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Comment by roymurdock | Hacker News Reader

Can you translate your great technical summary into a few potential applications to help us understand what might be on the near horizon for AI/DL?

LeCunn cites photo recognition, Ng cites autonomous trucks, Nosek cites auto-scaling difficulty for online courses and some kind of magnetic brain implant.

Seems to me that these are all fringe/isolated use-cases - like learning to use your fingers one at a time without learning the concept of how to use them together to grasp an object. Perhaps once we get better with each of these fringe "senses" we'll be able to create some higher level intelligence that can leverage learnings across dimensions that we haven't even considered yet.

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I think most people are very bad at predicting the future, and I know that I'm very bad at it, so I won't try to make detailed predictions about the long term effect of AI since I would get it all spectacularly wrong.

However, in the short term, I think the areas where AI has the potential to make the biggest impact are where we have huge amounts of data (and gathering data is cheap/getting cheaper) and we have an obvious objective. I am really excited to see what Deep Mind will do with their collaboration with the NHS, and I think some incredibly exciting thing will happen when people with a deep understanding of biology collaborate with people who really understand deep learning.

The difficulty is that in industry the people that often have an easy time raising funds are impressive bullshit artists that are great at selling stuff (Theranos, Verily) while in academia people often spend too much time in their own comfortable silos, and straddling multiple fields is a very difficult act to pull off if you want to ever get tenure.

TBF, it's extraordinarily difficult for a full-time scientist to do better at PR than a full-time bullshitter. Some (e.g., Ng) pull it off, but they tend to be exceptionally brilliant, exceptionally dedicated to their work, and well-supported by their exceptional employers.

Most academic people tend to spend all their time in their own comfortable silos for the same reason most industry people send time in their (MUCH more comfortable!) siloes -- there's enough to keep everyone busy for 40-60+ hours/wk without leaving the silos, and families/eating/sleeping are all important too.

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