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The New AI: Where Neuroscience and Artificial Intelligence Meet
An anonymous reader writes "We're seeing a new revolution in artificial intelligence known as deep learning: algorithms modeled after the brain have made amazing strides and have been consistently winning both industrial and academic data competitions with minimal effort. 'Basically, it involves building neural networks — networks that mimic the behavior of the human brain. Much like the brain, these multi-layered computer networks can gather information and react to it. They can build up an understanding of what objects look or sound like. In an effort to recreate human vision, for example, you might build a basic layer of artificial neurons that can detect simple things like the edges of a particular shape. The next layer could then piece together these edges to identify the larger shape, and then the shapes could be strung together to understand an object. The key here is that the software does all this on its own — a big advantage over older AI models, which required engineers to massage the visual or auditory data so that it could be digested by the machine-learning algorithm.' Are we ready to blur the line between hardware and wetware?"
Are we ready to blur the line between hardware and wetware?
No. You can't ask that every time you find a slightly better algorithm. Ask it when you think you understand how the mind works.
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There are sometimes good reasons why companies are reluctant to upgrade from old hardware.
One of the big ones I've seen over the years has been specialty software that was developed for windows 2000 in some cases. This can sometimes run on windows XP but going beyond that it can be difficult to get to work or downright buggy. Most companies don't have the resources to build a new software suite in house and when you can be in a small market you might be stuck with 1 or 2 options. If the alternative option looks promising then that can lead to the second issue of upgrading.
The second issue that I've seen with upgrading is migration of data to the new systems. Most companies that I've ran into do a splendid job of stripping the data sets out of competitors software and importing it into their own. There are cases where this doesn't happen though. So you could end up in a phase where your re-entering all of your previous data into the new system. That can take a long time especially if you don't want to have downtime as the data sets can change over the course of a day if the old system remains live. Sometimes that's the only option though. This can bring up a large cost in getting the data over to the new system if it has to be done manually.
Cost. You might say well I can understand a small company not wanting to switch they don't have the resources to upgrade like a larger company. That's not always true. If you are looking to upgrade multiple systems and services you might be hiring on multiple people or even contracting out to get that job done. You have to be aware that their might be downtime and even complete system failure over the course of an upgrade. Recently a friend of mine was working at a company that changed their inventory software over to a new version. During the migration they lost everything and backups weren't helpful. This shouldn't have ever happened and I question some of their methods but that's besides the point. They lost almost a week of productivity and ended up having 100's of employees standing around or being sent home because they couldn't do work on machinery. That downtime cost them huge as contracts weren't being filled in time and the employees were still being paid. They just finished a round of layoffs.
So let's say you do proper project planning and everything goes smooth there's not much work to the transition to new software roll over is quite easy. You can still end up with bugs in the new system which might bring down time over the course of the first few months. Retraining people on new software packages might require outside resources that you have to pay and productivity generally drops over this time.
These are some of the reasons why I've seen management veto doing upgrades on something even as simple as IE6. I've seen IE8-10 break internal applications multiple times. Currently we can't run IE10 unless it's in compatibility mode until we have our web team rebuild a few of our resources. It's nice that we have that resource to be able to do that and we can do upgrades to newer versions of software, but not all companies do. Management sees it as, we haven't been hacked so what are the chances of something being breached compared to the cost of upgrades. If we do get breached how much is that going to cost us compared to upgrades? While I would say significantly more sometimes that's not an option, that decision can end up falling into the hands of upper management which might veto upgrades.