source:
https://towardsdatascience.com/in-praise-of-artificial-stupidity-60c2cdb686cdIn Praise of Artificial StupidityWhy today’s A.I. is not “really” A.I., but it may not matter that much to you.Dec 17, 2018 · 18 min read
Make Artificial Intelligence great again“Artificial Intelligence is the new electricity.” A. Ng
“Those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it.” G. SantayanaNot a week goes by in sunny Silicon Valley that a new Artificial Intelligence company makes the headlines, with shiny new promises and/or mind-blowing funding rounds.
The frenzy is not limited to the Valley: a cloud of somewhat overlapping concepts —
big data, data science, machine learning, Artificial Intelligence, deep learning— have become mainstream in recent years; serious business people went as far as claiming that
data scientist is “
the Sexiest Job of the 21st Century”, partially vindicating my failed attempt to become an NBA superstar (for some clear photographic evidence, compare this
life with the one below).
Still, not as sexy as the life of a data scientist.
To many old(ish) practitioners, it may seem like the world finally caught up with what we knew all along: building smart machines is pretty f*%$ing cool! On the other side, there seems to be some terrible confusion on what A.I. means, what A.I. promises and what A.I. can actually deliver.
As an old(ish) practitioner and founder of “yet another San Francisco startup with an AI domain”, I find myself fully immersed in an ecosystem where optimism is often only matched by genuine ignorance of basic facts in A.I. history: I cannot help but wonder, are we at the beginning of an era, or instead at the end of one?
In what follows, I submit my deeply subjective overview of A.I. — yesterday, today, tomorrow — and shall commit the ultimate (nerd) sin: decoupling the scienc-y hype from the business value.
Disclaimer: in what follows, we won’t make particularly original claims from a scholarly perspective; even just considering non-academic stuff, some of our considerations are shared here, here, here and here. The aim of this post is not so much to discuss academically some strong argument pro/against A.I., but more to give an “insider” perspective on the current hype and put it into a wider context, especially for educated readers that are new to the field. Without any presumption of completeness and neutrality, you will find a list of references, fairly impressive folks and further comments at the very end.see the source link for the rest of the article ...