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Comment by ktta | Hacker News Reader

I love Machine Learning. I think it is one of the biggest breakthroughs of this decade.

The Big Data + Computing power recipe is something that I thought will bring sweeping changes to society. But with Amazon's Echo look, and now this, I don't know if I'm ok with where this is going.

I thought it'll help us in fields like architecture, physics modelling, medicine, but they all seem to be on paper. OTOH, uses like this seem to be the ones that actually come to market and make the best use of the Machine Learning talent.

Maybe I'm being cynical, but please someone prove me wrong. Am I missing Machine Learning being used in new applications in the market, or is the situation as I see it is?

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You're completely right.

I'm seeing a more general trend which I find equally worrying: Software is eating the world, and the best tech is currently produced by the likes of Facebook, Google or Amazon.

I'm fine with this, but I'm seeing governments and other "serious" businesses like health, physics... seriously lagging behind.

I don't know what to do with this assumption, though...

Google will run the world? I'm saying it's too good to be true.

The entire world run by an org full of data driven engineers? I'll take the nanobots turning the world into gray goop or paper clips first please.

First of all there is no machine learning used in the article.

Second, machine learning IS helping in places like physics and medicine. There's currently a one million dollar prize by google for an algorithm that can detect cancer (actually it just ended.) And there have been a number of similar contests in the past. Just look here for all sorts of places machine learning has been applied: https://www.kaggle.com/competitions?sortBy=deadline&group=al...

People have been applying statistics and AI to medicine since the 80's. The biggest problem is medicine and similar fields, is it's terribly conservative. It's very difficult to get new technology to market. Whereas tindr doesn't have any regulations or bureaucracy to deal with. They can just push new technology to millions of users overnight.

I used the term machine learning in my first sentence, but I was actually referring to data + computing power as I did in my second paragraph. Even if they just use OpenCV, that still falls into the realm of using computers to solve problems that are only recently being solved due to the computing power being recently available.

>The biggest problem is medicine and similar fields, is it's terribly conservative. It's very difficult to get new technology to market. Whereas tindr doesn't have any regulations or bureaucracy to deal with. They can just push new technology to millions of users overnight.

Looks like that's the best possible reason.

It's things like this that bring machine learning to the masses, which also typically lowers costs and makes it more available for niche uses.

It's a lot easier and more forgiving to use machine learning to pick what picture or outfit you look best in than it is to use it in medicine or architecture. As the technology matures, you will see it move in to those sectors very rapidly.

> more forgiving to use machine learning to pick what picture or outfit you look best in than it is to use it in medicine or architecture

Makes sense. I think that's why I'm not seeing them right now.

It has to pay the bills. There is money to be made from the Echo Look so it gets developed first. For things that will help society but aren't profitable we will have to look to other funding sources.

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