One would have thought that November is not cherry-picking season. Apparently not.
"Almost overnight, the quality of [Google's] translations skyrocketed." In certain languages, and still dependent on the human brain to reparse the not-quite-gibberish into something that makes sense.
"Driverless cars soon" - and flying ones, too, "in production in a few years" for a century now.
"the progress of the past couple of decades has been stunning. After many years of nothing much happening [in AI]" - is that lack of research, or just that alt-facts make for a nicer story?
"However, if you keep up the doubling for a while, [therefore strong AI], [Moore's not dead, proof by handwaving, technoesoteric New Age babble]". From this point on, the story dissolves into "let us assume the Moon is made of cheese. Why didn't anyone start mining it yet?!?"
> "Almost overnight, the quality of [Google's] translations skyrocketed." In certain languages, and still dependent on the human brain to reparse the not-quite-gibberish into something that makes sense.
But it happened replacing a system carefully crafted for 10 years, for another one that barely needed a couple of months to get better than the old one. And it can be made better than google's, today: https://www.deepl.com/translator
> "Driverless cars soon" - and flying ones, too, "in production in a few years" for a century now.
We had driverless car prototypes for a century? Wow. /s
- Fair point. Conflating machine learning with strong AI (as evidenced on the machine translation example) still dubious.
- We had flying cars promised for a century, "any year now."
Very similar status to "level 5 autonomous driving any moment now, don't look at the edge cases."
Truck drivers are held up as the classic example of a job that will be decimated very soon. A million jobs, wiped out, read the fear mongering headlines.
The hysteria is remarkable. Ten Million plus jobs are created and destroyed every single year in the US. We're facing at least a 8-12 million person jobs gap, in terms of not having enough labor, over the next ten years alone (with 6.5 million unfilled full-time jobs right now and the U6 rate pushing down toward two decade lows). And that's assuming modest average economic growth of perhaps 1.5% annually (2.5-3% and we'll have an extreme labor shortage).
To amplify the actual context problem, if we had a perfect solution for automating away truck driving jobs today, it would take decades to fully deploy it. In reality, we're still a decade away from meaningful scale commercial testing.
Yeah I'm a little bit dubious about this article too, the author appears to have absolutely no training or experience related to AI and it doesn't look like this article is based on any actual research.
"Almost overnight, the quality of [Google's] translations skyrocketed." In certain languages, and still dependent on the human brain to reparse the not-quite-gibberish into something that makes sense.
"Driverless cars soon" - and flying ones, too, "in production in a few years" for a century now.
"the progress of the past couple of decades has been stunning. After many years of nothing much happening [in AI]" - is that lack of research, or just that alt-facts make for a nicer story?
"However, if you keep up the doubling for a while, [therefore strong AI], [Moore's not dead, proof by handwaving, technoesoteric New Age babble]". From this point on, the story dissolves into "let us assume the Moon is made of cheese. Why didn't anyone start mining it yet?!?"