Comment by cm2187 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cm2187 | Hacker News Reader

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I think the requirement for a large amount of data is the biggest objection to the reflex "AI will replace [insert your profession here] soon" that many techies, in particular on HN, have.

There are many professions where there is very little data available to learn from. In some case (self-driving), companies will invest large amount of money to build this data, by running lots of test self-driving cars, or paying people to create the data, and it is viable given the size of the market behind. But the typical high-value intellectual profession is often a niche market with a handful of specialists in the world. Think of a trader of financial institutions bonds, or a lawyer specialized in cross-border mining acquisitions, a physician specialist of a rare disease or a salesperson for aviation parts. What data are you going to train your algorithm with?

The second objection, probably equally important, also applies to "software will replace [insert your boring repetitive mindless profession here]", even after 30 years of broad adoption of computers. If you decide to automate some repetitive mundane tasks, you can spare the salary of the guys who did these tasks, but now you need to pay the salary of a full team of AI specialists / software developers. Now for many tasks (CAD, accounting, mailings, etc), the market is big enough to justify a software company making this investment. But there is a huge number of professions where you are never going to break even, and where humans are still paid to do stupid tasks that a software could easily do today (even in VBA), and will keep doing so until the cost of developing and maintaining software or AI has dropped to zero.

I don't see that happening in my life. In fact I am not even sure we are training that many more computer science specialists than 10 years ago. Again, didn't happen with software for very basic things, why would it happen with AI for more complicated things.

I'd say on the contrary, the problem with experts is that they are so expensive to train and so rare. It is easier to collect data, train the AI and then equip doctors all over the world with it than to have thousands of experts in that particular field.

A doctor that treats patients all day long doesn't have time to keep up with the research and state of the art. A researcher that is on the cutting edge of medicine doesn't have time to treat the patients. We need to equip doctors with AIs to keep them up to date with the best practices.

well, you are mentioning an example where:

- there is data

- there is a wide market that could justify large investments in AI

With this combination, yeah I can see AI being used. In fact medecine is one of the few professions that never industrialised. But there are loads of other professions where either or none of the conditions above are met.

If you are talking about a doctor specialised in a rare disease, where there is very little data, and very few patients to cure, how do you think AI will replace that?

> If you are talking about a doctor specialised in a rare disease, where there is very little data, and very few patients to cure, how do you think AI will replace that?

Well, since transfer learning is a thing, you would start with a general purpose medical system and then train it on what little data you do have on the rare disease to produce an appropriate model (which isn't too different from the way a human expert is produced). In fact, I would assume that the first such systems will be created and used by the researchers focusing on rare diseases.

Yes, experts will use AI to build better tools that will be accessible via computer and by less-expert physicians to augment their skill base in diagnosis. Trying to fully automate the physician promises to be so difficult and expensive (and legally fraught) that the value it adds will be nowhere near worth the investment. No doubt a few direct-to-patient AI-based apps and services will arise in this space, and maybe AI will allow generalists will extend their reach further into the space of specialists. But robot doctors will remain the stuff of fantasy for many decades yet, I suspect.

> and will keep doing so until the cost of developing and maintaining software or AI has dropped to zero.

I have no idea about the progress of AI, but normal software will get an order of magnitude cheaper to develop as we slowly wake up from the Unix/worse-is-better/everything-is-text mindset and abandon the dynamically typed and imperative languages, broken systems abstractions, etc. that hold us back.

I think it's a more fundamental problem than the choice of languages (though I share your griefs!).

To the vast majority of the educated population, software is very much a black art and people would have no idea of how to do even the most basic things. That's of course true for more senior people, but I find that it is as true for the generation who graduates today. They can do incredible things with their smartphone that I didn't suspect was possible, but wouldn't know where to start to code something.

Until this skill gap changes dramatically, and that everyone gets out of high school with basic knowledge in programming, like they have basic knowledge of maths, biology, physics or history, this gap will never close.

May God will it that the heathens should see the light and come to Haskell ;-).

I sincerely would like to know what you think the alternatives are?

Sounds something like Haskell with a Smalltalk environment. Functional, statically typed with powerful type extensions, but with an image instead of text files that you modify.

From just using Jupyter Notebooks, I can see the appeal of working with a live environment, and it's just a fancy REPL, not a full Lisp or Smalltalk environment.

If it has to be a general public language, I'm afraid it will have to be light on special characters and abbreviations or acronyms that made sense 30 years ago. I'd say a Basic or Python-like language, but modernised, and with strong typing to enable the IDE to help a lot the users with auto-completion and error checking.

But if you think about it, most business users are even intimidated by VBA. So it will have to be very fluffy, and I don't think you can spare the mandatory coding 101 teaching at school.

Programming is describing a solution space, and we describe things with words. I don't see how anything but text/speech would map to that aspect of programming.

I'm not holding my breath for that development

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