Hacker News Reader

Comment by azinman2 | Hacker News Reader

When you have a dumb machine that simply solves for maximum likelihood, using past data to predict the future is what you’re going to get. Why is this surprising?

I don’t understand what he’s arguing for, exactly. That we should have AGI all of the sudden to understand intent, and detangle causation vs correlation? I don’t think anyone in the machine learning community would argue against that, but the question is how.

What’s new here?

View on HN

I don't think Cory is writing for the machine learning community.

Cory is trying to inform people that AI and ML aren't a magical solution to all our wasteful systems because in some cases we need to throw away the system and start again, and AI can't tell us that. It can only tell us the best way to run the current system. That's what he means when he says AI is conservative.

It's not surprising at all if you understand AI but most non-tech people don't.

It has the same flavor generally of people who criticize something that’s hard but offer no solutions — a style that has become increasingly popular IMHO. This also isn’t a new angle for the non-informed audiences. It bears repeating for those audiences, but I’d wish he’d at least point to others who have already echoed such concerns.

But... it's Cory Doctorow. He's not just some random writer; he's one of the best and most insightful technology commentators around.

Paragraph two cites the inspiration for this piece, a 2017 article by Molly Sauter: https://reallifemag.com/instant-recall/

And he points to three other sources right in the first paragraph.

Did you think this or the other works mentioned are written for the machine learning community? They are written so the rest of society can understand what is happening despite mountains of hype to the contrary and the marketing of ML as magic.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com