I don't think most of ML papers are to be labeled science. But it's some kind of scholarship. Maybe engineering, maybe just reports of whatever people worked on

I don't think most of ML papers are to be labeled science. But it's some kind of scholarship. Maybe engineering, maybe just reports of whatever people worked on in the last 6 months and here's what happened. I don't know exactly what kind of knowledge you want. Cybernetics and AI from the 40s and 50s onwards didn't aim at learning the laws of intelligence like the laws of gravitation, they were practical goals of building a thing. Like the Manhattan project wasn't about leaning stuff but about going kaboom. Chomsky complains the same, that ChatGPT teaches us nothing about human language at all, it's not science, it's not advancing linguistics, but sure these things are good for captioning videos for those hard of hearing or translating between languages. And I'm like dude, nobody is stoked because they think we learned something about human language or the nature of intelligence. People are stoked because the computer can talk back at them. And again I get where you are coming from, I see the same picture but see the rabbit instead of the duck. I see it as very important and consequential that these things work so well. I'm very big on eyeballing. I don't need to measure the voltages under the hood and stare at the speedometer to tell whether a car runs or not, may it run on electricity, natural gas or petrol, the wheels are rolling and we get from A to B. Science isn't the outermost frame of existence, and has only been here for a few centuries. Journals and professional academia rat race of the shape as today, publish and perish etc, only since like half a century. The Romans built all their infrastructure without journals and h-indexes. I get it, the hype often goes too far. But I'm now contrarian about the contrarianism. Denying that translation or transcription or image segmentation etc don't work is an increasingly silly hill to die on. So many have moved on to say stuff like yeah it works, but it's biased, it is wasteful and has a big carbon footprint, or can fail suddenly and unexpectedly out of distribution. But denial doesn't help. I mean, the Internet wasn't a scientific discovery but TCP/IP, Ethernet and the Web still revolutionized society. Now maybe my grandma would deny this and say she gets by just fine gossiping with the neighbors and never using the Internet (though even her soap operas are delivered via IPTV). But just because it's not science, just "building stuff" it's still impactful. Don't be distracted by whether it fits a definition of science or not, that's a separate question from whether the thing works, by the definition of whether it gets jobs done that people want to get done and will pay for.