
Siren Song of Deep Learning and AI - romanormandy
Recently a number of investments in Deep Learning space raised hopes of delivery of AI products with human like performance in near future. Dharmendra Modha, in charge of IBM’s Synapse “neuromorphic” chips claims that IBM “will deliver computer equivalent of human brain” by 2018. I have heard echo of this claim in statements of virtually all recently funded AI and Deep Learning companies. While some progress in speech processing and image recognition will be made, it will not be sufficient to justify lofty valuations of recent funding events.<p>Symbol based computing technologies, including point-to-point “deep” neural networks can not possibly deliver on claims made by many of these well funded Deep Learning labs and startups. Here are just three of the reasons:<p>1. Every single innovation in evolution of vertebrate brains was due to advances in organism locomotion, and none of the new formations indicate the emergence of symbol processing in cortex.<p>2.Human intelligence is a product of resonating, coupled electric fields produced by massive population of neurons, synapses and ion channels of cortex resulting in dynamic, AM modulated waves in gamma and beta range, not static point-to-point neural networks.<p>3. Human memories are formed in hippocampus via “phase precession” theta waves which transform time events into spatial domain without use of symbols like time stamps.<p>Each of the above three empirical findings invalidates AI’s symbolic, computation approach. “Artificially Intelligent” computers will certainly not appear in next 20-30 years, what market needs today and tomorrow are  “mobile assistants” augmenting human memory and intelligence, which will be delivered by rapid advances in wearable sensors and neuromorphic chips operating under control of real neural science, not AI.<p>Roman Ormandy
Founder 
Embody Corp
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dkarapetyan
I think you're over-thinking it. This is all just marketing hype and when
someone says deep learning and AI you can just substitute automated data
mining without loss of generality. Automated data mining doesn't sound as sexy
and so the marketing departments are not presenting it that way.

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vonnik
That's true, but only if you describe the human senses as data mining. Deep
learning is a form of machine perception, which is a necessary but not
sufficient condition of strong AI.

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dkarapetyan
No, human sense can be considered input devices but it's not your senses that
do the mining. All the consolidation happens by some unknown mechanism and
it's more about model building than anything else. None of the recent trends
in AI address the model building aspect of learning. See my comments
elsewhere:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8327625](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8327625).

