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Me too. HN's anti-hype sentiment seems to be winning. Perhaps HN doesnt realise how harsh an AI winter will be: billions in funding will vanish. PhD's staking

Me too. HN's anti-hype sentiment seems to be winning. Perhaps HN doesnt realise how harsh an AI winter will be: billions in funding will vanish. PhD's staking their careers in this area will find no jobs, etc. This has happened twice before in largely identical ways (self-driving cars, ad-tech companies, university research propaganda -- 50s and 80s).

svara 5y ago
I think it's more nuanced - I agree there's no clear road to AGI like some would like you to believe, on the other hand there are new and useful techniques that are real. Those PhDs may not have the stellar careers the they might currently expect, but they'll find plenty of work building automation and assistance systems for "boring" existing workflows. Things like making your IDE a bit better, making some data entry jobs redundant, automating quality checks in increasingly complex cases, assisting in biomedical image interpretation ... These things provide essentially a lower bound for how bad the "winter" might be.
- mjburgess 5y ago
  PhDs in this area are sufficiently embedded into generic technical industrial practice, perhaps unlike early eras. > assisting in biomedical image interpretation I suspect there's going to be a (counter-)renaissance of expertise and anti-tech sentiment because of gross technical failures in these areas. I think tech budgets into these projects are presently so massive, and so unlikely to deliver on an ROI, that reputations here are going to be destroyed. So the question is what the nature of this counter-reaction will be. I suspect, within the decade, people will be hiding "AI" from their CVs and describing all the python/data-eng they were doing.
axelroze 5y ago
There is no certainty of an AI winter, let alone of it's harshness. Quantum computing and quantum machine learning are here and they could sustain the ecosystem for this next decade as ANNs did the last one. Money will vanish as it did in the 1999 crash for overvalued stocks. This might happen for self-driving cars and other too hyped products. But AI research will continue and be well funded. FAANGs are not going anywhere and they will push AI as much as they can. For example AWS has the Bracket service for quantum computing and quantum ML via PennyLane. This will hit mainstream in the next few years. In the worst case we will have (approximate) human level intelligence by brain simulation. This will likely remain in Academia and be less paid than FAANG AI projects but will stay here. In 10 to 20 years we might see it getting mainstream. It is still a very exciting field. Hype will die down and some money with it but AI careers will not be threatened at large.
- mjburgess 5y ago
  > Hype will die down Alas, I think everything in your comment is hype. > Quantum computing and quantum machine learning Harsher news for QC i'm afraid -- there are no quantum computers, and there aren't going to be any for decades -- and even when we have them, they'll be highly specialised devices offering limited generic commercial use. > In the worst case we will have (approximate) human level intelligence by brain simulation I don't know what this means. But there's not going to be any meaningful advances in machine intelligence within a century, and I don't see AGI within a couple hundred years. Intelligence is all about devices, and their interaction with the environment. It seems highly likely to me that the real-time top-down and bottom-up adaption of organic cellular systems will be central to the creation of really-existing intelligence.
dsr_ 5y ago
On the other hand, make a boringly criticism of a cryptocurrency (say, "No stablecoin is worth anything unless it can show a recent third-party audit that says exactly what and where their backing assets are and that the processes for handling those assets are up to best accounting practices.") and see how far that gets you. Nothing about a bubble prevents other bubbles from forming at their own rate.

svara 5y ago

I think it's more nuanced - I agree there's no clear road to AGI like some would like you to believe, on the other hand there are new and useful techniques that are real. Those PhDs may not have the stellar careers the they might currently expect, but they'll find plenty of work building automation and assistance systems for "boring" existing workflows. Things like making your IDE a bit better, making some data entry jobs redundant, automating quality checks in increasingly complex cases, assisting in biomedical image interpretation ... These things provide essentially a lower bound for how bad the "winter" might be.

mjburgess 5y ago
PhDs in this area are sufficiently embedded into generic technical industrial practice, perhaps unlike early eras. > assisting in biomedical image interpretation I suspect there's going to be a (counter-)renaissance of expertise and anti-tech sentiment because of gross technical failures in these areas. I think tech budgets into these projects are presently so massive, and so unlikely to deliver on an ROI, that reputations here are going to be destroyed. So the question is what the nature of this counter-reaction will be. I suspect, within the decade, people will be hiding "AI" from their CVs and describing all the python/data-eng they were doing.

axelroze 5y ago

There is no certainty of an AI winter, let alone of it's harshness. Quantum computing and quantum machine learning are here and they could sustain the ecosystem for this next decade as ANNs did the last one. Money will vanish as it did in the 1999 crash for overvalued stocks. This might happen for self-driving cars and other too hyped products. But AI research will continue and be well funded. FAANGs are not going anywhere and they will push AI as much as they can. For example AWS has the Bracket service for quantum computing and quantum ML via PennyLane. This will hit mainstream in the next few years. In the worst case we will have (approximate) human level intelligence by brain simulation. This will likely remain in Academia and be less paid than FAANG AI projects but will stay here. In 10 to 20 years we might see it getting mainstream. It is still a very exciting field. Hype will die down and some money with it but AI careers will not be threatened at large.

mjburgess 5y ago
> Hype will die down Alas, I think everything in your comment is hype. > Quantum computing and quantum machine learning Harsher news for QC i'm afraid -- there are no quantum computers, and there aren't going to be any for decades -- and even when we have them, they'll be highly specialised devices offering limited generic commercial use. > In the worst case we will have (approximate) human level intelligence by brain simulation I don't know what this means. But there's not going to be any meaningful advances in machine intelligence within a century, and I don't see AGI within a couple hundred years. Intelligence is all about devices, and their interaction with the environment. It seems highly likely to me that the real-time top-down and bottom-up adaption of organic cellular systems will be central to the creation of really-existing intelligence.

dsr_ 5y ago

On the other hand, make a boringly criticism of a cryptocurrency (say, "No stablecoin is worth anything unless it can show a recent third-party audit that says exactly what and where their backing assets are and that the processes for handling those assets are up to best accounting practices.") and see how far that gets you. Nothing about a bubble prevents other bubbles from forming at their own rate.