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Comment by tomelders | Hacker News Reader

Not really. The world is data. Anything you need to know about the world is in a table somewhere, and the web has done a great job of making the planets data accessible to machines.

Other areas may be more complex, but complexity isn't as big a barrier as it may seem.

Also, those areas are probably not as complex as people think they are. I'm reminded of the AI that started making breakthroughs in oncology by looking at the cells around a tumour, despite the scientific consensus that there was nothing to be learned from the cells around a tumor.

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> Anything you need to know about the world is in a table somewhere

No it isn't. If I read an article about the Volkswagen emissions scandal, what table do I look in to figure out how much consumers will care, and how aggressive various governments will be with their punishment? When Disney buys the rights to Star Wars, where should I look to see if it's worth what they paid for it? Should I rely on data from 30 year old movies, or look at merchandise sales or something? If I start seeing a lot of articles about climate change and the dangers of fossil fuels, should I sell my stock in Exxon?

Not that humans are particularly good at this stuff, but I don't think computers will be as good or better for a long time.

I think a lot of people get hung up on how humans make decisions, with the expectation that you need to be able to understand the same ideas to perform the task.

Even if a computer can't figure out the stats you mention, maybe it doesn't matter? Maybe just reacting fast enough to what people in the market are doing is good enough? Maybe simple sentiment analysis on articles on Disney around the web is a good enough proxy for share price increase.

Sounds like that's giving the humans who are left in the market 10x the power.

You're making the mistake of being specific. Think heuristic.

> Anything you need to know about the world is in a table somewhere

Not yet.

The problem is understanding data. A human can learn a new word's meaning by reading its definition in a dictionary; a computer can't.

It's a dictionary. I'm pretty sure a computer can look it up faster than a human can.

Access to raw text is not the hard part.

Even so, that doesn't stop one human helping the computer to understand, and thus replace x more humans.

Spoken like a true data scientist. Hope there's room for culture in there somewhere.

Sorry to burst your bubble, but culture is data too.

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