[sharemywin]

First humans make errors too. Second, there's a lot of "generic" work flows that AI could enhance.

routing emails.

voice mail routing handling.

commenting code. easy enough to add something that strips comments and verifies the code is the same.

taking meeting notes.

going to google and pulling down notes from 10 websites.

writing a user guide for a module.

any kind of corporate-ese emails, memos etc.

generating test data.

I wouldn't allow this stuff to work with out human supervision for the most part, but this list of table types stuff seems to work pretty good and be worth time to ask it.

[epolanski]

I'm not saying that AI hasn't some utility, I'm stating that the hype is gonna push for building AI'd applications that didn't need AI.

Few of the examples you make don't need ML at all (such as routing emails, voice mail, generating test data or pulling notes from 10 websites).

[LeanderK]

Have fun pulling notes from websites without ML. NLP just plain didn't work before ML. The thing is that with ML you are able to work with unstructured data, e.g. routing email without having a complicated system the person mailing you has to understand or hundreds of brittle, hand written rules that in the end won't fire anyway because somebody spelled a word wrong.

I think ML/AI is just not ready for a lot of applications because it's not good enough, but our models are still improving every month. Impossible to know what it's like in 5 years.