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You didn't have to go for the jugular and do the brutal kill on the first hit, dude! > We want it to be true, so we squint and connect dots and it's true. Tha

You didn't have to go for the jugular and do the brutal kill on the first hit, dude! > We want it to be true, so we squint and connect dots and it's true. That's exactly the issue. You summarized it once and for all and we can all go home and stop discussing it now and forever (until we get a general AI that is). 1. Normal people want to have intelligent machines. They watch movies and series and imagine one day a robot will cook for them so they actively look for intelligence, as you said. They buy Roombas and imagine they are going to clean 100% of their rooms (seen it, heard it, watched them rage when it didn't happen). They buy Alexa-enabled devices and imagine themselves like some aristocrats barking orders at an intelligent home (lol). But yeah, that's what the normal people do. It's quite puzzling to me. 2. People who work in the area are obviously biased and I have argued with some of them here on HN but I view it as a doomed affair. They insist there's a lot of innovation going on and that improvements are being done all the time yet we still have embarrassing failures as Michele Obama classified as a male and various politicians classified as known criminals or black people in general classified as gorillas. Like OK, where are your precious improvements and why are they NEVER finding their way into the news? "It's hard to make someone understand something if their salary depends on them not understanding it", that's how I view the folks working in the DL / ML area. Sorry if that's offensive but just looking from the sidelines, it seems that what I say is true.

visarga 5y ago
> Michele Obama classified as a male Yes, humans don't make embarrassing mistakes all the time. We're only making dignified mistakes.
- throwawayboise 5y ago
  A good number of people will state that Michelle Obama is a male. I had no idea this was started by an AI misclassification (if indeed it was)
- pdimitar 5y ago
  If something is to replace humans at doing a job X then it has to be better than the humans at job X. Also humans instinctively expect the machines to not make mistakes. I haven't made them such; it's just a fact of life. And we have to work with the expectations of the bigger populace.
  - visarga 5y ago
    It's not necessary to be perfect, just useful.
    - pdimitar 5y ago
      I agree but I still question whether modern ML is useful at all. I mean OK, obviously it works quite well for China in order for their social credit score system to work (facial recognition almost everywhere you go) -- which is damned impressive, I'll give it that. But does it work in the benefit of the people at large? I've read a study a loooooong time ago, I think the late 90s, that stated that the amount of time people spend in the kitchen has not moved down at all. For all the praised innovation of technology, people still have to cut salads by hand -- or if they use the so-called kitchen robots that make the job quicker, you still aren't saving time because then cleaning the machine takes more than it took before (you had to just rinse the cutting board and the knife). If memory serves, Michael Crichton cited this study in the book "Jurassic Park" even... So I keep asking: where's the actually useful stuff? Are we going to be classifying kittens (or making a NN distinguish between those small rat-like dog faces from cookies) until civilization collapses? Where's the useful AI? When will I, a programmer that hates voice assistants (because I know how useless they are) and the idea of constant surveillance in my home, reap any tangible benefits from AI? But I suspect you'll cite various small improvements that are only known in small circles and will say "they'll be ready when they're ready" which, even though not wrong at all, will not be helpful.
      - lmm 5y ago
        I suspect that might be down to kitchen social dynamics (and/or carefully defined its terms to avoid counting pre-prepared food which is the real timesaver), because e.g. laundry has famously become something that consumes massively less time due to mechanisation. Being able to search through your photo library by person is a real improvement that ordinary people notice and use. (Also I think most technical people gave up on voice recognition back when it was overhyped and poor, and have thus missed out on what it can do when it's actually decent).
tootie 5y ago
Many years ago I wrote this spreadsheet import tool. One of the fields required data a little too rich to fit in single cell value so I came up an "encoding" that read like a sentence. It was sorta NLP but only understood one sentence worth of syntax. I thought it was some clever UX. Users thought they were talking to an AI. They'd just type whatever expression or thought they wanted in that field. And of course the parser would just choke.

visarga 5y ago

> Michele Obama classified as a male Yes, humans don't make embarrassing mistakes all the time. We're only making dignified mistakes.

throwawayboise 5y ago
A good number of people will state that Michelle Obama is a male. I had no idea this was started by an AI misclassification (if indeed it was)
pdimitar 5y ago
If something is to replace humans at doing a job X then it has to be better than the humans at job X. Also humans instinctively expect the machines to not make mistakes. I haven't made them such; it's just a fact of life. And we have to work with the expectations of the bigger populace.
- visarga 5y ago
  It's not necessary to be perfect, just useful.
  - pdimitar 5y ago
    I agree but I still question whether modern ML is useful at all. I mean OK, obviously it works quite well for China in order for their social credit score system to work (facial recognition almost everywhere you go) -- which is damned impressive, I'll give it that. But does it work in the benefit of the people at large? I've read a study a loooooong time ago, I think the late 90s, that stated that the amount of time people spend in the kitchen has not moved down at all. For all the praised innovation of technology, people still have to cut salads by hand -- or if they use the so-called kitchen robots that make the job quicker, you still aren't saving time because then cleaning the machine takes more than it took before (you had to just rinse the cutting board and the knife). If memory serves, Michael Crichton cited this study in the book "Jurassic Park" even... So I keep asking: where's the actually useful stuff? Are we going to be classifying kittens (or making a NN distinguish between those small rat-like dog faces from cookies) until civilization collapses? Where's the useful AI? When will I, a programmer that hates voice assistants (because I know how useless they are) and the idea of constant surveillance in my home, reap any tangible benefits from AI? But I suspect you'll cite various small improvements that are only known in small circles and will say "they'll be ready when they're ready" which, even though not wrong at all, will not be helpful.
    - lmm 5y ago
      I suspect that might be down to kitchen social dynamics (and/or carefully defined its terms to avoid counting pre-prepared food which is the real timesaver), because e.g. laundry has famously become something that consumes massively less time due to mechanisation. Being able to search through your photo library by person is a real improvement that ordinary people notice and use. (Also I think most technical people gave up on voice recognition back when it was overhyped and poor, and have thus missed out on what it can do when it's actually decent).

tootie 5y ago

Many years ago I wrote this spreadsheet import tool. One of the fields required data a little too rich to fit in single cell value so I came up an "encoding" that read like a sentence. It was sorta NLP but only understood one sentence worth of syntax. I thought it was some clever UX. Users thought they were talking to an AI. They'd just type whatever expression or thought they wanted in that field. And of course the parser would just choke.