The answer is simple: electricity is a prerequisite to artificial intelligence, and fire was necessary to provide us with the nutrition we needed to harness the power of electricity.

Modern ML certainly has some cool applications, but none seem revolutionary. Can you list any that are?

Off the top of my head:

When paired with a robotic medium, we'll be able to automate most pattern driven jobs like construction, welding, surgery, anything really that doesn't require human element to it and is more of a pattern matching behavior.

This is extremely revolutionary and will put a ton of people out of work. Any pattern-dependent job that does not require human interaction will be at risk, even coding (as we've seen by GPT-3's ability to generate code). Lawyers, sales people, cops, these jobs will be ok, but there will be less demand for humongous medical teams, software teams, etc. Bc all the entry-level work can be handled by AI, and just need some QA from a few engineers.

This is a wildly optimistic take on what AI can accomplish, and a misunderstanding of the difficulties in all those tasks. If AI can do the first set of jobs, it will be able to replace sales people, cops, and lawyers too. But there's nothing, yet, to indicate that there isn't a wide gulf between the current state of the art and the kind of generalized intelligence you're talking about.

Besides, the more imminent threat to "our jobs" is not artificial intelligence but the brutal combination of globalization and the increasingly effortless ability to work remotely. If it doesn't matter anymore where the person behind Slack or Zoom is located, then why should they be in the same country. Before AI catches up to our jobs, the jobs will already have been taken away from us by the forces of globalization.

I mean it can already replace certain tasks done by sales people, cops and lawyers.

Three lawyers with the right set of tools (e.g. for discovery, writing legal briefs, etc.) can be more productive than twenty lawyers.

Yes but for jobs that require emotion like sales, the current Neural Network paradigm is just not gonna cut it. I am never buying from a robot, it’s missing an element of the mind that we still haven’t even categorized the biological side of, even if it sounds like a “real person”.

The state of the art of today’s DNN, I agree, is far away. But the peak of today’s architecture is yes, replacing construction, welding, and surgery. Those actually might happen quickly.

That would be revolutionary! Like others in the comments, I haven't seen evidence that this can be done with today's technology. But I would be happily be proved wrong, and would love to learn more.

All that from today's AI? The best I've seen from today's AI is a few gpt-3 articles that are clearly in the uncanny valley and a car which may or may not mistake an exit ramp wall for a passing lane.

When you demo some tech to 5 year old and he mistakens it for magic, I think it’s revolutionary enough. In current state of art, Atari RL, AlphaGo, AlphaFold, GPT3, GANs, Pix2pix, CLIP, DeepFakes etc are very very revolutionary. You can take any of these and go back in time even just 15 years ago, people won’t believe what was accomplished.

However, I do believe we are far and away from generalized intelligence.

Yes, those applications are awesome. I just think they don't hold a candle to (sorry for the pun) fire, or electricity. But maybe that's not a useful comparison, since very few people likely think (today's) AI to be _that_ revolutionary.

The comparison to fire and electricity aside --- you're absolutely right, we can do very interesting things with machine learning & automatic differentiation these days!

Protein folding seems like it could be a revolutionary application.