
Ways to dismiss technology - turel
http://ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2017/5/24/not-even-wrong-ways-to-dismiss-technology
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pron
I think the author is attacking a strawman. The common ground to most
successful technologies is that their potential was recognized early on, and
many people worked on realizing them, at least after breakthrough proofs-of-
concept. That was the case for airplanes, televisions, computers, mobile
phones, etc.

But what people "dismiss" \-- although, I would say _question_ \-- is not the
technology's ultimate success, but its timing. Machine learning, and the
eventual AI, was Alan Turing's dream years before the first computer was
built. He talked to his friend Claude Shannon about supervised learning in
1943, and Shannon proposed letting computers absorb culture and arts, too
(playing them music, in particular, an idea that Turing first found
surprising). In 1946, Turing wrote about unsupervised learning, talking about
equipping computers with wheels, arms and cameras, and letting them roam the
countryside. Neural networks were invented circa 1942, and Turing started
researching them in the late 40s. The algorithms used _today_ for machine
learning were invented in the '60s, but the theory behind them pretty much
stalled in the '90s.

The question is, then, not whether AI is ultimately achievable, nor whether
current machine learning is useful in some domains. The question is _how far_
is (actual) AI or generally useful machine learning. Given that we've been
working on the problem for 75 years now, no major theoretical breakthroughs
have been made in the past few decades, and that most successes are due to
better hardware but with uncertain future scalability, I see no rational
reason to expect a breakthrough in the next 5 years (very smart people in the
'40s, '50s and '60s were equally convinced that AI is around the corner). I
would never dismiss the promise of AI, but I would certainly question the
unbridled enthusiasm some people have for machine learning's current form.

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dahart
> Where Cellnet missed it, Orange got much closer to the actual capability:
> the future is wire-free. Why is your phone tied to the wall of a particular
> room with a piece of wire? Cellnet was guessing about applications while
> Orange talked about the breakthrough.

This part caused problems for me. For one, Cellnet survived. So we have
evidence that whatever they did wasn't the wrong choice. Second, a sales pitch
or value proposition is not a technology prediction, it's an attempt to get
money in trade for a product. It's not just right to talk about specific
applications, but fairly important to demonstrate the practical utility to a
buyer. This has been studied widely and is falsifiable. Plus, anecdotally,
I've never bought something because a sales guy said "but it's a
breakthrough!", I pay for things when I see clear value to me.

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MrQuincle
Quote: "Bringing this back to 2017, I've suggested elsewhere that voice
interfaces do not have a roadmap to become universal computer interfaces or
platforms. Machine learning now means that speech recognition can accurately
transcribe the sound of someone speaking into text and that natural language
processing can turn that text into a structured query - that's one
breakthrough. But you still need somewhere to send the query, and it is not
clear that we have any roadmap to a system that can give a structured answer
to any query that any person can pose, rather than just dumping you out to a
keyword search of the web. To even start making voice interfaces useful for
general purpose computing rather than for niches, I would suggest that we
would need general AI, which is (at best) a few decades away."

An interesting way to distinguish the potential between new technologies. I
would say that someone might argue that a fully autonomous car would also
require general AI for example. If we would argue that "no, it should just
have less casualties than human drivers", we can continue with arguing that a
voice interface will be abundant by just having fewer mistakes than by typing
words or having queries better answered than by a text interface. On the
roadmap will then probably be more sensors than microphones alone and it's
hard to dismiss such a technological progression only because at some time we
might need general AI to continue the technological progress.

~~~
erikpukinskis
The entire field of UI design exists because it's almost impossible to capture
user intent _even when you present them with a damn button that has their
intent written on it_.

UI design is about guiding people through a series of explicit and difficult-
to-fuck-up gates to make it clear what they want.

What about voice inputs or AI is so powerful that it could _entirely reverse
that trend_ and go the other way to a UI where you can say whatever you want
and still end up with a UI that's impossible to fuck up?

I really think the AI bulls should spend just a little time on a serious,
professional interaction* design team working on a product that's critical to
daily commerce before they go announcing that voice obsolete screens.

\\* not graphic design, not motion design, not UI design. Nuts and bolts
interaction designers who are responsible for metrics

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lebek
_What mattered was seeing the value of the capability, not predicting any
particular applications_

How can you separate the value of a capability from its potential
applications? Surely he doesn't mean scientific/intellectual value so.. how
else can a capability have value?

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mobiletelephone
That quote stood out to me too. My question is, if there is a new capability
(Bitcoin is a good example) then how do you invest in that capability? Sure
you can pick a company working on some application, but they will almost
certainly miss the real value of the capability.

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adamlett
"how do you invest in that capability?"

It's not clear to me that you can. How would you have invested in air travel
in the time of the Wright brothers? None of the companies that eventually came
to dominate existed then.

~~~
neom
I think in this light you either invest in an inventor or radical innovator,
or a component of their supply chain. One is: I'm going to make this happen
and all these things will happen, the other is: this thing is happening so we
should should to these things. This is why the path from venture (paradigm
shift) to public (shifted) is important, the best public companies indicate a
fundamental in other businesses, they are enablers. However, over time you
become a commodity item on a supply chain and run risk the "enabled" companies
will out innovating you as they build their capabilities and margins .

