
Magical thinking about machine learning won’t bring the reality of AI any closer - majikarp
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/aug/05/magical-thinking-about-machine-learning-will-not-bring-artificial-intelligence-any-closer
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gipp
The catalyzing event for the article is a talk at NIPS drawing a comparison
between ML and alchemy (i.e. experimentation by intuition and rules of thumb
without an underlying theoretical foundation). The author presents this as a
novel bombshell declaration (an "intellectual hand grenade" he calls it), but
that is a sentiment that has been raised and broadly agreed with in every
conversation along these lines I've ever had with actual practitioners. The
other comparison I hear a lot is to bridge-building before formal structural
analysis. People were perfectly capable of building functioning bridges, and
some through practice were much better than others, but no one could tell you
e.g. the maximum load for a given margin of safety and maintenance schedule.

Anyway, point is, the author is not wrong but this is far from some eventful
revelation.

