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Don’t forget that most of these engineers down in the trenches can’t see further than their battlefield. You actually need someone with vision and track record
by startupsfail 3y ago
Don’t forget that most of these engineers down in the trenches can’t see further than their battlefield.
You actually need someone with vision and track record of doing right predictions and placing right technology bets.
Ask engineers that had placed their bet on deep learning and generative models back when discriminative models and support vector machines were a rage of dat, a few years before Alexnet (I’m one of such engineers). I’d bet the answer will be different.
- ke88y 3y ago> Don’t forget that most of these engineers down in the trenches can’t see further than their battlefield. I don't think this is the case at all. I'm not primarily talking about a junior or even senior engineer with a decade of experience working on product features. On the contrary, many of these people have PhDs, have been leading research agendas in this field for decades, have been in senior leadership roles for a long time, have launched successful products, etc. etc. > Ask engineers that had placed their bet on deep learning and generative models back when discriminative models and support vector machines were a rage of dat, a few years before Alexnet (I’m one of such engineers). I’d bet the answer will be different. And at that time half of the "Great Minds And Great Leaders" prognosticating on X-Risk were doing social web or whatever else was peak hype cycle back then.
- jrumbut 3y ago> On the contrary, many of these people have PhDs, have been leading research agendas in this field for decades, have been in senior leadership roles for a long time, have launched successful products, etc. etc. Society should definitely hear from those whose careers depend on continued AI research (and I fall into this group myself), but we are a hopelessly biased group. Advancements in AI are going to change everyone's lives, so everyone deserves a say in this. For the last 20-30 years tech has raced ahead of our government and civic processes and we're starting to feel the consequences of that. New technologies are being experienced by people as changes that are inflicted upon them instead of new options open to them. They might have very little understanding of the technology, but everyone is the expert on what impact it is having on their lives. That's something that we shouldn't ignore.
- ke88y 3y agoFWIW, my bias leans the opposite direction. I benefit from AI risk hype. I agree with everything you said and I think exaggerating capabilities and risks distracts society from doing that important work.
- lacrimacida 3y agoCashing in on hype is short sighted and selfish.
- zone411 3y agoI agree. If you speak with ML engineers, many simply haven't deeply considered longer-term risks and things like self-improvement until recently. I think we'll see more concern, not less. For me personally, GPT-3 wasn't that surprising, but GPT-4 and code generation capabilities were.
- OkayPhysicist 3y agoIf you have a PHD, you scouted the battlefield.
- red-iron-pine 3y agoBut often a very small battlefield, and located away from other efforts. Literature reviews are meant to get broad down to the hyperfocused, and stay focused. But many of these issues are related to marketing, governance, economics, etc. I'm sure plenty of PhDs would love to weigh-in on those, but that's more "engineer's disease" than real expertise.
- dlkf 3y ago> You actually need someone with vision and track record of doing right predictions and placing right technology bets. Hofstadter does not exactly fit this description.
- TedDoesntTalk 3y agoWhy not? Serious question
- lacrimacida 3y agoI suspect OP that your respnding to thinks something like … Hofstadter is not known to have made himself uber-rich therefore he’s not worth taking advice from or something along those lines
- dlkf 3y agoWhat did he get right? While Hinton, LeCun, and others were laying the foundations of deep learning in the 80s, Hofstadter was writing expert systems in Lisp.
- lispm 3y agoJust for the record: Hinton was a Lisp user at some point in time. 1984 he got a Symbolics 3600. LeCun co-wrote Lush, a specialized Lisp for numerical computing. https://lush.sourceforge.net https://lush.sourceforge.net