credibility, but this seems to be a gold rush and as long as some have made money on the way who cares. If AI happens it will be from decades of hard research in the scientific community like how all breakthroughs happen, not in the trade.
doose_droppa 8y ago
A database parser, is not AI, it is a parser. when a script, compares realworld cause effect relationships to database parses then rewrites the database to accurately resemble real life this is the beginning of AI. learning is an aspect of intelligence and they both feedback to eachother in a less than simple manner. i think Machine Learning is the glimmer of the holygrail being glimpsed.
tim333 8y ago
>...it goes like this...on balance AI will be good for humanity. Oh – and by the way – its progress is unstoppable ... The truly extraordinary thing, therefore, is how many apparently sane people seem to take the narrative as a credible version of humanity’s future. I don't see what's extraordinary at all. AI's coming and will probably be net good. There may be some inaccuracies in how it's reported and corporations are not all angels but for what field is that not true? Also he says Theresa May has drunk cool aid by agreeing to fund AI but what she's funding is machine learning for cancer detection which is getting results like this >In tests, it achieved an area under the receiver operating characteristic (AUC) — a measure of detection accuracy — of 99 percent. That’s superior to human pathologists, who according to one recent assessment miss small metastases on individual slides as much as 62 percent of the time when under time constraints. https://venturebeat.com/2018/10/12/google-ai-claims-99-accuracy-in-metastatic-breast-cancer-detection/ https://venturebeat.com/2018/10/12/google-ai-claims-99-accur... That's for metastatic breast cancer that kills 500,000 people a year. Overall Naughton's arguments seems a bit silly.
- xg15 8y ago
  To be fair though, those numbers are the results of a single evaluation of the algorithm against a single group of human experts: > In the setting of a challenge competition, some deep learning algorithms achieved better diagnostic performance than a panel of 11 pathologists participating in a simulation exercise designed to mimic routine pathology workflow; algorithm performance was comparable with an expert pathologist interpreting whole-slide images without time constraints. Whether this approach has clinical utility will require evaluation in a clinical setting. Certainly an impressive feat of image recognition, but far from revolutionising cancer diagnosis. It's also not clear to me that this would actually diagnose cancer more accurately if you factor in the ability of experts to consider other things than just the scans.
  - tim333 8y ago
    I guess so though it seems promising. Not quite sure how it'd work in real life. I've got two friends who went to the doctor with a headache and sore throat and were told it was nothing to worry about and then a year or two later found it was cancer - one died rapidly, one presently having a bunch of surgery. It would be good if there were a better way of screening that sort of stuff.
matthewfelgate 8y ago
What a stupid article. Attacks Theresa May for say AI will be good for healthcare; It will be.
agent008t 8y ago
Rule of thumb: if someone is talking about "AI" and not "Machine Learning", "Pattern Matching and Recognition", "Search heuristics" or "Statistics", it is most likely going to be bullshit.
- sanxiyn 8y ago
  On the other hand, OpenAI is not bullshit, so...
- bitminer 8y ago
  There are occasional readable pieces in the press... https://nationalpost.com/opinion/colby-cosh-rejected-by-a-robot-an-emerging-debate-over-ai-immigration https://nationalpost.com/opinion/colby-cosh-rejected-by-a-ro... TLDR: ML is like a credit score https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/11/06/andrew_fentem_on_ai/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/11/06/andrew_fentem_on_ai... (Granted the Register is not msm). TLDR: AI is oversold and surprisingly fragile. https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/02/02/mathematics_behind_ai/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/02/02/mathematics_behind_... TLDR: The progression from math to AI.

92 points by chobeat 8y ago

>> Why do people believe so much nonsense about AI? That is the central question. Why is it that people are prepared to believe in all the wild fantasies that the marketing arms of the tech industry come up with? Shouldn't the expectation be that the majority would instead be more cautious and avoid believing all the overblown promises, especially when they repeatedly fail to be fulfilled?

yters 8y ago
The materialist philosophy of mainstream science and academia makes this palatable.
matte_black 8y ago
They want to believe.
pfortuny 8y ago
Today we believe in SCIENCE (whatever that means). Hence, we believe what any of its priests says unless countered by other (more famous) priest.
- scottlegrand2 8y ago
  That seems counter to the narrative that led to the current holder of the highest office in the United States, no? Because if his fans believe in unquestioningly science then why do they disbelieve in a tapas selection of the following: climate change, evolution, vaccines, gravity, a round Earth, and/or whether the moon landing happened?
  - chobeat 8y ago
    It's a hot topic. One very good argument I've read recently is that most of what pro-science people label as "anti-scientific" statements like anti-vax stuff are made by people that don't refuse science as a whole but just science coming from what they perceive is a corrupted establishment. Clearly this involve cherry-picking that validates their ideological positions, or it's just following the twisted narrative of some political group. Science, with the capital S, is still society's reference framework for truth (and this is a huge problem, but not the one we are talking about) but these people refute the priests and the religion, not the God. New priests are bending the same God to their interests and the times favor them over the previous priests.
- c1ccccc1 8y ago
  Speak for yourself. I personally prefer to evaluate the statements of scientists on a claim by claim basis.
- mwfunk 8y ago
  I wish I could say that people believed in science. Priests (literal ones, not metaphorical ones like your strawmen) seem to have more influence over public policy in much of the world though, including America, and more often than not to the detriment of all.
  - noobiemcfoob 8y ago
    The benefit about being more honest about their role in society: they get to exploit it more thoroughly.
dmreedy 8y ago
Agreed. My pet theory is that it boils down to how superficially accessible AI is. A conversation about AI is kind of like Bikeshedding, except no one realizes it's actually a conversation about the Nuclear Power Plant. Everyone's got practical, direct experience with sentience, with thinking, with speaking a language, with seeing things. Everyone can introspect for a little bit and make genuine claims to having contemplated the fundamental problems of AI. And since so little genuine progress on the really fundamental parts of the problem (the Hard Problem, as Chalmers would say, versus the somewhat more tractable 'parsing problems' that Deep Learning has made such great gains on), the most frustrating part is that it's really hard to prove some amateur thinker's conclusions wrong. You can bury them with the technical jargon of three thousand years of philosophers, but no one's been able to build a formally verifiable model for the whole thing so far, and so amateurs and experts are in some sense separated only by how impressively technical they sound when talking about the matter. This problem is amplified by the technical jargon being painfully close to the technical jargon for philosophy of the mind, and to straight lay terminology. So a person with technical knowledge can talk about, say, 'training', and a person with no technical knowledge can think they understand, because the word is so ill-separated from their own internal, non-technical definition. It's so easy to have an opinion about AI, the fundamental ideas are so prevalent in day-to-day discourse, and it's so hard to prove any given opinion wrong.
Barrin92 8y ago
>Why is it that people are prepared to believe in all the wild fantasies that the marketing arms of the tech industry come up with? Because very influential people have thrown their weight into the discussion I would say. You have Kurzweil who basically predicts that the singularity is imminent every five years, and you had Musk and Hawking painting apocalyptic scenarios about AI. That dominated the AI pop news headlines for weeks if not months. On the other hand people like Andrew Ng or Kai-Fu Lee who actually work in the industry and draw attention to the socio-economic impact of AI, which is very real, seem to only find an audience within the community itself, if at all. The reason is probably twofold. Terminator-esque stories are more interesting than talking about the economic impact of AI, and the industry has a lot more to gain by distracting people with grandiose scenarios than by talking about the negative impact they have on the lives of working people and society at large.
- tim333 8y ago
  >You have Kurzweil who basically predicts that the singularity is imminent every five years Kurzweil has always predicted the singularity for 2045. He may be wrong but I don't find that prediction or Musk and Hawking say AI may be dangerous as wild fantasies. You can make reasoned arguments for all that stuff.

matt4077 8y ago

I guess such „counter-hype“ feels like an attractive position to many. Just like general cynicism seems to be the mindset of our times. Maybe because people think being contrarian and/or negative makes them appear smart? I don’t necessarily buy into any predictions of what machine learning will accomplish in the future. But just the examples already available today are quite stunning, especially in images and language. In any case, I don’t see how „the media“ is at fault here. I see far more „hype“ of AI among the tech community than the larger media outlets. The possibility that AI could transform our economies certainly exists, and it would seem prudent to nurture the debate about the future of work even in the abscence of certainty.

peterdavenport 8y ago
Your exactly right. This is just contrarian click-bait leveraging general cynicism.
chobeat 8y ago
What is the tech community? The CEOs or the engineers/researchers/data scientists? Because they are not by any means the same entity.

peterdavenport 8y ago

This sort of nonsense bothers me. So the guardian, a member of the media, is telling us that the media are unwittingly selling an AI fantasy? And the fantasy is that it's positive? Most of the news I see about AI is handwringingly pessimistic about AI being a disaster that will wipe out jobs and maybe the human race, which is the opposite of the thesis of the article. This sort of article is just trying to grab attention and took no thought to write, it has no substance, and took no research or deep insight to write. And the idea that somehow we can get Law before we work out the Ethics of AI? You cant just have fiat law pulled out of a hat that works? How can you possibly expect the law to proactively regulate AI before we know what it is? Because at this point we don't know what it is, its an evolving thing just like the internet was when it first came out. Frankly it's disappointing that drivel like this can make it onto the front page of HackerNews.

rchaud 8y ago
> So the guardian, a member of the media, is telling us that the media are unwittingly selling an AI fantasy? No, it is an opinion piece written by an academic that summarizes the findings of a research study of how media outlets covered AI in their articles.

chobeat 8y ago

I suggest this reading to anybody interested in this topic: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3078224 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3078224 It tracks the history of this narrative and explains who profits from it. This phenomenon has a clear political and ideological root and both journalists, politicians and engineers should fight against it together. If you want to explore more related topics there's plenty of related content in a reading list I've been developing in the last few months: https://github.com/chobeat/awesome-critical-tech-reading-list https://github.com/chobeat/awesome-critical-tech-reading-lis...

klibertp 8y ago
From the abstract: > In practice, the confusion around AI’s capacities serves as a pretext for imposing more metrics upon human endeavors and advancing traditional neoliberal policies. The revived AI, like its predecessors, seeks intelligence with a “view from nowhere” (disregarding race, gender, and class) — which can also be used to mask institutional power in visions of AI-based governance. Later: > The manufactured AI revolution has created the false impression that current systems have surpassed human abilities to the point where many areas of life, from scientific inquiry to the court system, might be best run by machines. However, these claims are predicated on a narrow and radically empiricist view of human intelligence. It’s a view that lends itself to solving profitable data analysis tasks but leaves no place for the politics of race, gender, or class. Meanwhile, the confusion over AI’s capabilities serves to dilute critiques of institutional power. If AI runs society, then grievances with society’s institutions can get reframed as questions of “algorithmic accountability.” This move paves the way for AI experts and entrepreneurs to present themselves as the architects of society. This is implausible, to say the least. Isn't this basically a conspiracy theory? Not to mention, huge tech companies were already huge before the AI hype. I'm 4 pages in and I still don't know what's the author's point, other than promoting conspiracy theories and spreading FUD about AI.
- chobeat 8y ago
  They are not conspirancy theories because they don't assume a concerted effort from these entities but just a common interest and their action converge to reinforce the same phenomenon. The author is a system biologist writing about sociology, so the paper should be read with the vocabulary of sociology, not of colloquial language.

NarcolepticFrog 8y ago

I agree with the sentiment that the discussion about AI and Machine Learning should not be entirely driven by industry. At the same time, this article seems to be a bit down on AI itself, and part of their message is that AI doesn't provide "relevant and competent" solutions to problems. It also sounds like they are writing off real work (both in industry and academia) focusing on real ethical concerns with AI and what can be done to address them (e.g., the FAT* conference, a growing number of sessions on fairness, privacy, and other related topics at NeurIPS and ICML, etc). I think the most important issue is educating the general public about AI and giving them familiarity with what types of things are automatable, what things can be learned from their data, where and how AI is being used in the real world currently, etc. A big part of this is to have the mainstream media be a bit more self-guided. A final thought: one of the suggestions from the Reuter's article is that we should hear more from scientists and activists in the media. This seems a bit troubling to me, since in ML and AI research there are very strong ties between academia and industry (and often people move fairly freely between the two). I'm not sure we would hear a significantly different narrative if we talked to researchers in academia...

CuriousSkeptic 8y ago
there is this humor show (the fix, on Netflix) where they were supposed to “fix” AI. I think it’s quite telling that the entire show instead ended up talking about robotics. I don’t think any of the participants reflects at all on how AI is used today in the systems they interact with. So that’s probably the first step in educating the public. Find a basic mental framework for thinking about AI that doesn’t involve robots or skynet.
- NarcolepticFrog 8y ago
  That's a really interesting point - it does seem like most people immediately jump to skynet or our robot overlords whenever the topic of AI comes up. I don't have any really solid suggestions for what a good mental framework for thinking about AI would be, but I think giving an alternative to these unrealistic versions would be super helpful.

chobeat 8y ago

The problem is that researchers and engineers rarely engage in the public debate except if they need to drive corporative interests. The debate sees corporations and the tech elite on one side and artists, activists and philosophers on the other, with journalists split between the two. Engineers are used by either side but they don't have their own voice and mostly because they don't have informed opinions or the cultural means and interest to join a non-technical debate as a cohesive force. The result is that the whole debate is conducted mostly by people that has no idea how this stuff really works and cannot separate marketing mumbo jumbo from the actual practice of building "AI" systems. It's therefore very refreshing to see the work of artists like Hito Steyerl or ssbkyh that actually learn how to work with Deep Learning or other techniques to actually create critique of the existing narrative.

NarcolepticFrog 8y ago
I whole-heartedly agree. This is one of the reasons I think that education about AI and ML is important (and, on the flip side, I also think that it wouldn't hurt to educate AI and ML researchers/engineers about humanist issues so that they can participate in non-technical debate).
- sanxiyn 8y ago
  I found there's not much to learn about "humanist" issues, in the sense of background knowledge of consensus of the field. United States and North Korea agree on nuclear physics: they use the exactly same number for cross section. They don't agree much on humanist issues.
  - RodericDay 8y ago
    the USA is the only country that has murdered innocent people with nuclear weapons
  - chobeat 8y ago
    "humanist issues" are about the management (not the solution) of unsolvable disagreements. The knowledge is different in nature from scientific knowledge but for no reason should it be considered inferior. By thinking this way you just exclude yourself from any discourse and just hinder your condition.

dwiel 8y ago

Replace AI with Science and the articles points are all pretty much the same. The media reports on cancer cures, new batteries and energy tech, etc all the time. It's the same thing. Grand visions, money to be made, stories to sell.

thanatropism 8y ago

I'm just going to leave this picture of the elephant in the living-room: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubert_Dreyfus%27s_views_on_artificial_intelligence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubert_Dreyfus%27s_views_on_ar...

B1FF_PSUVM 8y ago
Eh, this week Scott Adams' Dilbert has been going that way: https://dilbert.com/strip/2019-01-10 https://dilbert.com/strip/2019-01-10 https://dilbert.com/strip/2019-01-12 https://dilbert.com/strip/2019-01-12

jayd16 8y ago

Is this a real issue though? The article skips past what the problem is and focuses on why it exists by accusing the tech industry of writing articles about tech. Besides the philosophical argument of whether pattern matching counts as AI is there really a problem here? I have not heard of anyone effected by AI becoming a buzzword. Products are still evaluated on what they can actually do, so who cares? Siri and Google can now take voice commands. I don't know of anyone who actually expected an intellectual conversation. They were never marketed as such.

skywhopper 8y ago
Actually it is somewhat dangerous in that once politicians buy in, they start pursuing policies built around the assumption that this sort of thing is real. Billions will be wasted on military projects pursuing AI-enabled features that are nowhere close to being ready; police are blowing money on facial recognition systems based on misleading stats; and we already see local and national governments salivating over self-driving cars as a solution to public transportation woes. Tax money is and will continue to be given away to corporations who are selling the snake oil of self driving cars rather than that money being invested in real solutions for public transit, or even basic maintenance.

throw2016 8y ago

Everyone reading here knows there is no 'AI' but are happy to peddle or sit back and watch as pattern matching used to identify nudity is wildly hyped up as 'AI'. This is the same kind of fraud as Theranos was guilty of. There is nothing in the current programming paradigm to create an 'AI' as the 'world understands the term' but individuals and groups blinded by profit and greed are 'growth hacking' redefining and blurring the meaning of words to suit their commercial agendas. The technical community at large would come out against this kind of widespread misinformation and abuse but they don't as everyone is looking for a gig, job, contract or more ominously some 'illusory power'. But that doesn't make it any less abusive of discourse. How can we make an AI when we don't even understand human intelligence properly. What in current programming language allows you to create anything that can 'think' and make decisions. How is processing data and matching patterns 'thinking' or AI is any way or form? A culture of hubris is seeing programmers constantly engaged in hype and overestimating their tools while underestimating basic human intelligence required for even mundane tasks like driving. But once you redefine and twist words they lose all meaning for communication and in the end you lose all credibility, but this seems to be a gold rush and as long as some have made money on the way who cares. If AI happens it will be from decades of hard research in the scientific community like how all breakthroughs happen, not in the trade.

doose_droppa 8y ago

A database parser, is not AI, it is a parser. when a script, compares realworld cause effect relationships to database parses then rewrites the database to accurately resemble real life this is the beginning of AI. learning is an aspect of intelligence and they both feedback to eachother in a less than simple manner. i think Machine Learning is the glimmer of the holygrail being glimpsed.

tim333 8y ago

>...it goes like this...on balance AI will be good for humanity. Oh – and by the way – its progress is unstoppable ... The truly extraordinary thing, therefore, is how many apparently sane people seem to take the narrative as a credible version of humanity’s future. I don't see what's extraordinary at all. AI's coming and will probably be net good. There may be some inaccuracies in how it's reported and corporations are not all angels but for what field is that not true? Also he says Theresa May has drunk cool aid by agreeing to fund AI but what she's funding is machine learning for cancer detection which is getting results like this >In tests, it achieved an area under the receiver operating characteristic (AUC) — a measure of detection accuracy — of 99 percent. That’s superior to human pathologists, who according to one recent assessment miss small metastases on individual slides as much as 62 percent of the time when under time constraints. https://venturebeat.com/2018/10/12/google-ai-claims-99-accuracy-in-metastatic-breast-cancer-detection/ https://venturebeat.com/2018/10/12/google-ai-claims-99-accur... That's for metastatic breast cancer that kills 500,000 people a year. Overall Naughton's arguments seems a bit silly.

xg15 8y ago
To be fair though, those numbers are the results of a single evaluation of the algorithm against a single group of human experts: > In the setting of a challenge competition, some deep learning algorithms achieved better diagnostic performance than a panel of 11 pathologists participating in a simulation exercise designed to mimic routine pathology workflow; algorithm performance was comparable with an expert pathologist interpreting whole-slide images without time constraints. Whether this approach has clinical utility will require evaluation in a clinical setting. Certainly an impressive feat of image recognition, but far from revolutionising cancer diagnosis. It's also not clear to me that this would actually diagnose cancer more accurately if you factor in the ability of experts to consider other things than just the scans.
- tim333 8y ago
  I guess so though it seems promising. Not quite sure how it'd work in real life. I've got two friends who went to the doctor with a headache and sore throat and were told it was nothing to worry about and then a year or two later found it was cancer - one died rapidly, one presently having a bunch of surgery. It would be good if there were a better way of screening that sort of stuff.

matthewfelgate 8y ago

What a stupid article. Attacks Theresa May for say AI will be good for healthcare; It will be.

agent008t 8y ago

Rule of thumb: if someone is talking about "AI" and not "Machine Learning", "Pattern Matching and Recognition", "Search heuristics" or "Statistics", it is most likely going to be bullshit.

sanxiyn 8y ago
On the other hand, OpenAI is not bullshit, so...
bitminer 8y ago
There are occasional readable pieces in the press... https://nationalpost.com/opinion/colby-cosh-rejected-by-a-robot-an-emerging-debate-over-ai-immigration https://nationalpost.com/opinion/colby-cosh-rejected-by-a-ro... TLDR: ML is like a credit score https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/11/06/andrew_fentem_on_ai/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/11/06/andrew_fentem_on_ai... (Granted the Register is not msm). TLDR: AI is oversold and surprisingly fragile. https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/02/02/mathematics_behind_ai/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/02/02/mathematics_behind_... TLDR: The progression from math to AI.