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Machine Learning Expert Michael Jordan On the Delusions of Big Data
First time accepted submitter agent elevator writes In a wide-ranging interview at IEEE Spectrum, Michael I. Jordan skewers a bunch of sacred cows, basically saying that: The overeager adoption of big data is likely to result in catastrophes of analysis comparable to a national epidemic of collapsing bridges. Hardware designers creating chips based on the human brain are engaged in a faith-based undertaking likely to prove a fool's errand; and despite recent claims to the contrary, we are no further along with computer vision than we were with physics when Isaac Newton sat under his apple tree.
A man of many talents.
... and despite recent claims to the contrary, we are no further along with computer vision than we were with physics when Isaac Newton sat under his apple tree.
That's true, I looked into object recognition for image classification by content. Face recognition is proceeding fairly nicely but doing stuff like just programmatically classifying/tagging images by whether they contain a car, airplane, house, tree, dog, mountain .... without even trying to do things like identifying the type of airplane/dog/car is pretty much undoable in any reasonable amount of time with human level accuracy needed on garden variety PCs and tablets which is the application I'd be interested in. The fastest and most accurate image classifier/tagger is still a human. Am still looking forward to they day that changes but I'm not sure that will be within my lifetime.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
The interview is slightly more nuanced than that. Prof. Jordan says that he can take off his academic hat and read musings on a common singularity with ordinary human awe and wonder. It is only in his work as an academic that he doesn't feel Kurzweil's ideas are relevant.
I remain sceptical of the singularity idea myself, though for different reasons. When I read Kurzweil's The Singularity is Near , I was disappointed at how in claiming a never-ending increase in the pace of technological advancement, Kurzweil never dealt with the regulatory and consumer factors, and the whole notion of how humans perceive time in general. The wheels of government can only move so fast, and so mankind's access to radical new technology outside the lab (e.g. self-driving cars, new medical tech) must slow down to match the speed of regulatory agencies. Also, consumers can be convinced to buy new shiny things, but there is still a desire to get one's money's worth out of one's purchases, and lots of people still feel their computer or smartphone from three or four years ago is still good enough. Would the market go for replacing one's tech in the shorter and shorter spans that Kurzweil envisions?
So when I read a computer scientist like Jordan admit that he sees no cause for singularity optimism within his work, I can only feel that Kurzweil's dream is a balloon being stuck with a thousand pins. Still, I continue to enjoy thinking about the subject.
I was disappointed at how in claiming a never-ending increase in the pace of technological advancement, Kurzweil never dealt with the regulatory and consumer factors, and the whole notion of how humans perceive time in general. The wheels of government can only move so fast, and so mankind's access to radical new technology outside the lab (e.g. self-driving cars, new medical tech) must slow down to match the speed of regulatory agencies.
You make some good points. However, I believe the march towards the singularity will march inexorably forward for one (highly undesirable) reason: the insatiable appetite of the leaders of nations for power. The populations of those countries will not even be allowed to know much of what is being developed with hundreds of billions of their tax dollars, but technologies that leaders perceive could enhance their ability to dominate the world will be financed. There will be no regulation. If you want to know the state of the art in visual recognition, you should look at military applications: robot soldiers and autonomous drones. For applications of big data (especially its usefulness in widespread blackmailing activities) then, in spite of some initial missteps, look at the pervasive collection of data by the world's "intelligence agencies".
There's plenty of reasons I can think of why I'd prefer image recognition on my phone rather than the cloud. Privacy, for one. If you let FB tag your photos with the names of the people in it (after teaching it those names), what do you think happens to that data? You might not even want to share the photo or video stream with anyone... Another reason is that we still do not live in a world with ubiquitous and cheap mobile data. Travel abroad, and you'll find out quickly why cloud-based services like Waze aren't always a viable option.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
As it happens, I am a computer vision expert.
I do wonder how much useful stuff was done with the results from physics back then as opposed to emperical hand-hacking of everything. I suspect not much.
Computer vision has a long way to go. On the other hand, there are plenty of things which it does do, some of which are more or less impossible otherwise.
OCR is very useful. It runs the mail system of many countries and has plenty of use when it comes to digitising old documents. This would be possible, but deeply tedious by hand.
Structure from motion is used heavily in the film industry to work out 3D structure and motion for placing virtual objects. Almost impossible to do well without computer vision.
Photo stitching for automatic panoramas. Classic CV system, and my phone comes with it built in.
Number plate recognition. Apart from the rather unpleasant big brother potential, London's congestion charging system runs off this and it does very good things for London.
Those cameras/phones with face detection built in. Not sure how useful it is but it works.
Lego Fusion is a recently released game which appears to rely on computer vision.
Oh those phone based barcode and QR scanners. Very useful.
The pick and place machines which use vision for accurate placement.
This machine which is really awesome: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Lots of other industrial things are controlled by CV.
Certain types of super resolution microscopy are based on computer vision.
And that's just a few off the top of my head.
So yeah computer vision has a long way to go. On the other hand, it's out there doing real things right now. It might not be very advanced CV (the industrial stuff often is not because it needs to be reliable), but it's still CV and it's still being used.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
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Latency.
I am doing a postdoc in applied statistics/machine learning and I was very surprised by this interview since it is contradictory to what Michael Jordan has himself expressed as an invited speaker at conferences as well as what his most recent research projects are focused at. It appears that, according to Michael Jordan himself as expressed on his webpage, the article is a hack-job where the journalist is completely misrepresenting his view on big data. To quote:
I’ve found myself engaged with the Media recently (...) for an interview that has been published in the IEEE Spectrum.
That latter process was disillusioning. Well, perhaps a better way to say it is that I didn’t harbor that many illusions about science and technology journalism going in, and the process left me with even fewer.
The interview is here: http://spectrum.ieee.org/robotics/artificial-intelligence/machinelearning-maestro-michael-jordan-on-the-delusions-of-big-data-and-other-huge-engineering-efforts
Read the title and the first paragraph and attempt to infer what’s in the body of the interview. Now go read the interview and see what you think about the choice of title.
The title contains the phrase “The Delusions of Big Data and Other Huge Engineering Efforts”. It took me a moment to realize that this was the title that had been placed (without my knowledge) on the interview I did a couple of weeks ago. Anyway who knows me, or who’s attended any of my recent talks knows that I don’t feel that Big Data is a delusion at all; rather, it’s a transformative topic, one that is changing academia (e.g., for the first time in my 25-year career, a topic has emerged that almost everyone in academia feels is on the critical path for their sub-discipline), and is changing society (most notably, the micro-economies made possible by learning about individual preferences and then connecting suppliers and consumers directly are transformative). But most of all, from my point of view, it’s a *major engineering and mathematical challenge*, one that will not be solved by just gluing together a few existing ideas from statistics, optimization, databases and computer systems.
Source: https://amplab.cs.berkeley.edu/2014/10/22/big-data-hype-the-media-and-other-provocative-words-to-put-in-a-title/
I think he underestimated the power of stupidity.
You can grant every reasonably well-off person in a country a device that gives them access to all scientific and engineering knowledge and a vast communications network - and half of them will use it to publish rambling arguments that the moon landing was fake, fossils are a hoax scientists made up to disprove the bible, autism is caused by vaccines and Obama is secretly a Kenyan Muslim Communist Atheist Black-Supremecist who hates America.
No, seriously. Here are some choice quotes:
"I read all the time about engineers describing their new chip designs in what seems to me to be an incredible abuse of language. They talk about the “neurons” or the “synapses” on their chips. But that can’t possibly be the case; a neuron is a living, breathing cell of unbelievable complexity."
"It’s always been my impression that when people in computer science describe how the brain works, they are making horribly reductionist statements that you would never hear from neuroscientists."
"Lately there seems to be an epidemic of stories about how computers have tackled the vision problem, and that computers have become just as good as people at vision."
"Even in facial recognition, my impression is that it still only works if you’ve got pretty clean images to begin with."
"I have a hobby of searching for information about silly Kickstarter projects, mostly to see how preposterous they are, and I end up getting served ads from the same companies for many months."
Here's the catch: all of these quotes are from the interviewer. Jordan has a lot of really nuanced claims here, but it's clear that the interviewer has an agenda of his own.
As someone who was involved in the previous neural network hype cycle (late 80s, early 90s), I'd have to agree with him that we go through these cycles, where a particular approach gain ascendency, then is shown to not work as well as the hype, and then gets rejected. On the inside, however, lots of good work continues to be done. The press (and then in popular opinion) keeps saying 'this is it, we're really close to AI' or somethign similar, and then when it doesn't pan out, then it is considered a bust. But, we are making progress, we know more than we did last year, and a lot more than 10 years ago. It is just that the problem is hard, and we're still trying to figure out some basic principles, so don't expect us to be there yet.
The more people I meet, the better I like my dog.
The whole idea of "the Singularity" is nonsense. It is basically people seeking a surrogate "God" in technology, and the singularity is needed to create the "all knowing" aspect. There is however zero reason to believe it is even a remote possibility. All practical connections of more hardware have had a speed-up below 1 (i.e. use 2x the hardware get less than 2x the computing power) often significantly and fundamentally so.
The singularity is the production of a child-like fantasy that ignores any and all facts that are known. Just like the idea of a religious "God" it does touch something in many people that makes them want to believe against better judgment.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.