Comment by seibelj | Hacker News Reader

Comment by seibelj | Hacker News Reader

> How come there's a lot of buzz around ML but we grossly fall short when it comes to deployed ML in real world applications (especially in certain industries). There are many reasons for this, including but not limited to:

> data: not enough of the right data.

> cost: the data, compute, storage and talent resources needed for ML allow mostly large companies to benefit from it.

> utility: most ML content you see online are gimmicky tasks that can't extend into valuable real world applications.

> trust: ML needs to be engineered reliably and robustly.

This is a very honest take on ML / AI. I work in blockchain and what drives me crazy is that crypto / blockchain has delivered huge, tangible successes and value (measured easily and accurately via real-time prices) but the HN cognoscenti orgasms over ML and considers blockchain a scam.

IMO the situation is flipped - crypto is proving its success in a massive, revolutionary way while ML / AI is pretty stagnant at delivering world-changing products. It's cool that bots are sorting and picking at the warehouse but the value has been overstated by many orders of magnitude (thus far).

ML is a tool in a box right now, one of many that can potentially solve a class of problems, but it isn't (yet) a paradigm shift in how businesses operate.

I'll ask the question I seem to always ask: What is a problem that is solved by blockchain that cannot be solved by just having a central authority?

Blockchains are value-transfer networks. The value transfer layer has historically been abused as a rule rather than the exception:

- Rent seeking, such as by Visa and Mastercard that continually try and raise merchant fees

- Censorship, such as with OnlyFans and its attempted blacklisting by the banking system

- As a weapon of war, as with the treasury blocking entities via their monopoly of the global reserve currency and their licensing / penalty system of banks regardless of their country

- Debasement of money in general by the money printers

Blockchains, when properly implemented as closely as can be attempted using decentralized engineering techniques, are neutral plumbing for value transfer. Ethereum is owned by no one, thus competitors can use it, and fees can be optionally added by middlemen if their services justify the fees. The benefit to the world is choice in the world of finance, something society has never had until recently.

All those problems you listed are "I don't trust the central authority". None of those are problems that cannot be solved by a central authority.

However, all those are specifically only useful for payments/currency. So, if blockchain is only nifty for distributed currency, that's a use case. But hardly lives up to the hype you bring forward. ML can solve problems I face. Blockchain cannot.

> All those problems you listed are "I don't trust the central authority". None of those are problems that cannot be solved by a central authority.

It seems to me that the listed issues are actually actions that have been taken by central authority systems. This isn't about trust, it's about historical behavior, and an incentive and power scheme that promotes those types of autocratic and exploitive actions.

Those last two bullets are not solved by crypto unless people stop using their country’s currencies altogether, which is incredibly unlikely in any well functioning country

People still buy crypto with dollars and they have shown an obsession with the dollar value

> People still buy crypto with dollars and they have shown an obsession with the dollar value

This is an unfair criticism. When I travel to a different country I think about their currency in terms of my home country's currency.

People are "obsessed" with the dollar value because crypto is not currently the main currency/asset/payment method/whatever you want to call it.

Other than Bitcoin and Ethereum, how many blockchains _don't_ have a central authority anyway? AFAICT most blockchains rely on infrastructure provided by the initial developers.

What is a huge tangible success that crypto has delivered?

See my comment here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28388450

that comment listed a lot of things that maybe blockchain could theoretically accomplish and no tangible accomplishments at all

I am not aware of anything on your list that I would call a real tangible success.

Proof of work crypto currencies seem like they are currently a net-negative because of the energy consumption. What’s the benefit to society that has already happened?

For AI better speech recognition is widely used and has a ton of benefits. For example nearly all radiologists use voice dictation in order to write faster/better/more reports.

I agree that we need more sobering takes on ML like this resource and not more of the hype that is all to prevalent.

ML is about writing programs automatically. It is huge, like the end of programming as we know it. Think of future Blockchain algorithms, crypto functions etc as trained instead of programmed. It'll take time but ML shall supersede every programming task. Computer science is about automation, ML is the next level of autation, of programming itself. It was abput time :)

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