
The fourth industrial revolution: a primer on Artificial Intelligence - wslh
https://medium.com/mmc-writes/the-fourth-industrial-revolution-a-primer-on-artificial-intelligence-ai-ff5e7fffcae1
======
nickdavidhaynes
Oof this article is atrocious, ill-informed hype. Most of it is so high-level
that it's essentially a paraphrase of Wikipedia, with some ridiculously
specific details like gradient boosting and sigmoid activation functions
sprinkled in for extra confusion.

>The breakthrough in deep learning is to model the brain, not the world...
Artificial, software-based calculators that approximate the function of
neurons in a brain are connected together.

This comparison is criminally incorrect.

And don't even get me started on figures 2+3 - 2 adjacent figures, with
different horizontal _and_ vertical scales, that use highly technical terms
without introduction?? It's really hard to see how a lay-reader could get
anything useful out of those plots.

Despite the author's promise to "get behind the headlines" and "cut through
the hype", this is just a regurgitation of "intro to machine learning"
cliches.

~~~
woodandsteel
I have no expertise in this area, so I have no idea if you are right or wrong.

That said, I think you comment would be more useful to people like me if you
said for several specific points what is the truth that the author got wrong,
and also gave a link to an article for non-experts that gets things right.

------
jpfr
Nothing new to discover here.

Bits of AI history and the current state. But no current or future
applications of AI in industry.

The guy who discovers the first killer application in the space will be rich
and famous. Until then, most efforts will go the way of scheduling theory.

Theoretical results are nice. But 90% of effort for building applications goes
into domain and project specific details. So every new client project is
starting nearly from scratch.

This is a consultant project-business. Not a startup product-with-market-
fitness business.

~~~
nojvek
Tech company stocks are going crazy. Nvidia more than doubled it stock in one
year. I think it's still early but the premise holds true.

Once we thought human flight is impossible. Now we can fly 500+ people half
way around the planet in a single aircraft because we discovered fundamentals
of flight.

We're discovering some fundamentals of the human brain. Atleast the audio and
visual cortex. Being able to achieve human level imagenet recognition is an
amazing milestone.

Go was thought to be a human only skill. A skill of reasoning and intuition
that could never be achieved by computers. We did it.

Technology grows exponentially. With better sensors, labelled data and cheap
faster computers we can achieve parity with some parts of the brain.

The big question is how can we use it to build a better world. Privacy,
security, income disparity and joblessness are very sensitive subjects that
need to be tackled in a way that benefits everyone.

------
frozenport
HN should have a downvote button so that we can dispose of this kind of
recycled, echo chamber content.

~~~
saycheese
They do, it's called flagging.

