
Interview with Mark Cuban on AI, Silicon Valley, Politics, Media and more - espeed
https://bothsidesofthetable.com/mark-cuban-on-why-you-need-to-study-artificial-intelligence-or-youll-be-a-dinosaur-in-3-years-db3447bea1b4#.ionwzln9o
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a_humean
Previous:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13599074](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13599074)

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greenleafjacob
> He thinks even programming is vulnerable to being automated and reducing the
> number of available programming jobs.

Hmm... Where have I heard this before?

> It is far more likely that the programming occupation will become extinct
> (through the further development of self-programming techniques) [...] More
> and more, computers will program themselves; and direction will be given to
> computers through the mediation of compiling systems that will be completely
> neutral so far as the content of the decision rules is concerned. (Herbert
> Simon, 1961) [1]

[1]
[https://www.princeton.edu/~hos/Mahoney/articles/miscellany/i...](https://www.princeton.edu/~hos/Mahoney/articles/miscellany/ieeetalk.html)

~~~
djaychela
While such predictions may have been made before, surely as circumstances
change it becomes more likely for it to be possible? If you go back 20 years
or so, I can remember people confidently predicting that it would be
impossible for computers to have human-like vision, and that it was an
'impossible' problem. And look where we are now.

I think it's often difficult to appreciate that one's own profession could be
replaced by some code, but it's an issue that many areas of the working
population will have to deal with in our (and our children's) lifetimes - what
has happened with physical work - automation such as robots and machines will
happen with the work we do with our minds in many cases.

~~~
simias
The way I see it if we manage to reach a level of AI strong enough to replace
software engineers it means that basically anything can be automated. It's not
just the end of programming, it's basically the end of jobs altogether. The
consequences will be tremendous for humanity as a whole.

So I'm not really selfishly worried about this. We'll go eventually, but we'll
probably be amongst the last to go. By then society will have to figure out
how to deal with mass unemployment, it's already a massive issue today and
it's not going to improve any time soon.

~~~
BaronSamedi
We may not need AI to automate software development. If genetic programming
techniques started making serious advances it might be possible to evolve
software. Call it "test only development"\--write the tests and then grow a
program that satisfies them.

GP doesn't seem to get much attention so we are far from this method being
practical. Actually, I'm puzzled why GP is so unpopular compared to say, type
system research, since it could have a vastly greater impact if it were to
make progress.

~~~
zzalpha
The problem is that unless you perfectly specify your tests to provide a
complete and formal definition of the interface, GP can produce results that
might appear correct but is actually subtly (or grossly) broken.

That's an extremely difficult task for any but the most trivial problems. It
shares many of the same issues with formal verification, which has also failed
to catch on beyond the odd niche project.

~~~
halflings
Yup, in ML you would call this the generalization problem: How are you going
to build your algorithm build something useful instead of just memorizing the
inputs in some way?

Differentiable Neural Computers [1] are getting us closer (by incorporating an
explicit I/O operations on a memory) but it's uncertain how much test data you
would need to build complex code routines.

[https://deepmind.com/blog/differentiable-neural-
computers/](https://deepmind.com/blog/differentiable-neural-computers/)

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dandermotj
Mark Cuban is talking about it - maximal hype has been reached.

~~~
entelechy
Just a matter of time until only Dinosaurs will remember what AI was ;P

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gydfi
Note: article doesn't actually say _why_ he thinks this, only that he said it,
so the comment is really just "next big thing is big".

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6d6b73
In reality programming is already fully automated :) Translation to machine
code is done in most cases automatically. We just tell the compiler what we
want the program to do.

Honestly, if we treated software engineering as a real engineering discipline,
we would already have 90% of software created automatically. We just keep
ourselves busy by building same CRUD apps, recreating same layouts, building
same libraries over and over again.

When we start treating software engineering as engineering not as art, full
automation of programming will be a matter of only few years.

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jokoon
To be honest it smells like AI has become something you just talk about
because you have something to sell. It was called web 2.0, then big data, and
now it's AI.

~~~
minimaxir
I wrote a rant last post
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13599465](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13599465))
about how AI is being oversold. The problem in this case (along with buzzwords
like Web 2.0/big data) is that there is _some_ logical advantage to
implementing AI/Web 2.0/big data for a business, just not a change-the-world
advantage that will not help if everything else is being done incorrectly.

There is a gray area in between the marketing, and the _ambiguity_ is the real
danger.

~~~
jokoon
I don't see any danger with AI, I'm optimist that it will introduce great
changes.

I'm just bothered by the whole market tendencies, it often sounds like it's
appealing to salesmen, meanwhile doing real stuff with machine learning is
tough and it is often the realm of research and universities.

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e2e4
Interesting part of the article is also "Mark also pointed out that the number
of investments he personally makes in San Francisco has dropped by 90%. "

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elcapitan
I know that there's an infinite amount of AI/ML books and courses, but does
somebody know a good high-level overview of how ML-based solutions can be
introduced to replace existing imperative/OO code bases, and how to think
about this? That would be a good starting point to avoid the "dinosaur"
scenario, without starting from scratch on sample projects that are unrelated
to your current work.

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some1else
Once a fair number of hackers become dinosaurs, working from home might become
the new norm.

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dovdovdov
Dumb, thin front-end FTW! :)

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kapauldo
Mark cuban cares about mark cuban. Suster should get qualified opinions on the
matter.

