[notahacker]

Popular economics and popular "AI" as described in the article both seem like situations where everybody with an idea to push cites popularisation of research conclusions without understanding the limitations to the models and people with actual expertise in the field are often happy to play along with these hyperbolic, caveat-free popularisations because it helps their end goals.

Sure, the economics profession and its popularisers might be a little more incentivised by political aims and AI research and AI's hypers and commercialisers a little more by money, but both fields suffer from the fact whilst researchers agonise over tradeoffs between tractability and predictive accuracy and fitting and overfitting and wonder whether the class of problem they're looking at is even soluble, the people with the most confidence in their assertions tend to get the column inches, even if they barely know what they're talking about.

I only wonder whether it will ultimately lead to similarly widespread middlebrow dismissals[1] of the entire field of AI...

[1]for the avoidance of doubt, not an accusation I'm levelling at the poster above

[iwintermute]

Wasn't it the case with the first AI winter? When the field was overhyped, oversold and then imploded?

[mcguire]

And the second.