Comment by MathYouF | Hacker News Reader

Comment by MathYouF | Hacker News Reader

I can't relate at all. The progress in artificial intelligence in all categories is fascinating and is in the modern day what electricity was at the turn of the century, during the time of Tesla and Edisson. It is not even fully understood how some state of the art AI achievements actually work to achieve the results, and what it has been able to solve in terms of previously unsolvable problems in computation has been fascinating.

The rapid consumerizaton of AR/VR tech is also pretty amazing given what the expected timeline for it was back in say 2015, when everyone was connected to a $2000 computer with wires and two sensors to play the one or two demos available.

A person's view of the world is usually just a rorschach test for their personal life. If you think the tech industry is slow/useless/uninnovative at the moment it likely just means you aren't personally doing the interesting work. You could change that by spending time learning the interesting tech and switching jobs to it, but the cynicism isn't relatable for those of us who deliberately work on interesting problems and continue to learn new and complex new things, rather than collect easy paychecks for boring work (they chose to do) then complain that life isn't exciting enough.

Condescending bits aside, I appreciate your reply.

I do feel like some AI advancements instill that fleeting sense of magic, while others work so well that we (consumers) reap the benefits without even realizing it.

Can you share some specific AI advancements or projects that you’re particularly excited about?

I'd be more optimistic about AR and VR if it hadn't been almost immediately monopolised by Facebook and Google. Now instead of actual creativity we get VR Walmart, using 3D UX decisions that game developers realised don't work in a 3D space back in 1997.

I agree with you, but at least Valve's in the sphere, doing their thing.

It's been two and a half years since the Index launched. I'm a bit surprised there hasn't been a refresh or update for the hardware.

> If you think the tech industry is slow/useless/uninnovative at the moment it likely just means you aren't personally doing the interesting work.

Fair, but when I’m looking at the interesting work it’s clear they’re looking for established domain experts, not some guy who hacked some shit together because he was interested in it.

Also, I feel like it’s really easy to target interesting work and still end up doing the boring shit. Take the whole data science thing. How many jokes have you seen about eyed individuals stuck cleaning data from excel spreadsheets, or people who want to be hackers, digging into and analyzing wild zero-day threats, but instead get stuck in the majority of boring organizational/operational security work.

Disclaimer: obviously boring and interesting are highly subjective.

>The progress in artificial intelligence in all categories is fascinating and is in the modern day what electricity was at the turn of the century

I personally don't buy into this analogy which I think its just a marketing ploy. The advance in AI is incremental in reality. Before neural networks have been widely implemented, other machine learning algorithms had been working fairly well. The highly non-linear models with hand-crafted domain-specific constraints just fit the data better and push the accuracy higher. But fundamentally, the way we treat data and prediction is not very different from other machine learning models.

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