In a way, you could take this as a perfect example of the authors' point: we might have had a lot of these advances sooner if we hadn't let interest in neural networks fall completely off a cliff.
Think about it: Do we really, in the US of A or anywhere in the 1st world countries, have a lack of resources? In the 21st century? With hardly anyone actually working on the basics the population needs, like food, because our productivity is through the roof?
And "money" only is an issue when humans decide it is - it is an entirely made-up concept represented only in bits in computers (never mind that little bit of printed money, which can be produced at will too).
We do pay a huge amount of people in both private and public sector to do useless work. See dilbert.com cartoons and their popularity, and the results of research into the mood of working people, a huge amount of them thinking their work is useless to society or even just their own company.
The feeling (and reality) that we all have to work hard to get by is mostly an artificially created system outcome. With the productivity levels we have achieved, and the tools and knowledge at our disposal, we should have plenty of room for experiments.
Yes, I just say national debt. As long as this is not paid back (or we are working seriously to decrease it) we can't claim that we have an abundance of money - quite the opposite. Even more: As long as we aren't seriously working to decrease the national debt we are near to delayed filing of insolvency, which is not a good idea as any founder can tell you.
And no, debt does NOT have to be paid back. It can be rolled over indefinitely, or, if demands on "payments" really are an issue just go bankrupt. NOT A JOKE. It happened A LOT. I myself - and I'm not that old - have seen three currencies in my country in my life (Germany), my grandparents more. Germany is a horrible 3rd world place... no?
What are people going to do when all they get is "sorry, no more payments on the old debt. Are they going to emigrate to Alpha Centauri? Are they going to refuse to live from now on? No, they will grumble and get back to doing what they've been doing all the time. As long as the government is strong etc. Plenty of examples - see Germany. No that doesn't lead to Argentina - only Argentina leads to Argentina. A countries industry, culture, people, government don't suddenly stop working just because the currency is changed and old debts forgiven. Money does not exist, it's a made-up concept.
> we can't claim that we have an abundance of money - quite the opposite.
Uhmm... what should I tell someone like you? Except to repeat:
Money does not exist, it's a made-up concept.
Guess what happened after the financial crisis - we invented a trillion dollars. Out of nowhere. Suddenly it was there.
Also, the attitude that ANNs are "all we need" was there even before deep learning delivered all the recent SOTA results. I remember Patrick Winston commenting on that in one of his lectures in 2010(!).
Deep learning undeniably works well. It works so well that it has almost completely taken over the field, sucking the oxygen out of other parts of the field. This is a little disconcerting since no one really understands how much of deep learning's success is due to a) the algorithms themselves vs. b) the massive amount of data and computational power being thrown at vision problems.
There is something to be said for some "counter-cyclical" efforts to encourage people to keep exploring approaches that aren't just slightly different network topologies, or least to ensure that they're not totally forgotten. That's the message I took away from the article.