We'll see whether this is true when ML has actually changed huge parts of human life. So far it hasn't changed much, to be honest.
Re:Simple questions to help reduce AI hype
by nickmorri on Sunday July 10, 2016 @07:00AM
(#12065216)
The recent advances in speech and image recognition alone have had tremendous impact. Many areas of day to day life have been impacted.
This is generally overblown. What has mainly happened so far is that already-existing products have been incrementally improved by deep learning - speech recognition, spam detection, search ranking, etc. all worked reasonably well before deep learning came along; deep learning just improved them.
There aren't actually that many actually massively-impactful image recognition products out there yet (there are certainly products with the potential to be impactful, e.g. medical diagnostics, but it is too early to call).
Yes, the underlying "magic" is decades old algorithms, often relatively simple concepts like LMS or nearest neighbors. The ML isn't the exciting part, it's the application. The pieces are finally in place: simple acquisition of training/test data (big data), powerful computing for the masses, larger crossover of ML into the computing/robotics fields. There is much hype but also much on the cusp of changing huge parts of human life.