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Comment by empath75 | Hacker News Reader

This is pretty stunning and should make a lot of knowledge workers terrified. I'm sure Google has a bunch of really smart guys working on figuring out how to reduce energy costs. To have a computer come in and get those kinds of results on the first attempt is pretty mindblowing.

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When people talk about AI, the topic invariably turns to things like "truck drivers and other low-skill jobs should be scared!" I think the reality is the opposite. I think that anyone whose job is to do mid-to-high skill work with numbers should be scared, because you can automate their jobs without solving the messy problem of getting computers to move big physical objects around.

Exactly, and not only that, but truck-driving is hard because among other things, some of the other trucks will be driven by humans.

We have some really smart gals too!

This is why I prefer the nonspecific "meat sack," though I'll admit mine is often more cumbersome in general usage. (Seriously: "folks" is what I tend to use to avoid this situation. Any time you find yourself saying "guys," folks will work.)

With the caveat that you end up sounding like a politician

If you s/guys/folks/ in that comment and think it sounds like a politician, I'm quite intrigued by who your politicians are. Kill this thread and don't reply to me, though, we are super off topic.

http://www.buzzfeed.com/johntemplon/confirmed-obama-says-the... https://www.quora.com/Why-does-President-Obama-like-and-use-...

Or a hillbilly!

It's what happens when people speak vernacular.

Hu-Man. Woops, lets rage on scientists!

I use 'guys' in the gender-neutral sense of 'you guys' :)

That's a very interesting point.

While AI is not at a point to write programs, it's probably going to eliminate the need for many programs.

A majority of programs exist in order for people to use them to achieve some result. If the AI can achieve the same result, you've eliminated the need for the program, and the programmers who would program it, and the people who would use it (and the sales people who would sell it).

I would counter the fear. Data center engineering requires expert knowledge (network, civil engineering, material science, etc), and expert knowledge is a testimony of experience, and experience is only proven to be good with data (track of records!)! While computers are very good at making prediction and decisions with enough data, humans are still integral in the decision such as actually building the blueprint and architecting the right system. That computer cannot do. Only human is capable of doing that today. Not to be too negative because I don't know how complicated the model is, but since they already have senors all the years (they use these senors to determine how much cool air need to be come in, how much of hot air need to be released and reused, etc), I am not sure how the learning model is different from a classical supervised ML algorithm. I can only think of simulation wasn't in the original equation and here they do some simulation?

"I am not sure how the learning model is different from a classical supervised ML algorithm"

It's different because you have to perform a sequence of actions that optimize some goal. This is not a classical prediction/classification problem, it is a reinforcement learning problem.

I'm sure someone said the same thing when AWS was created but it has only always resulted in an explosion of new needed skills.

The computer doing this is the result of smart people working on the problem.

Well, to be fair, the AI probably tried somewhere over several millions of times before coming to whatever conclusion it reached in its training process

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