[TrackerFF]

> Either you can only predict the types of failures you've already seen, or you can identify states you've never seen but you wouldn't know whether they mean the system is likely to fail soon or not.

Yup, this is something I've seen from both sides. First you mention is basically the standard, while the last is part of the deep learning voodoo black magic that executives and sales love.

I've had people approach me with proposals like "What if we just churn [ALL OF] our data through this or that model, and let's see if it comes up with some patterns we've never seen or thought about"

And that's not just for industrial applications. It's everywhere.

What is concerning to me is that this mentality will surely induce more unrealistic expectations. Before you know it, business execs are starting to ask why we need business analysts at all, because surely those fancy deep neural networks can extract all kinds of features - "only need data scientists to figure out those things".

So yeah, that's my fear. That businesses will blindly start to discard domain knowledge, and just feed black-box models their data, and let the data scientists wrestle with the results.