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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

There have been four such revolutions so far and I strongly feel this will be the fifth.

  - transistors
  - (micro)computers
  - (smart)mobile phones
  - the web

And now:

  - practical pattern recognition using neural nets
    aka deep learning

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Agreed, though I draw the parallel elsewhere. The industrial revolution was about automating labor, though really it just scaled up repeatable processes. Likewise, computer programs don't really automate mental labor, they just scale up repeatable processes once the mental labor of figuring out the specification is done. Deep learning, on the other hand, promises the automation of actual mental labor--creating new information from other, unrelated information. If you look at it that way, its role and future seems pretty obvious.

Why the device-centric view? (Not that there is anything wrong with that, but, you know, it's just an incremental innovation curve). Why not:

  - Cybernetics (incl. Szilard, Von Neumann)
  - Information theory (incl. Shannon, Turing) 
  - Whatever you might call LISP
  - Overlapping window based BLT GUIs

(for example)

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