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The PC was supposed to democratize computing. It did, and then Microsoft found a choke point. The internet was supposed to democratize communication. It did, an

The PC was supposed to democratize computing. It did, and then Microsoft found a choke point. The internet was supposed to democratize communication. It did, and then Google found a choke point. It seems like this two steps forward, one step back pattern might be the rule rather than the exception. Even the article defines AI democratization in terms of using models rather than training models, as the costs of training sophisticated models seems beyond the common developer even according to idealists. AI in particular seems to be a centralizing technology at this point, given that a model is often a black box to the user. The amount of data as well requires a massive telemetry apparatus, and designing likely models seems the province of people with PhDs. So yes I'm a bit pessimistic that AI will have a democratizing effect on technology or society, at least in the near future.

srtjstjsj 6y ago
> The PC was supposed to democratize computing It was?
- DSingularity 6y ago
  Yes. Before that it was mainframes and those who had access to $ who had access to computing.
- nl 6y ago
  Yes. The name gives it away. And Microsoft's mission for many years was "a computer in every home".
  - pixl97 6y ago
    "One ring to rule them all, and in the darkness bind them."
decasteve 6y ago
The airplane and the radio brought people closer. It also improved the coordination and delivery of mass destruction. Technology can be a rollercoaster ride of benefit and detriment.
- tobr 6y ago
  Technology is an amplifier of things we’re already doing. It’s easy to think of all the amazing things people are capable of, and imagine that new technology will help those amazing things flourish. But people are also capable of unspeakable cruelty. Depending on your outlook on humanity, that insight may or may not give you sympathy for neo-Luddites.
r7r73hdhdu 6y ago
This seems like the most cynical take possible, most of those choke points aren't really that firm anymore. Microsoft had a brief chokehold and then smartphones became the computer of the working class. Google is dominant in search but now they're competing against other megacorps who are investing heavily in catching up. All that's died is the naivety of the 80s and 90s that believed small mom and pops would somehow be outcompeting megacorps rather than serving as product development for them.
ssss11 6y ago
Isnt this just human nature? Not everyone is looking to improve the world and when they get power.. well, power corrupts. I’m equally pessimistic, not about new technologies but about who controls them - we need to empower societies not corporations.
ben_w 6y ago
How else would you define “AI democratization”? The fact I can even program puts me in an elite of less than 0.5% of the world population [0], and that includes all specialties not just AI. I do iPhone apps these days; even though I can follow the various tutorials for how to train an AI to recognise handwritten digits [1], I don’t actually grok the maths behind the back-propagation algorithm and why it’s better than, say, simulated annealing of the weights (which I do grok). True democracy puts the power in the hands of the masses; making it available to all developers and only developers is like giving the vote to only the richest half of all millionaires. Packaging AI into a simple magic black box makes it available to everyone. I don’t know if normal people have the right expectations of the tech for that to be generally wise, but that is a separate problem and black boxes are the only way I can see to achieve the goal. [0] https://www.daxx.com/blog/development-trends/number-software-developers-world https://www.daxx.com/blog/development-trends/number-software... [1] https://kitsunesoftware.wordpress.com/2018/03/16/speed-of-machine-intelligence/ https://kitsunesoftware.wordpress.com/2018/03/16/speed-of-ma...
- partingshots 6y ago
  What’s so difficult to understand about back propagation? All you’re doing is computing a derivative.
  - ben_w 6y ago
    If I could explain why it feels like a magic trick, it would immediately stop feeling like a magic trick. I can follow each of the steps in online lectures, tutorials, etc., but something about it never clicks.
    - david-gpu 6y ago
      Backpropagation is literally the chain rule of derivatives. Imagine you have a black box, such that when it produces an output, you can compare it against a target. The black box has a ton of little dials (weights) you can turn up or down, which affect what the output will be. Say the output of the box was too small relative to the target. Now you want to know how to tweak each of the dials (weights) to increase the output a little, so that next time the output will be closer to the target. How do you do that? You could do it by trial and error, changing one dial at a time to see how it affects the output (find the derivative of the output relative to the weight). That works but it is very inefficient. So, what if it was not a black box? What if you could peek into some of the circuitry right before the output is produced? There are fewer knobs there to tweak. More efficient! You could then figure out how sensitive the output is to each of those end-knobs (weight gradients), and even to the inputs to those end-knobs (activation gradients). Your life is getting easier. But wait, why stop there? Now that you know how the circuitry close to the end output works, you can repeat the same process iteratively working backwards towards the inputs of the black box (chain rule). In the process, you will know exactly how much each dial affects the final output. Instead of doing all this numerically by playing with the dials, you can do the same analytically if you know the (derivable) functions that compose this big box of dials. That's how it's done, basically.
darawk 6y ago
Neither Google nor Microsoft were or are actually choke points. The internet is plenty democratized. People simply choose to use a few big centralized services. They have the ability to use others. A democracy where everyone votes for the same candidate because they're the best candidate is still a democracy.
- tetris11 6y ago
  You could argue the losing net neutrality debate influences people to use the more centralised services, and the dominance of chrome pushes people towards more google-centric services
andreilys 6y ago
“The amount of data as well requires a massive telemetry apparatus, and designing likely models seems the province of people with PhDs.” Transfer learning takes care of your first point. The second is taken care of by the plethora of open source libraries such as fast.ai that abstract away most of the decisions one needs to make when creating a deep learning model. Oh did I also mention Kaggle and Google Collab offer free GPU to train your models, in addition to the thousands of publicly available datasets?
chosen1111 6y ago
Wonder what the chokepoint is for blockchain. And who will find it?
- m-p-3 6y ago
  Proof-of-work and the massive computing farms that belongs to a handful of miners would be a choke point, at least for Bitcoin?

srtjstjsj 6y ago

> The PC was supposed to democratize computing It was?

DSingularity 6y ago
Yes. Before that it was mainframes and those who had access to $ who had access to computing.
nl 6y ago
Yes. The name gives it away. And Microsoft's mission for many years was "a computer in every home".
- pixl97 6y ago
  "One ring to rule them all, and in the darkness bind them."

decasteve 6y ago

The airplane and the radio brought people closer. It also improved the coordination and delivery of mass destruction. Technology can be a rollercoaster ride of benefit and detriment.

tobr 6y ago
Technology is an amplifier of things we’re already doing. It’s easy to think of all the amazing things people are capable of, and imagine that new technology will help those amazing things flourish. But people are also capable of unspeakable cruelty. Depending on your outlook on humanity, that insight may or may not give you sympathy for neo-Luddites.

r7r73hdhdu 6y ago

This seems like the most cynical take possible, most of those choke points aren't really that firm anymore. Microsoft had a brief chokehold and then smartphones became the computer of the working class. Google is dominant in search but now they're competing against other megacorps who are investing heavily in catching up. All that's died is the naivety of the 80s and 90s that believed small mom and pops would somehow be outcompeting megacorps rather than serving as product development for them.

ssss11 6y ago

Isnt this just human nature? Not everyone is looking to improve the world and when they get power.. well, power corrupts. I’m equally pessimistic, not about new technologies but about who controls them - we need to empower societies not corporations.

ben_w 6y ago

How else would you define “AI democratization”? The fact I can even program puts me in an elite of less than 0.5% of the world population [0], and that includes all specialties not just AI. I do iPhone apps these days; even though I can follow the various tutorials for how to train an AI to recognise handwritten digits [1], I don’t actually grok the maths behind the back-propagation algorithm and why it’s better than, say, simulated annealing of the weights (which I do grok). True democracy puts the power in the hands of the masses; making it available to all developers and only developers is like giving the vote to only the richest half of all millionaires. Packaging AI into a simple magic black box makes it available to everyone. I don’t know if normal people have the right expectations of the tech for that to be generally wise, but that is a separate problem and black boxes are the only way I can see to achieve the goal. [0] https://www.daxx.com/blog/development-trends/number-software-developers-world https://www.daxx.com/blog/development-trends/number-software... [1] https://kitsunesoftware.wordpress.com/2018/03/16/speed-of-machine-intelligence/ https://kitsunesoftware.wordpress.com/2018/03/16/speed-of-ma...

partingshots 6y ago
What’s so difficult to understand about back propagation? All you’re doing is computing a derivative.
- ben_w 6y ago
  If I could explain why it feels like a magic trick, it would immediately stop feeling like a magic trick. I can follow each of the steps in online lectures, tutorials, etc., but something about it never clicks.
  - david-gpu 6y ago
    Backpropagation is literally the chain rule of derivatives. Imagine you have a black box, such that when it produces an output, you can compare it against a target. The black box has a ton of little dials (weights) you can turn up or down, which affect what the output will be. Say the output of the box was too small relative to the target. Now you want to know how to tweak each of the dials (weights) to increase the output a little, so that next time the output will be closer to the target. How do you do that? You could do it by trial and error, changing one dial at a time to see how it affects the output (find the derivative of the output relative to the weight). That works but it is very inefficient. So, what if it was not a black box? What if you could peek into some of the circuitry right before the output is produced? There are fewer knobs there to tweak. More efficient! You could then figure out how sensitive the output is to each of those end-knobs (weight gradients), and even to the inputs to those end-knobs (activation gradients). Your life is getting easier. But wait, why stop there? Now that you know how the circuitry close to the end output works, you can repeat the same process iteratively working backwards towards the inputs of the black box (chain rule). In the process, you will know exactly how much each dial affects the final output. Instead of doing all this numerically by playing with the dials, you can do the same analytically if you know the (derivable) functions that compose this big box of dials. That's how it's done, basically.

darawk 6y ago

Neither Google nor Microsoft were or are actually choke points. The internet is plenty democratized. People simply choose to use a few big centralized services. They have the ability to use others. A democracy where everyone votes for the same candidate because they're the best candidate is still a democracy.

tetris11 6y ago
You could argue the losing net neutrality debate influences people to use the more centralised services, and the dominance of chrome pushes people towards more google-centric services

andreilys 6y ago

“The amount of data as well requires a massive telemetry apparatus, and designing likely models seems the province of people with PhDs.” Transfer learning takes care of your first point. The second is taken care of by the plethora of open source libraries such as fast.ai that abstract away most of the decisions one needs to make when creating a deep learning model. Oh did I also mention Kaggle and Google Collab offer free GPU to train your models, in addition to the thousands of publicly available datasets?

chosen1111 6y ago

Wonder what the chokepoint is for blockchain. And who will find it?

m-p-3 6y ago
Proof-of-work and the massive computing farms that belongs to a handful of miners would be a choke point, at least for Bitcoin?