[swalsh]

This is dense, I think there are a few threads of reason though. The exaggeration in marketing common in tech is quite tumultuous. The AI behind duplex is a staggering technical achievement, and really is a small whistle at how AI is going to start to change some fundamental aspects of society. To say AI is not going to be a fundamental change to our literal society in the very near future is naive. But I can understand how the trivialness of the use case is playing down the real achievement here.

I do think though that AI is the last "fundamental" change information technologies will bring though. From here out, the future is in the convergence of other hard sciences with advanced IT. Each "Big thing" has been a fundamental building block. By themselves small, but they get significant as they combine.

[romaniv]

> I do think though that AI is the last "fundamental" change information technologies will bring though.

There are wast continents of mostly unexplored or abandoned territory in IT. Moreover, some of them are well documented. Some of them were documented in 1970s. The fact that IT professionals today don't know about them and can't imagine anything more significant than "AI" for pizza ordering, is unsettling. Just to name a few things Alan Kay often talks about:

- Automated system integration or tools for generalized interconnection of applications available to end users.

- WYSIWYG for the Web.

- Constraint-based problem-solvers accessible to mere mortals.

- Agent oriented programming with UI simple enough for normal people to use.

- Dynamic simulations in "normal" software (not CADs)

I am absolutely sickened by the fact that the most common response to this list is "nobody needs this". As far as I'm concerned, each of those things is needed orders of magnitude more than a haircut-scheduling AI.

[swalsh]

You misunderstand what I mean then. I view "AI" as a series of technologies which can be applied to a problem space. You're right in that there is a lot of open problem space, and there's definately a lot of additional technologies which can be discovered in the indivudal categories of technologies. I just don't know what the next "major" category of technology is.

For your example, automated system integration is the combination of existing technologies. That's mostly what I'm implying. We have breadth, now the work is on the depth.

[romaniv]

> automated system integration is the combination of existing technologies.

Which ones? As far as I can see, it's all manual right now. Service integration is probably the largest area of IT at the moment and it sucks in more and more engineers every year. So maybe the notion of "web services" and "APIs" simply aren't the right ways to go about it.

[new299]

What is the real technical achievement behind Duplex? What we've seen is a rather short tech demo.

Speech synthesis has improved, but are you saying that Duplex is a massive step forward in speech recognition and natural language processing too?

[beisner]

It’s a major payoff of a lot of small research advances made by Google over the last few years. In and of itself it’s not a terribly groundbreaking research result, but a bunch of parallel AI, NLP, and systems research had to go into this to take it from toy experience to what will eventually be a robust service. This is the promise of AI in the 2020s: incremental services that chip away at various low-cognition but high-variance/pattern-based tasks that litter our home and professional lives.