Comment by brootstrap | Hacker News Reader

Comment by brootstrap | Hacker News Reader

This stuff is the friggen worst if you ask me. i'm so done with the AI hype train and IBM is the worst. Linked article mentions a 'watsons law' (similar to moore's law etc). If you ask me, it is more likely for watsons law to be that all commercial BigCo 'AI' offerings will burn thru hundreds of millions and ultimately fail rather then the intended meaning.

"Phytel’s contribution was analytics paired with an automated patient communication system. A clinic could use the system to search its patient records and find, for example, all the men over age 45 who were overdue for a colonoscopy, and then use an autocall to remind them to schedule the dreaded appointment"

This shit isnt AI it's literally a database query and then some 3rd party library to send a text message or a phone call.

Watson's law: as the complexity of technology and business processes increases, the amount of time it takes for people to recognize and acknowledge that the emperor in not in fact wearing clothes increases in proportion to the profitability of the lie being sold.

"The Emperor's New Clothes" are made of the finest blockchain silk adorned with golden AI brocades.

AI as a research field generates plenty of useful applied techniques that make real products possible. The problem, which Watson is ground zero of, is calling AI itself a product -- like something you can just mix in and make business processes better.

> If you ask me, it is more likely for watsons law to be ...burn thru hundreds of millions and ultimately fail rather then the intended meaning.

That’s already called Musk’s Law.

Seems like a strange name given none of Musk’s companies have failed?

In before

IBM was simply an AI hype train grifter. AI is still valuable (although it's not advancing as quickly now as it was in, say, 2015), it's just that you have to dig deep to make sure that the "AI" being used is actually AI and that it's being used in an appropriate way.

AI seems more and more, in communication to the general public, to mean "computer program that does something useful, that hasn't yet been commonly called a computer program."

Billions. IBM has spent billions.

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