Ask HN: Name one biggest improvement in your life made possible thanks to AI? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Name one biggest improvement in your life made possible thanks to AI?

15 pointsdgudkov16 comments

Following the topic about new "AI winter". What has AI managed to deliver to you personally so far?

Professionally: Better image recognition by a mile. I'm a controls engineer, but having better information about the environment from my camera is huge for robotics.

I see this personally too although the wins aren't as big, for example I've seen Facebook ask me to correctly identify friends as a way to verify identity, thought that was pretty cool.

Probably though the biggest personal impact has been better google searches, it's pretty rare that I have to search more than once to find what I'm looking for these days (for non technical stuff anyway). It seems like I used to need to use less google fu than I used to.

The fear of every single click & action being used to train a neural network and thus recording that action forever to serve me "better" ads.

Amazon showing me the related books based on what I browsed or bought.

I no longer need to go on a wild goose chase googling to find similar books. This way I have found some real gems that I might not have had I simply googled for similar books. So, when I do have to google for a book on a new topic that piqued my interest, I know that once I find an Amazon page directly or find a forum post recommending one and then open that page on Amazon, the rest of the search would be a relatively smooth ride.

Not just books, other all products as well, video/music recommendations on youtube, netflix, prime video, spotify.. Not sure if it is really 'AI' though..

rather Collaborative Filtering or other kind of recommender

The only product I use from what you listed is YouTube. While I have found some interesting videos there, I can't say it made sense based on what I had watched or searched before. In contrast, with books on Amazon I am thoroughly satisfied. Not sure if this is because books are easier to encode for the recommendation mechanism than videos.

I am a french speaking Belgian, google translate / DeepL lets me follow Flemish politics

Independent research at academic level for direct commercial exploitation without needing a lab, the publish-or-perish rat race or daily interaction with people anymore, all from my bedroom with a gaming laptop and 3-4-5 concurrent windows open for other tasks, 4-8-12-16 hours a day as I like. I am not 25 anymore but still not too late and for that very lucky, grateful to the exceptional people that are making this happen for the general public and happy to have gotten so far in terms of opportunities and intellectual freedom, relatively unscathed. It can stop tomorrow for whatever reason but I can say that my dream as a kid opting for a STEM education 30 years ago has been fulfilled.

Gmail has much better spam filters if you have noticed. That is less time spent on opening e-mails.

In 1999 amazon was already recommending people about books on their website. AI made discovery a lot better in the late 90’s. That was a big deal. Car manufacturers could tell you a similar story way back then. Today, AI is just a marketing word.

I'm not sure if Amazon's recommendation algorithm would qualify as AI.

Basically, it's still just shopping basket analysis as in the somewhat famous "Men who buy beer on Fridays are also likely to buy diapers." story (http://web.onetel.net.uk/~hibou/Beer%20and%20Nappies.html ).

Being able to say "ok google, take me to a gas* station" without having to touch my phone whilst driving.

* I'm English, and we tend to say "petrol station", sadly even Google's AI is not there yet

Youtube has been suggesting me pretty much the exact shallow stuff I need to consume to keep myself entertained while doing chores around the house. I doubt that's simply collab filtering, so it might count as AI.

if you cut out "biggest" the answer would be alexa/google for some people.

still quite humble I think:

- speech synthesis - music recommendations

And for this I already have to adapt the "ML/statistics = AI" coining of the term.

For me it's been a lifetime of better and more appropriate NI.

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