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by tim333 477 days ago
Also Zitron doesn't really seem to distinguish the AI tech steadily progressing which will probably go on and the investment boom which is probably a bit of a bubble. Quite likely there will be a financial pullback or crash where less money is spent but development will go on.
1 comments
rsynnott 477 days ago
Well, yeah; that happened in the previous eight or so AI bubbles, going back to the 1950s. His stance seems to be primarily “this stuff isn’t very useful and is absurdly expensive”, which seems fair enough?
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tim333 477 days ago
Kinda but I think "there is no AI revolution" is overdoing it. If he said the AI revolution is a bit rubbish and overpriced I could go with it. This time is different from the past so called AI bubbles in that current hardware is around human level whereas in the previous ones it was nowhere near. Also I don't remember a major investment boom like this in the past? I think the Japanese put aside $850m for their "Fifth Generation project" which flopped, but nothing on the current scale.
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rsynnott 477 days ago
Eh, I mean you can pick and choose what you call an AI bubble, but the CV one in the early 2010s (remember when self-driving cars were going to be a thing any day now?) and the speech recognition one in the 90s, where MS was claiming that within years people would primarily interact with their computer by talking to it, were attainable with consumer hardware. They were just a bit shit.

Not that either were completely useless (and nor were, say, expert systems before them), but they ended up squarely in the “yeah, that’s an occasionally useful feature” space, rather than being transformative.

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tim333 477 days ago
Fair enough but I still think the current thing is in a different category.

As a kind of argument that way you can check out Wait But Why's "The AI Revolution" which kind of argues the other way from Zitron's "There Is No AI Revolution", especially if you scroll to the animation of a lake filling up about half way down. Bear in mind the animation was done in 2013 https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revol...

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OkayPhysicist 476 days ago
Self driving cars are a thing, and they're awesome. I took one home from the bar 2 days ago. One of the very few "wow, the future is now" type innovations I've experienced.
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