The comic exists in this brief window of time where one task was finally "solved" and the other one was just getting started.
I'll add that if you think training models takes a lot of energy, try launching fleets of rockets to maintain an artificial satellite constellation.
Same. And not always in a meeting.
I've had detailed client specs that pick apart the minutiae of their intended inputs, interactive responses, and multi-user workflows, when somewhere hidden between the cracks is the single phrase “robust MI is required” with absolutely zero detail about what such reporting they are going to need/want. Sometimes this is because they don't entirely know up-front, but they expected us to know how to cost the thing that they didn't understand enough to fully describe to us yet! And it can be an uphill struggle getting through to them that not at least knowing vague requirements could cause us to not keep to time/cost estimates (or result in inefficient solutions) because efficiently getting out what they finally end up asking for might require a bit of rearchitecting of storage structures, changing work already done.
This is why I'm not truly scared of AI taking my job just yet⁰. The promise is that it'll produce what the want if they can describe it properly, and that if is doing a lot of legwork.
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[0] That might change over the next few years, we'll see how long the trough of disillusionment is with this iteration of the hype cycle… Hopefully I can hold out until some natural enough retirement age!*
Sometimes there is just an assumption that you will know that they want it.
Even the navigation problem still offers some challenges that most apps fail to address. Consider the store locator function common on retail business websites and apps. They usually just compute the straight line distance from you to the stores and show the stores within some particular range, sorted by distance.
That's probably fine most of the time, but consider a place like Seattle and its surrounding areas. Suppose you are in Kingston, which is on the west side of Puget Sound about 5 miles away from the east side, which is the side Seattle is on.
The Walgreens store locator shows 10 stores when searching for stores near Kinston, and 9 of them are on the Seattle side of Puget Sound. Crossing the Sound there is a 30 minute ferry ride that costs around $20 each way if you are bringing your car.
The one it shows on the west side of the Sound is on Bainbridge Island and that is probably not the one someone in Kinston would go to. They would go to the one in Silverdale. It's actually closer to Kinston than the one on Bainbridge by road distance, but slightly farther away straight line.
The one in Silverdale is on their list, as are three in Bremerton and one in Port Orchard, which are all closer in terms of time and travel expenses to Kingston than are any of the ones on the Seattle side, but you only see those on the map if you hit the "load more" button. Once brings in Silverdale and a couple in Bremerton, and twice brings in the rest.
Similar for businesses whose site has an option to find items in stock locally. They often report an item is locally available, but it turns out to only be in stores across the Sound.
Actually, I guess there are quite a lot of places like that. I've been to both the Brazilian and the Argentine sides of Iguazu Falls, and they're both great, but one is not officially allowed to cross between them inside the parks, so no infrastructure has been built to facilitate that, even though it's literally just across a river.
Or, I've heard it's quite inconvenient to get between Kinshasa and Brazaville, the two largest cities in their area, both national capital cities that face each other across a river just about two kilometers apart. There is a ferry but it's not quick and easy.
I complain all the time about the same thing you detailed here, and I thought I had it bad, having restaurants that are multiple bridges and slow-streets away be listed. At least there is a bridge!
Thanks for giving me some perspective.
GPS was not really novel in 2014, so for me it's a bit of a stretch.
On the other hand, Randall Munroe would be the last person to take GPS for granted, so this is probably a correct interpretation.
The idea is that non-software developers don't know which tasks current technology can solve trivially and which tasks can't be. Yes, the distribution of those tasks into the two buckets changes over time, but it is still not easily knowable by lay-people.
Everything we do today would be extremely difficult to re-create from scratch, but that doesn't mean it is hard to do - because we DON'T have to re-create it from scratch.
Hadn’t always been that easy. Once upon a time someone was paging in and out their dictionary from a floppy disk. Not to forget about the compression they had to implement from scratch.
d = set(open("/usr/share/dict/words").read().split())
And you think we spend any less time trying to identify food animals that lay tasty eggs?
These were all huge governmental undertakings with serious financial backing sustained over centuries. The power and might of empires were at stake. Can you name anything similar to the bird identification problem?
I would argue that observing birds by eyes does not really help you teach a slab of silicone to distinguish birds. But if you feel that it does, then surelly all the walking, riding, sailing around humans did should also be counted to the navigation task.
It only makes sense if we ignore the "standing on the shoulders of giants bit".
"Your parents made you; money had to be invented"
It's not the training what makes it difficult! It's the necessary research to invent machine learning algorithms which can be used to train a model to recognize birds. For multiple decades, this was way harder than maintaining a satellite constellation.
The National Park Service was started August 25, 1916 (only 108 years ago)
:)
The point of the original xkcd was that the hard seems easy and the easy seems hard, especially to laypeople. It wasn't particularly about computer vision or LLMs. The exact problem is not the main portion of the observation.