[y1tan]

I predict the broader ML/DL community will keep pumping out iterative papers that push the ball just a little bit forward while maintaining job security : Gatekeeping, no one thinking outside of the box, benchmark putting, just enough for the appearance of progress, and nothing broadly innovative or disruptive. The applications of ML/DL will continue to be gimmicky consumer products that have questionable valuable, questionable profit potential, add even more to disinformation/misinformation, produce more informational noise, only serve to rebuff a big corp's cloud offerings, and waste people's time. I predict tons more 'bought' articles that hype up AI technology for the typical 'household' names. I predict the same ol' echo chamber of thought and reinforcement of 'gatekept' ideology. I expect a number of more prominent articles critiquing the shortfalls of the technology. I expect a number of young minds steeped in DL/ML coming to the realization that it's not what they expected... That its a big profit/revenue story for Universities and established corporate platforms. I expect a number of them to realize ML/DL is truly not "AI" or anything close to it. That they aren't doing cutting edge research and that they are not allowed to think outside of the echo chamber of 'approved' approaches.

I predict more useless chatbots that utter unpredictable word salads. I expect more gimmicky entertainment focused uses of it. I expect more assistants being adopted for data collection. I expect more people who aren't busy or doing anything important, using assistance assistants and text-to-speech to speed up their tasks so they can waste more of their time on social media/youtube/entertainment. Samsung Neon is coming out in some days.. making use of that 'Viv' acquisition.

I expect more feverish attempts at attacking low hanging fruit jobs with overly complex solutions. I predict failures in a number of startups targeting this. I predict no pronounced progress in self-driving cars nor any particular grand use for them. I predict several hollow attempts to overlay symbolic systems over ML/DL or integration attempts of it with ML/DL from prominent AI figures. I predict pronounced failures in this effort cementing a partial end to the hype of ML/DL.

I predict we will get a pronounced development outside of run-of-the-mill corporate/academic gatekept/walled garden ML/DL that will forge a new and higher path for AI. Hinton's words from prior years will have been heeded and the results of a new approach to AI presented. A change of guard, a break from the necessity of a PhD, a break from the echo-chamber of names, and a broader and more deeply thought out vision. Disruption not of low-hanging-fruit but disruption directed at the heart of the AI/Technology industry... So that we may finally progress from this stalled out disinformation/misinformation/hype/gatekeeping/cloud/all-your data-belongs-to-us cycle.

It's 2020 after-all, time for a new age.

[visarga]

Apparently there is nothing positive possible in AI, based on your predictions. Is there?

[y1tan]

Apparently, a lot of the positives are broadly overhyped because such hype and misrepresentation keep money in people's pockets, ventures overvalued, universities with a steady pipeline of warm bodies paying 40-50k a year, and a movement sustained. Apparently, you can't do this forever.

[The_rationalist]

Why would there be? Nobody has any sound roadmap on how to encode semantic meaning of words in a database. This preclude any hope of AGI.

[visarga]

Have you heard of word embeddings, and recently of contextual word embeddings based on attention?