Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by seibelj 2584 days ago
I have been a big skeptic of self-driving cars and other AI promises for years, taking my downvotes as armchair futurists predicted a self-driving car would be picking me up any day now, well before it was popular to be a contrarian after Tesla and Uber killed their drivers. [0] [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] Also notice the original links have the breathless hype from journalists who know-nothing and eat up whatever technologists' PR firms tell them.

Huge VC money has been and will continue to be destroyed by "AI"-businesses. Most of them are a cover for hiring tons of cheap laborers, such as businesses in the Philippines that park thousands of people in warehouse offices to review images, despite "advances" in AI detection that continue to be unable to automatically block content.[7]

Artificial general intelligence, and self-driving cars as well, will continue to be a pipe dream. Automated statistical analysis, which is what neural-networks that crunch tons of data essentially are, are a very neat trick but cannot drive a car nor build you a website. They can be very powerful tools that assist people in their jobs, but they will not replace human ingenuity. At least not until a new breakthrough happens that actually learns, rather than sifts through data for patterns which has limited utility.

Our current type of "AI" is simply branding - it is nothing of the sort and it is not intelligence at all.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10153613#10153800

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11559393#11561600

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10132991#10133049

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12011979#12012336

[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12323039#12323473

[5] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12596978#12598439

[6] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13961802#13962230

[7] https://www.wired.com/2014/10/content-moderation/

2 comments

David Deutsch, father of the quantum computer, says that we can only automate and program something that we understand, and that we do not understand human intelligence or how creativity works. And AGI is not possible until we do.
> we can only automate and program something that we understand

I'm pretty sure no one really understands how Alphago Zero works, though - not really. Same goes for a lot of other neural network derived architectures.

We understand how to play games with defined rules. That’s the point.

Do you expect AlphaZero plus human advice to beat unaided AlphaZero? If so, it’s not a step towards AGI.

I just wish there were tools to analyze all the claims and projections against reality - just to identify who actually grasps a market reality. How do I find the Micheal Burry of AI?

Is there a way to short AI?

Perhaps there is a way to use prediction markets, like Augur, to short it.