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There's an article like this once a week because everyone is trying to stake their claim to "I predicted it" so that in 10-15 years they can retire on the confe

There's an article like this once a week because everyone is trying to stake their claim to "I predicted it" so that in 10-15 years they can retire on the conference circuit (ala yann lecun and bengio and all those others). Here's the truth: the future of AI is commitment completely unknown and not even at all certain - plenty of revolutionary technologies have fallen to wayside over the years. So to my fairly-educated-in-this-area mind I think we should stop listening to wannabe thought leaders (and even minted thought leaders) and just keep focused on our small parts.

heyitsguay 5y ago
This take is both overly cynical and downplays the contributions people like Lecun and Bengio have made to the field of machine learning, both through their own work and their academic progeny. I see you work broadly in the area, but I doubt your research touches on anything they've affected (that you know of) if you earnestly feel that way. This article's focus doesn't strike me as especially aligned with current problems in applied AI (how will self-organizing systems relate to prediction problems in NLP, tabular data, or computer vision?) but the connections to robotics are plausible, and in any case the tone doesn't come off as a wannabe thought leader trying to stake a claim, more like an excited learner who is really interested in some new ideas in a niche that may end up being narrower than they currently hope. I won't be assembling object detectors this way any time soon, but it was still a really pleasant read.