[philipodonnell]

The comments here seem to focus on the specific examples, but this misses the point of the article, which I take to be that _every_ new product or feature, no matter how minor or how incremental, is treated as the second coming of the 100x engineer and the cheering crowds hand-picked to promote whatever they see aren't helping by covering it rabidly.

He's not wrong, but I've heard that complaint about the tech press in general for years, so I'm not sure its bringing anything new to the table on HN.

But at the same time, "some of these will surely turn out to be revolutionary eventually" isn't a great excuse to treat everything as revolutionary before it has a chance to even be seen in the field.

[TheOtherHobbes]

I don't think the messianic cheering is the real problem.

Here's a short and not very complete list of unsolved meta-problems:

Even when products and systems are revolutionary, there are unexpected negative consequences (e.g. FB and Cambridge Analytica)

All systems can be trolled and abused, and if they can be, they will be (e.g. fake reviews on Amazon etc.)

AI doesn't actually work all that well yet. (Neither Siri nor Alexa truly pass a conversational Turing test, which means there's a lot of guessing about whether or not any novel request will generate a useful response.)

IT systems and products of all kinds are brittle, unreliable, and often downright stupid. Users don't trust updates and feature changes, and often they're right to do so. Given that, why would AI "products" be any better or more reliable?

[icc97]

> AI doesn't actually work all that well yet. (Neither Siri nor Alexa truly pass a conversational Turing test...)

When we pass the Turing test it means we've got actual AI.

But I'm not sure there'll ever be a clear line. So Duplex kind of passes it in a very narrow context. Whether or not the person at the end of the line was actually fooled or not is a slightly different question. They could have just been humouring what they figured was a weird automated system.

But it's not like Google won't improve exponentially with this. They've now got a basic AI conversation system that they hope people will use and feed it data of actual conversations.

So Duplex v2 will have an expanded system where they can handle ten times the number of scenarios and questions.

The more I think about it, the more impressive it seems. Most attempts at a Turing test are text only where the subject is supposed to be a 13yo immigrant boy. Here Google's jumping straight to voice conversations.

[TheOtherHobbes]

I don't think there's a clear line either. Even the Turing Test is notional - a conversation with a high schooler is going to be easier to fake than a conversation with an English professor.

I can imagine in the future there will be some kind of approximate conversational AI rating analogous to Flesch-Kincaid for text.

But I left a problem off my list, which is that we unconsciously demand AI should be better than average human performance.

If you monitor your conversations with people, you'll find there are regular misses where one person either mishears words, doesn't understand what's said, or misinterprets a subtext.

We cut human conversations a lot of slack. We're used to thinking of humans as independent agents, and there are social conventions about asking for more information and admitting - or sometimes denying - mistakes.

But there's an unconscious expectation that AI should operate at a better-than-human level before it's considered reliable.

We're more likely to think "Stupid machine!" if something isn't understood than we would with a human. So AI will have to cross the Uncanny Turning Valley before we really trust it. And because we're dealing with automated interpretations of human agency, errors will be harder to forgive.

You can already see this with driverless cars, where any accident is considered a failure. Even though statistically an AI may be much safer than the average human, it's not considered good enough unless it can deal with situations that an average human would have no hope of dealing with.

[icc97]

> we unconsciously demand AI should be better than average human performance.

Yeah I agree it's an unfair demand.

Especially given how much more powerful human brains are than computers we should perhaps be having a go a humans for not trying hard enough.

The wins of things like Go and Chess by computers has been down played because humans 'only' learned that stuff 100,000 years ago.

Personally I think that driverless cars work better as passive systems that augment humans for the moment rather than the dodgy crossover that is Autopilot. I think that car AIs can be trained to deal with extreme circumstances by running simulations of crashes millions of times over and then they're capable of taking over if the driver ever becomes unwell or hits black ice.

But this is all temporary, as soon as their vision systems match humans they will only ever improve over what we have. This Stanford self-driving car sliding between four perfect donuts is amazing [0].

[0]: https://youtu.be/LDprUza7yT4?t=31m38s

[acdha]

> Neither Siri nor Alexa truly pass a conversational Turing test

Even with the constrained grammar, neither of them passes the test of reliably producing the same result for the same phrase under good conditions. If the error rate is well into the double digits for simple structured queries using a constrained vocabulary it seems like the Turing test is still pretty far off.

[Clubber]

New and improved Tide. New formula! Better than ever! I think that's just the hyperbole of marketing. Most people should be immune now. That's probably why marketers target youngsters so much; most haven't caught on to the enormity of the BS just yet.

[tabtab]

Re: "some of these will surely turn out to be revolutionary eventually" -- It may be true, but the real question is do YOU want to be the guinea pig to test them. Unless your job or shop is R&D, it's usually best to let other companies kick the tires; get the kinks out; and most importantly, test it for your particular domain.

Domain-mismatch is a common problem: something is expanding rapidly, but in the end doesn't work on many or most niches. One size does NOT fit all.

An example is the no-sql movement. People started writing ALL new applications with it, thinking "it's the future". Turns out the regular RDBMS are still the better option 98%+ of the time. "Microservices" are a similar boondoggle. Make sure you really need it.

[sharemywin]

I think it's the scale. Be in love with the future products we're using your money to play with don't focus on our actual products because they're really just more expensive than before(no control over life cycle, same features as before) and don't actually add much value but have huge margins.

[tim333]

If his point is that "_every_ new product or feature, no matter how minor or how incremental, is treated as the second coming" then he's picked a bad example in Google Duplex in that it does seem noteable - the HN coverage was the second highest voted and most commented story this month (1875 points, 750 comments). It's not that booking hairdresser is a big deal - it's not. It's that it seems kind of half way between Siri and passing the Turing test which is a big deal.

[Trundle]

Claques are nothing new. People have been rigging crowds for a very long time. It certainly doesn't seem newsworthy to me that tech is doing it.

[kei929]

Look at all the hours we get to spend on making voice apps that make phone calls when both sides having access to quickly update the ledger is already a thing: calendars

So instead of debating solutions to local needs with neighbors, we fetishize juicing Googles stock price and enabling them to build things that mathematicians already figured out the theory and limits to years ago

This is nonsense.

It’s one thing to theorize the Higgs and build an LHC

It’s another to build chat bots with our time so we can avoid menial scheduling.

Feed people misdirection about how the economy needs this cause we’re all too dumb to figure out our own lives (translation: elites lose power if we do that) and you keep getting these stupid generational pyramid schemes: we buy in now on some vague promise of a future payout we’ll not be around to collect on

Corporate is the church now. Love it or be ostricized.

[DylanDmitri]

While your points on the economy are valid, I disagree with your take on Duplex.

Duplex isn't about scheduling or calendars, it's about robots conversing with humans. It's proof of concept, a stepping stone on the path to general artificial intelligence.