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Hits the nail on the head for me. I worked for a data analytics consultancy for about 6 months, filled with data scientist types - the statistics and decision

Hits the nail on the head for me. I worked for a data analytics consultancy for about 6 months, filled with data scientist types - the statistics and decision trees type. One of the bigger projects was looking at computer vision to get a robot to detect when a pipe was busted underwater. I asked the CTO about it and they said they were going to do it by teaching a mini off the shelf robot to locate a beer bottle in the office and transfer learn from there. I mentioned that would be highly unlikely for several reasons and was quickly ushered away from their pet project. Suffice to say they eventually had to negotiate the final project scope down just a bit to offline binary image classification (broken vs. not broken). So even a company filled with so called data scientists can fall into the trap of believing the snake oil. Addendum: not necessarily believing their own snake oil I suppose, totally possible that they were just naive about the capabilities after reading too many wired/ars articles.

antipaul 6y ago
Or they had no choice but to follow the AI strongman, I mean, CTO, because of bad culture. Culture eats strategy, after all.
- dijksterhuis 6y ago
  Less CTO AI Strongman, more underhanded/nuanced pressure in the form of this is a big pitch we could win and we're a small start up about to be acquired by a big conglomerate and it could affect how much we make from that deal from the MD and founders etc. Edit: I only joined the company because I thought they were above all the snake oil, turned out their oil was just a different color.
Aperocky 6y ago
Hahah I feel this story. This is entirely the case in too many places, and them trying to solve a problem that pressure gauges solved about 100 years ago.
bumby 6y ago
This is my big concern with autonomous driving. Namely, we have confused perpetually being on the cusp of solving a big problem (self-driving) because we’ve solved an important subset of that problem (perception)

antipaul 6y ago

Or they had no choice but to follow the AI strongman, I mean, CTO, because of bad culture. Culture eats strategy, after all.

dijksterhuis 6y ago
Less CTO AI Strongman, more underhanded/nuanced pressure in the form of this is a big pitch we could win and we're a small start up about to be acquired by a big conglomerate and it could affect how much we make from that deal from the MD and founders etc. Edit: I only joined the company because I thought they were above all the snake oil, turned out their oil was just a different color.

Aperocky 6y ago

Hahah I feel this story. This is entirely the case in too many places, and them trying to solve a problem that pressure gauges solved about 100 years ago.

bumby 6y ago

This is my big concern with autonomous driving. Namely, we have confused perpetually being on the cusp of solving a big problem (self-driving) because we’ve solved an important subset of that problem (perception)