[rm999]

>I was around for the prior round of neural network excitement and much time, effort and money was wasted. In that case it turned out that other techniques were more tractable and thus easier to use and improve upon.

And before 1980s style neural networks there were 1950s perceptrons. That was a much bigger mess, it took more than ten years for someone to point out how 'dumb' perceptrons were (they couldn't even model an XOR), which led to a collapse in AI funding that lasted more than 25 years.

[spikels]

Can we be a little more thoughtful this time and avoid the boom and bust cycle that so often leads to problems?

You would think that since it already happened with neural networks before it would be less likely to happen again. However it may be that the same factors that lead to the last cycle are still in operation and it is actually more like to happen again. Something like the reasons for the seemingly endless series of real estate bubbles.