Ways to dismiss technology

But what people "dismiss" -- although, I would say question -- is not the technology's ultimate success, but its timing. Machine learning, and the eventual AI, was Alan Turing's dream years before the first computer was built. He talked to his friend Claude Shannon about supervised learning in 1943, and Shannon proposed letting computers absorb culture and arts, too (playing them music, in particular, an idea that Turing first found surprising). In 1946, Turing wrote about unsupervised learning, talking about equipping computers with wheels, arms and cameras, and letting them roam the countryside. Neural networks were invented circa 1942, and Turing started researching them in the late 40s. The algorithms used today for machine learning were invented in the '60s, but the theory behind them pretty much stalled in the '90s.

The question is, then, not whether AI is ultimately achievable, nor whether current machine learning is useful in some domains. The question is how far is (actual) AI or generally useful machine learning. Given that we've been working on the problem for 75 years now, no major theoretical breakthroughs have been made in the past few decades, and that most successes are due to better hardware but with uncertain future scalability, I see no rational reason to expect a breakthrough in the next 5 years (very smart people in the '40s, '50s and '60s were equally convinced that AI is around the corner). I would never dismiss the promise of AI, but I would certainly question the unbridled enthusiasm some people have for machine learning's current form.

This part caused problems for me. For one, Cellnet survived. So we have evidence that whatever they did wasn't the wrong choice. Second, a sales pitch or value proposition is not a technology prediction, it's an attempt to get money in trade for a product. It's not just right to talk about specific applications, but fairly important to demonstrate the practical utility to a buyer. This has been studied widely and is falsifiable. Plus, anecdotally, I've never bought something because a sales guy said "but it's a breakthrough!", I pay for things when I see clear value to me.

An interesting way to distinguish the potential between new technologies. I would say that someone might argue that a fully autonomous car would also require general AI for example. If we would argue that "no, it should just have less casualties than human drivers", we can continue with arguing that a voice interface will be abundant by just having fewer mistakes than by typing words or having queries better answered than by a text interface. On the roadmap will then probably be more sensors than microphones alone and it's hard to dismiss such a technological progression only because at some time we might need general AI to continue the technological progress.

How can you separate the value of a capability from its potential applications? Surely he doesn't mean scientific/intellectual value so.. how else can a capability have value?