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Ask Slashdot: What Types of Jobs Are Opening Up In the New Field of AI?

Qbertino writes: I'm about to move on in my career after having a "short rethink and regroup break" and was for quite some time now thinking about getting into perhaps a new programming language and technology, like NodeJS or Java/Kotlin or something. But I have the seriously growing suspicion that artificial intelligence is coming for us programmers and IT experts faster than we might want to admit. Just last weekend I heard myself saying to a friend who was a pioneer on the web, "AI is today what the web was in 1993" -- I think that to be very true. So just 20 minutes ago I started thinking and wondering about what types of jobs there are in AI. Is anything popping up in the industry from the AI hype and what are these positions called, what do they precisely do and what are the skills needed to do them? I suspect something like an "AI Architect" for planning AI setups and clearly defining the boundaries of what the AI is supposed to do and explore. Then I presume the requirements for something like an "AI Maintainer" and/or "AI Trainer," which would probably resemble something like an admin of a big data storage, looking at statistics and making educated decisions on which "AI Training Paths" the AI should continue to explore to gain the skill required and deciding when the "AI" is ready to be let go on to the task. You're seeing we -- AFAIK -- don't even have names for these positions yet, but I suspect, just as in the internet/web boom 20 years ago, that is about to change *very* fast.

And what about Tensor Flow? Should I toy around with it or are we past that stage already and will others do AI setup and installation better than me before I know how this thing really works? Because I also suspect most of the AI work for humans will closely be tied to services and providers such as Google. You know, renting "AI" as you rent webspace or subscribe to bandwidth today. Any services and industry vendors I should look into -- besides the obvious Google that is? In a nutshell, what work is there in the field of AI that can be done and how do I move into that? Like now. And what should I maybe get a degree in if I want to be on top of this AI thing? And how would you go about gaining skill and knowledge on AI today, and I mean literally, today. I know, tons of questions but insightful advice is requested from an educated slashdot crowd. And I bet I'm not the only one interested in this topic. Thanks.

133 comments

  1. Dowsing by tietokone-olmi · · Score: 3

    But you gotta bring your own "battle-proven" rod.

    1. Re:Dowsing by FatdogHaiku · · Score: 1

      I was thinking camera and lens cleaning/replacement...
      https://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/shortcuts/2013/jan/25/game-destroy-cctv-cameras-berlin
      I think CCTV monitoring will be a big use for AI

      --
      You have the right to remain sentient. If you give up the right to remain sentient, you will be elected to public office
    2. Re:Dowsing by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      those things aren't prerequisites for intelligence.

      Well that explains how you're able to post comments here at all, doesn't it?

      no intelligence required

    3. Re:Dowsing by tietokone-olmi · · Score: 1

      Because calling machine-learning methods "artificial intelligence" is a religious attitude towards computation, and that-a-way lies a world where you trust the Computer because the Computer is your friend. It deserves to get figuratively spat on over and over.

    4. Re:Dowsing by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      That doesn't make any sense. None at all. There is nothing remotely religious about the use of the term "artificial intelligence" to include the current state of machine learning technology. Many people consider tomatoes a fruit...is that religious too?

      Sheesh.

  2. Advanced algorithm by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Funny

    There will be job designing advanced algorithms for robotics. Tasks such as felatio require experienced professionals who understand the ins and outs of the task they are designing for.
    Kudos to all you dick sucking engineers

    1. Re:Advanced algorithm by DontBeAMoran · · Score: 0

      Tasks such as felatio require experienced professionals who understand the ins and outs of the task they are designing for.

      1. Dick goes in
      2. Dick goes out
      3. Goto 1

      --
      #DeleteFacebook
    2. Re:Advanced algorithm by HornWumpus · · Score: 1

      No wonder you can't get dates...

      You should find someone with better technique to teach you something...I can't help, unless you also eat pussy...

      --
      John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
    3. Re:Advanced algorithm by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      No thank you, felines carry toxoplasmosis.

    4. Re:Advanced algorithm by tigersha · · Score: 1

      And they smell bad when you grill them

      --
      The dangers of excessive individualism are nothing compared to the oppressiveness of excessive collectivism
  3. Car cleaner by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Manually cleaning self-driving cars for $3.99 an hour.

  4. Difficult by jawtheshark · · Score: 3, Funny

    Doing AI is much harder than being an application developer. I doubt most of us would be able to switch. Good luck.

    --
    Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
    1. Re:Difficult by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 2

      Doing AI is much harder than being an application developer.

      Indeed. I know plenty of companies with openings, but they are looking for PhDs in machine learning and data science from top tier universities. Designing and training a deep ANN is a lot harder than learning how to edit HTML. It is not something you are going to learn in a 21 day "bootcamp".

    2. Re:Difficult by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Where would a "mere" master in AI apply ? (not in US though, ozzie)

    3. Re:Difficult by religionofpeas · · Score: 1

      Designing and training a deep ANN is a lot harder than learning how to edit HTML

      Sounds like a perfect job for AI.

    4. Re:Difficult by Hognoxious · · Score: 1

      In Soviet Russia, AI trains YOU!!!!

      --
      Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
  5. Worked in the AI field for 45 years... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Insightful

    and AI never works since anything that works is redefined as not AI. Sucks that I've worked my ass off for four different companies, and the last one is Microsoft, where what I do is considered amazing before it works then not appreciated after it works.

    Currently, I think AI will only "succeed" when it can make it's own arguments as to why it works.

    1. Re: Worked in the AI field for 45 years... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      We use AI to determine how much vacation time we can deny before people quit. It's pretty damn accurate. We've only had to fire six people since we started using it for requesting time off.

    2. Re:Worked in the AI field for 45 years... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      We (my team at Microsoft) recently worked on an AI that did correlations for denied vacation time between who we wanted to quit (mainly guys that were married and had kids) versus the people that worked hard (almost all single guys). We were 100% successful in getting the people we wanted to quit to quit versus the people we wanted to stay. AI is great at screwing employees over. I've never in the forty-one years since I graduated with an MS in Comp Sci seen it work for any other task.

    3. Re: Worked in the AI field for 45 years... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      We use AI to determine how much vacation time we can deny before people quit. It's pretty damn accurate. We've only had to fire six people since we started using it for requesting time off.

      That is a very profitable use of AI. It has a very measurable short-term return, so management will approve more investment.

      I work in Washington state, and we require less than 2/3 of vacation time to be paid out when someone leaves. That is a huge incentive to not allow people to take vacation time. That is very different from when I worked in CA where we were required to pay-out vacation time so we encouraged people to take time off to get it off of the books since it was a liability. Here in WA, we don't quite do AI, but do run a lot of different reports to measure Pearson correlation coefficients versus many different factors. We've gotten pretty good at predicting the 80% of employees that we can not allow any vacation time off that won't quit.

    4. Re:Worked in the AI field for 45 years... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You don't need AI for that. Just deny vacation time to programmers that are married and they will quit. You don't want them anyway since they usually refuse to work the typical Seattle Hundreds. I know when I was a dev manager, before I left tech, that the married guys were the ones usually guilty of being lazy and refusing to work the normal 16 hours a day Mon-Thu and 12 hours a day Fri-Sun. I know that after working for over twenty years in tech and not taking a single vacation or sick day off that the people that are lazy and take days off just destroy morale. You need to get rid of them quickly. Yes, it's great that someone wants to go to Disney Land with their kids, but when the vast majority of employees don't have kids, it hurts morale pretty badly.

    5. Re: Worked in the AI field for 45 years... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      The tiny percentage of devs that have kids destroy morale. It's best to get rid of their kind quickly.

    6. Re: Worked in the AI field for 45 years... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Microsoft's AI for HR was all about how they could screw us the most. After nearly twenty years there without a single vacation day off, I finally got fed up. I finally quit. The two weeks off I had were amazing.

    7. Re: Worked in the AI field for 45 years... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      So much of modern AI is centered around how much you can screw employees. I guess I'm one of the suckers since the last week off I had approved was on 1987. Microsoft knows just how far they can push us.

    8. Re: Worked in the AI field for 45 years... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      This. I know we screw employees, but they haven't pushed me to my limit yet. I was able to take a four day weekend off in 1993, and I still think of that fondly.

    9. Re: Worked in the AI field for 45 years... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Correct. I work for Oracle Fusion. We can't explicitly say we punish the tiny of percentage of devs that are married, but our product certainly does correctly identify them as problems. Those people want time off even though it screws their coworkers.

    10. Re: Worked in the AI field for 45 years... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You are correct. I wish we could ask that when we're interviewing people.

    11. Re: Worked in the AI field for 45 years... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      45 years working in AI and you never learned the difference between "its" and "it's"?

      Artificial intelligence? Doctor, cure thyself.

    12. Re: Worked in the AI field for 45 years... by Wycliffe · · Score: 1

      We've gotten pretty good at predicting the 80% of employees that we can not allow any vacation time off that won't quit.

      and from another post further down:

      I guess I'm one of the suckers since the last week off I had approved was on 1987.

      This is evil. I understand denying vacation for a given week but if I was denied vacation, I would immediately ask which weeks were still available. If there were no weeks available in the next 6 months, I would immediately quit. There is no way I would put up with being perpetually denied time off. Where I currently work not only do we have vacation and sick which can be used for any reason, we also allow unpaid time off if you run out of vacation. Unpaid time off is somewhat capped though because you have to maintain 30 hours per week in order to qualify for health insurance. We have some very good employees that run thru their vacation and sick and average about 33-35 hours per week. It's never been an issue. Vacation is always approved. Occasionally we will have an employee shift their vacation forward or backwards by a couple weeks in order to not have everyone gone at the same time but it's never not approved.

    13. Re:Worked in the AI field for 45 years... by Wycliffe · · Score: 1

      You don't need AI for that. Just deny vacation time to programmers that are married and they will quit. You don't want them anyway since they usually refuse to work the typical Seattle Hundreds. I know when I was a dev manager, before I left tech, that the married guys were the ones usually guilty of being lazy and refusing to work the normal 16 hours a day Mon-Thu and 12 hours a day Fri-Sun. I know that after working for over twenty years in tech and not taking a single vacation or sick day off that the people that are lazy and take days off just destroy morale. You need to get rid of them quickly. Yes, it's great that someone wants to go to Disney Land with their kids, but when the vast majority of employees don't have kids, it hurts morale pretty badly.

      They couldn't pay me enough to work 16 hour days. I average about 35 hours per week and that is plenty. I have kids but one of my coworkers doesn't. He also averages in the low 30s and that's after he uses up his vacation and sick time. He's currently telecommuting while touring Europe. He's one of the best employees we have. We pay hourly so the fact that he doesn't hit 40 hours doesn't really affect us. I don't understand why people put up with crap living conditions. I live in the USA, I make below 6 figures and I live in a 6k square foot house on several acres and have plenty of money left over at the end of each month working less than 40 hours per week. I have a friend who is a recruiter in silicon valley. I told him there is likely nothing he could offer me to get me to move there. More money is not an objective to me. I too would like to get into AI and that's likely the only thing that someone could offer me to get me to take another job but it would have to also have good working conditions. I'm pretty comfortable right now where I have plenty of money and work less than 40 hours per week.

    14. Re:Worked in the AI field for 45 years... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      > about 35 hours per week

      I've worked multiple continuous stretches of more than that several times just this year. I think my record was working from a Monday morning until Wednesday lunch which was 52 hours straight. There just aren't enough developers so we all have to work hard. I've worked at Microsoft since 1999, and we've made offers to everyone even remotely qualified. We're currently short nine people on my team and have been for over a decade. We have the budget, but we just can't find people. Yes, the long hours and no allowed vacation time scares people off, but the pay isn't that bad. I've saved over 60% of my pay for nearly 18 years and counting. Yes, it sucks to not be able to even take a single day off or to not work 80+ hours a week, but I'm going to be able to retire early.

    15. Re: Worked in the AI field for 45 years... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      On the off chance you aren't trolling- pay more. Pay double. Watch people take the jobs. If you aren't willing to do that, then you aren't sorry, you're just too cheap.

    16. Re:Worked in the AI field for 45 years... by Wycliffe · · Score: 1

      I've saved over 60% of my pay for nearly 18 years and counting. Yes, it sucks to not be able to even take a single day off or to not work 80+ hours a week, but I'm going to be able to retire early.

      So you've worked the equivalent of two full time jobs for 18 years but it's ok because you are going to be able to retire early. When do you plan to retire? Let's say you started at age 25 and plan to retire in 2 years. That's 25+20+20=65. You aren't retiring early, you just condensed your work into a shorter period. If you still have good health at age 45 and don't have an accident, this might not be a bad plan, but you still would likely be better off finding a job that maybe lets you save a little less for retirement and actually enjoy some of your vacation now instead of waiting to retire to have a vacation.

  6. New field of Al? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Come on, Beau. Certainly you aren't THAT stupid. Oh, dear.

    1. Re:New field of Al? by tietokone-olmi · · Score: 1

      I'll have you know that I personally find sweetieposting hilarious. Do keep it up.

  7. And what about Tensor Flow? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Nothing but a marketing gimmick for nVidia to sell more GPUs.

  8. Gardening by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Train to rake leaves. People will always want someone to that for them

  9. Meat-bag's do funny stuff, amuse the AI by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Not much else though, hopefully the 'amused by humans' feature is deeply ingrained into the AI and not removable

  10. AI is not new by fplant · · Score: 1

    ... It's just more accessible these days and more practical due to the huge increase in computing power. Back in the day, it was required to reduce the data (images, etc) to a much smaller set of features that could be fed into the AI algorithms. Now there's enough computing power for the AI engines to determine good features on their own.

    Even though you can train a neural net to recognize e.g. hotdogs by just feeding it a series of pictures of hotdogs, and, of course pictures of things that might be mistaken for hotdogs... I believe it's still best to have some domain expertise in what you're trying to get the computer to learn. If you want to get into AI for self driving cars, for instance, it would be good if you knew a bit about image processing.

    1. Re:AI is not new by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Here's the insidiously disruptive part (based on my limited understanding) - how the terminator (a portable, general AI) had such a compact computer, if you will - once you use a rented server or GPU farm to train the AI, actually running the neural network is not nearly as computationally intensive.

  11. Be a human pet for AI overlord by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    That's my goal at least!

  12. You want fries with that? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Fast food sounds more your level....

  13. AI isn't. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    At best, we have rather shoddy decision trees.

    You don't want to go into some nebulous bullshit that's decades, if not centuries, away. Go into big data and analysis. That's what we have today.

  14. What type of jobs? Marketing and bad Journalism by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    AI today means brute force problem solving by running non-very-smart algorithms very fast or pattern matching. It's nowhere near real intelligence nor sentience. Not even close.

    So today a lot of "AI" you read about is marketing hype and bad journalism because the two often go hand in hand. Like an article I read recently about "how an artificial intelligence called 'Harrison' sits in on meetings." It's marketing bullshit regurgitated by a journalist copypasting public relations.
     
    That's where the jobs are. Now anyway.

  15. Surgeon by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Not the fish but medical.

    1. Re:Surgeon by Hognoxious · · Score: 1

      I thought you meant that weird little Scottish woman.

      --
      Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
  16. There is no 'AI' by segedunum · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Like 'self-driving' cars AI is a scam and my eyes glaze over when I hear anyone mentioning it. It's usually a clueless investor or someone with something to peddle. All we have are systems with an ever increasing number of if statements. There is no true AI and won't be for a very long time.

    1. Re:There is no 'AI' by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Like 'self-driving' cars AI is a scam and my eyes glaze over when I hear anyone mentioning it. It's usually a clueless investor or someone with something to peddle. All we have are systems with an ever increasing number of if statements. There is no true AI and won't be for a very long time.

      If you think self-driving cars are a scam, then yes, AI is definitely a scam. Maybe you should wait a year or so and re-evaluate.
      You can't ignore that computers can now beat us at chess, Go, or pretty much any game based on strategy.
      Applications such as face-recognition, speech-recognition are already used in every-day life, and are increasingly based on deep-nets.
      I'm curious to know how many if statements are in the code?

    2. Re:There is no 'AI' by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      There will never be true AI as long as we all keep moving the goal posts.

    3. Re:There is no 'AI' by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      "True AI" is an oxymoron. The "A" in "AI" stands for "artificial." If something is artificial, then it does not qualify as "true."

      Semantics matter, you dolt. Have fun chowing down on your true imitation crab meat while wearing true faux leather and true fool's gold.

    4. Re:There is no 'AI' by angel'o'sphere · · Score: 1

      Self driving cars are not driven by an AI.
      There are plenty of self driving cars on the roards right now. Many have millions of miles of driving history.
      I would suggest to google a bit instead of spreading your hubris.

      --
      Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
    5. Re:There is no 'AI' by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Nice pedant. In reality while you obsess over what defines "true" AI, "fake" AI is running search engines, doing facial recognition, transcribing speech, recommending tv shows, ads, books... just about everything with a recommendation-like system, making people rich in all various areas of finance and investment, helping in medical diagnosis, analysing genomes, helping cars recognise objects, driving cars, helping design buildings, bridges etc,...

      But don't worry: what is really important is your pedantry.

    6. Re:There is no 'AI' by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      AI = artificial intelligence. E.g. the barrel throwing gorilla in Donkey Kong was controlled by AI. The program that beat all humans in GO was an AI. Self driving cars are controlled by AI.
      Superintelligence = AI that is smarter than brightests humans

    7. Re:There is no 'AI' by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

      Self-driving cars are powered by artificial neural networks, which rely on multiplication/convolution of 16 bit floating point matrices. The decision tree / expert system stuff you're talking about with "if statements" is ancient. Nobody is doing image segmentation, object detection, or object recognition with that.

    8. Re: There is no 'AI' by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You are an idiot. You need to read up on what's going on. The beginnings of true ai are being laid out right now. Read Google and ibm whitepapers. Read the textbook at http://www.deeplearningbook.org Bad science reporting doesn't mean there isn't truth there....

    9. Re:There is no 'AI' by religionofpeas · · Score: 1

      All we have are systems with an ever increasing number of if statements.

      You must be completely unaware of what's happening in the field, if you believe that. Here's an example of how it works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

    10. Re:There is no 'AI' by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      And backhoes beat us at digging holes. So what?

    11. Re:There is no 'AI' by 110010001000 · · Score: 1

      So multiplication of 16 bit matrices is AI? Wow. amazing stuff. OP is right: there is no "AI". Just algorithms. Just because you call them "neural nets" doesn't change a damn thing.

    12. Re:There is no 'AI' by dbIII · · Score: 1

      Sadly it's just like "hoverboards" and "nanotechnology" - something that looks only slightly like what the term used to mean is now wearing the label.

      Then again I could be wrong because I think people might have been calling the Eliza bot "A.I." some time back. Current stuff called "A.I." is no more intelligent than that bot that would throw out different outputs based on the input. The pattern matching is just a bit more elaborate and there are now databases behind it to improve the pattern matching over time.
      As for "neural nets", they were not new when I heard people raving about them in the 1980s - just providing an appearance of intelligence by eventually getting things right via brute force matching.

      I wouldn't worry about A.I. taking over, I'd worry more about a few more decades of disappointment about not having anything that can even match the intelligence of a single insect.

    13. Re:There is no 'AI' by religionofpeas · · Score: 1

      providing an appearance of intelligence by eventually getting things right via brute force matching.

      That's all we need. That's how our brains evolved. We have 20 billion neurons in our cerebral cortex, with thousands of connections per neuron. That's also brute forcing. The appearance of intelligence will get better and better as we find better algorithms, and bigger networks.

    14. Re:There is no 'AI' by religionofpeas · · Score: 1

      So multiplication of 16 bit matrices is AI?

      Just as much as connecting 3 neurons together is I.

    15. Re:There is no 'AI' by Kjella · · Score: 1

      So multiplication of 16 bit matrices is AI? Wow. amazing stuff. OP is right: there is no "AI". Just algorithms. Just because you call them "neural nets" doesn't change a damn thing.

      This is flawed deconstructionist logic, humans are an intelligent carbon-based life form. A lump of coal is neither alive nor intelligent, but still made of carbon. Whatever intelligence is, I doubt it is any magic that can't be implemented in silicon, even though the building blocks are equally unintelligent.

      --
      Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
    16. Re:There is no 'AI' by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      A shocking number of things in the Real World are not what the theorists expected to be. Nevertheless, those things are as useful - or more so - than what they were "supposed" to be. Lasers, transistors, stuff that used to be esoteric and lives these days in the most mundane of places. Drugs intended to cure one aliment that actually turned out to be better for treating another.

      Eliza is primitive, but ironically, it has also been considered as a useful tool in the box of psychology, not simply a "computer game". Because while the algorithms are very basic, the human response to them more than compensates.

      In the Real World, what matters are results, not intentions or expectations or pedantic definitions. No one cares whether a self-driving car is "real" AI or "fake" AI. They're far more interested in what it does to their lives and livelihoods.

      On the other hand, if you want to look at a place where people spend their lives trying to force things to be the way they're "supposed" to be, consider modern politics and what that has resulted in.

    17. Re:There is no 'AI' by dbIII · · Score: 1
      Wow - two responses that only give me very disappointing insights into the posters and their misconceptions and redefinitions instead of the topic.
      It's not about you. It's not about me either. Try harder guys.

      The appearance of intelligence

      Appearance has only limited applications compared with the real thing.

    18. Re:There is no 'AI' by raftpeople · · Score: 1

      So multiplication of 16 bit matrices is AI?

      Well, yep, math is how we solve pretty much everything. What's more interesting than just saying it's a bunch of matrix math is understanding at a more abstract level what the math functions represent.

      The reason neural nets end up being interesting is because they are essentially universal function approximators that can be adjusted/tweaked to move closer and closer to a desired function (based on input/output data) without actually knowing the function in advance.

    19. Re:There is no 'AI' by Hognoxious · · Score: 1

      If something is artificial, then it does not qualify as "true."

      So true polyester doesn't exist?

      Check your wardrobe, I'm sure you have plenty.

      --
      Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
    20. Re:There is no 'AI' by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Computers have beaten us at chess for well over a decade, programs like Fritz has been out calculating us mathematically for along time it doesn't mean AI is out thinking us.

    21. Re:There is no 'AI' by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I think the point is whether non-true polyester exists. That is the only way your argument holds up.

    22. Re: There is no 'AI' by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Although multiply/accumulate is how we compute convolutional neural net style AI (aka inference), the programming of the convolution weights (aka training) is done by magic (aka backpropagation plus encantations of various heuristics).

      Like most modern programming you don't really write much code, as most of the code is generated by the various frameworks. For so called AI most of the programming is writing training and testing, applying the various learning heuristics and going back and rewriting them when it doesn't work or kicking it back to the theory folks to architect a better network. The "production code" (aka inference) is mostly generated by the framework.

      AI programmer is basically a verificaton/validation job (what we call a tester). If you aren't writing framework code or code to stitch the framework into the UI or front-end you are probably doing work equivalent to a tester.

    23. Re:There is no 'AI' by Wycliffe · · Score: 1

      Appearance has only limited applications compared with the real thing.

      Except that this post is about where to find jobs in AI today. Jobs in AI today are focused on neural networks, expert systems, self driving cars, robotics, deep learning, and big data to name a few. Whether today's approach to AI is able to give us true AI is irrelevant. Today's approach to AI is where all the jobs are today. An example would be someone in the early 1900s asking the best way to get a job in space exploration. Sure, the rockets and airplanes in the early 1900s had no chance of getting to the moon but they get you a lot closer than anything else and interestingly enough, when we did finally make it to the moon, we did it with very similar technology. Whether this will hold true this round, we don't know. We could eventually end up at a brick wall just as you can't take a balloon to the moon but a balloon can still get you awful close to space.

    24. Re:There is no 'AI' by dbIII · · Score: 1

      Which is why the portion you quoted matters so much. Working on something with the objective of fooling people into thinking that it's human is not a job that's going to last long outside of the video games industry.

      It's the stuff that solves problems, and is not closer to what A.I. used to be called than a "hoverboard" is that's where the jobs are. "Neural network" is an extremely misleading name for what the things actually do - kind of like calling a database an Oracle.

    25. Re:There is no 'AI' by Hognoxious · · Score: 1

      Wrong. The point is that you think the opposite of "artificial" is "true". It isn't, it's "natural".

      --
      Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
  17. two I know by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    neural network admininstator, and senior mesh analys

  18. See the tree, the forest is for later by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    At present, developers & sysadmins with Deep Learning experience are in demand.

    You do not necessarily need to know the nitty gritty details of how it's done, as much as know the tools of the trade (hardware & software) and how to interact with them. I'd focus on that for now and build experience on existing components (GPUs, TPUs, torch7, caffe, keras etc etc).

    After all, if AI really works, you don't really need to know all the low level details, you just need to keep feeding that animal with its fuel!

    1. Re:See the tree, the forest is for later by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I used to think that neural networks were easy enough for anyone to learn.

      https://xkcd.com/1838/

      I decided to study Mathematics in college because I wanted to learn more. At the least, someone should have a strong linear algebra, multi-variable calculus, and statistics background to be involved in training neural nets professionally.

      If you want to add tensorflow to your utility belt as a sysadmin: by all means do so. It's mostly true that you can simply just pipe the training data, and fiddle with hyperparameters and have a pretty good idea after a couple hours of training if it's a "dead-end" or a "piece of cake" to have working.

      It's the problem of grinding the last 5-80% out of the error rate which takes all of the education to do correctly. Very few hours of a neural network researcher's time is spent actually applying that education, but the problem is that the "troubleshooting" process has a very high time commitment for every hypothesis, so the debugging more closely resembles the days of programming by punch-card where a single experiment might consume $50-$500 worth of electricity to run.

      Meanwhile, without a decent understanding of problems with sampling bias and p-hacking, it is difficult to teach someone how to avoid over-fitting the training data.
      https://xkcd.com/882/

      I'll concede that the rapid improvement in GPU training times is making the cost of failure much less, so "guess and check" may be more affordable in several years, but my point is that it is extremely easy to waste a lot of resources chasing your own tail if you don't understand partial derivatives well enough to know what's going on under the hood and make educated inferences when trying to improve performance.

      I also have no illusions about the fact that the vast majority of ML practitioners will likely be out of work IT workers, Developers, and sysadmins looking to freshen up their resume (and I don't see anything wrong with that). Most of the tasks they will be asked to do are fairly trivial machine learning problems, and could probably be solved more easily and appropriately with basic clustering, linear regression, logistic regression, or an SVM.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convolutional_neural_network
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_neuron
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multilayer_perceptron

      Almost everything you need to know to get started can be found on Wikipedia or here: http://www.dspguide.com/ch26.htm

      Recognizing which tool is appropriate for the application is where I expect to justify my salary, and the "artificial neural network for everything" devs can have their fun too. ANNs have gotten way easier to apply since ReLU solved the vanishing gradient problem. Just make your network deeper until you run out of GPU memory or you achieve satisfactory performance.

      Training/Preprocessing knowledge:
      http://cs231n.github.io/neural-networks-2/
      http://yann.lecun.com/exdb/publis/pdf/lecun-98b.pdf

  19. Too Late by michael.karl.coleman · · Score: 1

    I'm sorry, but you're too late. All of the programming jobs are already gone. :-)

  20. AI is the latest buzzword, but not the latest tech by Hylandr · · Score: 1

    It's been around for a while.

    If you really want to head in the right direction, talk to IT recruiters and ask them what they see trending. Keep a regular job while you mentally re-tool. Find a job that leverages your existing knowledge that also needs someone with the skills you're looking to acquire.

    Often you may find yourself picked up by people that are willing to overlook or even foster your learning curve based on demonstrating an ability to learn.

    Good Luck.

    --
    ~ People that think they are better than anyone else for any reason are the cause of all the strife in the world.
  21. Mostly Hype in my opinion. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    It's mostly hype. Yes there will definitely be new jobs created, but mostly they will go to people with a strong academic background in the field. We are pretty much at the peak of the hype cycle and it is still very competitive to find jobs in the field. Don't think every man and his dog will be doing AI / machine learning. In fact the most likely long term scenario is that as the tooling gets more advanced, there is a consolidation of roles so that fewer people will be needed. There is no harm familiarizing yourself with the ideas and tools of machine learning, but I wouldn't put all your eggs in one basic. Realistically the chances of someone teaching themselves tensor flow and doing a few coursera courses and then finding a job in the field are slim at best.

  22. Really... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    If you're asking this question, then you haven't researched your career more intent sufficiently...

  23. Commitment Issue by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Any applicable answer really depend of your educational background. If you have already received a well-rounded engineering education, AI plus IoT plus industrial networks, processes and the rest would open interesting short to medium term prospects. But it might involve moving to round the world. The publicity around the current AI technologies focuses too narrowly to few, hard applications and misses the wider world, in my opinion.

      If you aim for something more general, try those computer and information engineering degrees available to become an "AI Engineer", if you have the money, time and opportunity. This way you can built or adapt a suitable solution to a particular problem, even if the libraries around a research paper aren't mature enough or ported to the environment you work in.

    Like now.

    Oh sorry, I missed that.

  24. AI / ML is not a hobby by jmcbain · · Score: 5, Informative

    for quite some time now thinking about getting into perhaps a new programming language and technology, like NodeJS or Java/Kotlin or something

    You are in for disappointment if you think that getting into a career in AI / ML is anything like a programming hobby, such as picking up NodeJS or Java over a few weekends. First, let me make clear the terminology I'm using. Artificial Intelligence is a broad field. Although the public perception of AI is of software/robots like HAL with which humans can talk or interact, the field also encompasses knowledge representation, reasoning, and learning. Machine learning is then an important subfield of AI, and it involves supervised learning, unsupervised learning, reinforcement learning, etc. Over the last several years, many people have started to conflate AI and ML, but for someone knowledgable in these fields, the distinction is clear. ML is the practical application of algorithms towards taking inputs and producing an output prediction, and it's this area that contains the vast majority of jobs in "AI". Some basic applications of ML include spam filtering, face detection and recognition, product recommendations, fraud detection, revenue forecasting, gait and step detection, voice recognition, etc. If you look at that list and think about them, you'll come to realize that you've probably been consuming ML results for the last five years or much longer. If you want to work as a "ML engineer" in this area, you'll have to be knowledgable with ML algorithms, setting up data pipelines, running experimentation, and using ML software, such as scikit-learn, R, Caffe, Tensorflow, etc.

    I manage a ML team at a large company. Let me make clear: Unless you have a strong academic background in this field, no one will take you seriously. I recently applied to be a principal engineer working on an AI/ML personal assistant, and the recruiter told me straightforwardly that the hiring managers are not interviewing anyone unless they have a recent PhD related to deep learning. I'm a bit elitist about this as well: I tend to turn away candidates that don't have at least an MS or PhD in a field related to ML. Why is this so? Because you need a rigorous background to understand why and how ML works, and this involves understanding loss functions, gradients, training vs. validation error, decision boundaries, optimization, and other things. You need to understand these things because a lot of current ML involves choosing the right knob settings (hyperparameters) that make your ML work best. If your ML algorithm isn't working well, how do you fix it? That's where this rigorous background comes in handy.

    Now, there are many things related to ML that you can still work on if you don't have a strong background. As opposed to a ML specialist, there are plenty of positions related to data engineering (e.g. setting up and maintaining huge data pipelines), infrastructure administration (e.g. installing and mastering all aspects of Hadoop and Spark), visualization (e.g. creating dashboards that take fresh data and display it), among many others.

    1. Re:AI / ML is not a hobby by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Academia is a tool, not a condition precedent to being successful in a field of your choosing (except of course the obvious monopolies medical doctors, accountants, and lawyers).

    2. Re:AI / ML is not a hobby by SlashTom · · Score: 5, Interesting
      Wow. That is pretty much the only serious answer so-far ;-)

      I think you are right in saying that AI/ML is not something you pick up over a long weekend. Still, it should be possible for someone to give it a shot without doing a PhD.

      There is a really nice Coursera course I can recommend: https://www.coursera.org/learn... If you follow that and make all the assignments, this will take you some months (assuming you don't do it fulltime), but you end up knowing a lot more about ML then a lot of others. Also there are tons of books that cover Machine Learning basics. Then, if you want to get your hands dirty, you can go to Kaggle and participate. I think if you do that for a while, and prove that you are really good at it, a company/recruiter looking for an ML person might be interested even if you don't have a degree in an ML-related field.

      And as to the original question, what kind of job titles? I noticed that many times "Data Science" openings have something to do with some kind of machine learning. But the term is >>very As to "toying with Tensorflow", this is of no use whatsoever, IMHO, if you don't know anything about machine learning. So, first learn more about that, and then see how Tensorflow fits in, is what I would suggest.

      Anyway, long story short: go for it!! You won't be an expert in a month, but you are in for a treat ;-)

    3. Re:AI / ML is not a hobby by SlashTom · · Score: 1
      But the term is >>very

      But the term is *very* broad and is used for pretty much everything from toying around with Excel sheets to doing really cool ML.

      As to "toying with Tensorflow", this is of no use whatsoever, IMHO, if you don't know anything about machine learning. So, first learn more about that, and then see how Tensorflow fits in, is what I would suggest.

    4. Re:AI / ML is not a hobby by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I agree with your post in practice but not in theory. 10 years ago I made a similar decision about whether to jump into AI, and I chose not to under the auspice that "AI" as we tend to think of it would have been here by now. At the time I thought there's no possible way I could get up to speed before the market just took off and left any attempt I made look like a middle school science fair project. 10 years later I very much regret not getting in when I could.

      In another 10 years I think we'll see some amazing tech, but AI as portrayed in science fiction will still be just that. In theory, I think you should jump into it headlong using your own intuition about how it should work because it's an awesome and complex problem space to toy with, and it will make anyone a better developer. The benefits of even a mediocre AI are immensely powerful. And frankly no matter what state the market is in 10 years from now, having any sort of edge in the field will be important because computers will *not* be doing it all for us. And there's plenty of time to become a domain expert in many areas, which will set you apart from recent graduates.

      But in practice the only profitable avenues in AI these days, ie the ones hiring and paying others to take on the endeavor, are entrenched in math/statistical model architectures. They are crazy complex, so it takes a certain level of brilliance and dedication to handle it. It's also a small and prestigious sector so smugness and elitism go hand in hand when it comes to letting in outsiders. The complexity of this approach is also one of the deficits of the strategy in that making greater improvements takes massively more effort and brains than this sector of the industry has to give, particularly when it's more competitive than collaborative.

      But AI doesn't have to be built in that fashion. There are a million ways to solve the problems presented. Starting with something like NLP or vision tracking or OCR are all very possible without any math background. And there are hundreds of open source libraries available in just about every language, including JavaScript, that can fill in gaps or get you going with basic concepts quickly. My project - http://www.l7synth.com is currently capable of generating audio books and narrations of just about any corpus. It learns in the sense that I can train it on different problems and it will apply multiple strategies on data it is unfamiliar with, and then I select the best strategy for a given context. Parsing dialog and pronouncing words correctly in context is not a trivial task (ie heteronyms), yet none of the architecture relies on complex math or cryptic code (except for the AES/SHA modules :D)

      The the OP and anyone else who read this wall of text, if AI sparks your interest, I say jump into it. If you find that the math is too much, take a different path, but don't let the promise of the future hold you back today.

    5. Re: AI / ML is not a hobby by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      People used to say the same thing about writing a high performance rendering engine. Now those are commodity tools used by developers of average skill. I expect the same will happen in this domain.

    6. Re: AI / ML is not a hobby by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It's already there. All the big names have machine learning as a service.

    7. Re:AI / ML is not a hobby by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Academia is a lot of things, but it's not a tool.

  25. Software Engineer by afgam28 · · Score: 1

    Is there really anything other than Software Engineer? (for non-research roles)

    As others have said, AI isn't new. But it is a fast growing field, so I'd caution against getting too specialized. In a field that is growing fast and changing quickly, it's important to be adaptable. You only tend to see highly specialized roles in established fields, and AI is not one of those.

    1. Re:Software Engineer by mugurel · · Score: 1

      I agree with this. There's a lot of theory and experimentation going on in Machine Learning currently, but that's all research, not something you just hop into. Although there are many attempts at technology transfer and commercial exploitation of ML, I don't think there are currently any established tools and practices for that. In that sense, there is no ML equivalent of web-designer, or system-administrator.

    2. Re:Software Engineer by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      cyberpycholog ?

  26. "New field of AI", indeed by Rick+Schumann · · Score: 1

    There is no 'AI field', it's still just computers running code. Nothing to see here, move along..

    1. Re:"New field of AI", indeed by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Well, not exactly. In traditional programming, the algorithm runs on data and produces an output. In ML, the data informs or trains the algorithm. The algorithm may change in response to the data presented to it. If it's a good ML algorithm, it's performance will improve as additional data is presented.

    2. Re:"New field of AI", indeed by religionofpeas · · Score: 2

      That's like saying, "there's no story, just a book full of letters", or "there's no intelligence, just a skull full of chemicals", or "there's no weather forecast, just computers running code".

    3. Re:"New field of AI", indeed by Wycliffe · · Score: 1

      There is no 'AI field', it's still just computers running code. Nothing to see here, move along..

      When I was doing job interviews in 1999, when I mentioned AI, I had several interviewers say "You can't say you're interested in AI, it's a dead field". Today, it's anything but a dead field. Yes, we're no where near having true AI but we are continuing to replace more and more complex human jobs with computers. The HBO show "Westworld" has a great line where one of the programmers questions the logic of continuing to make the androids in that show more lifelike. We don't want "true AI". A truely intelligent being will likely demand rights. Why would we want that? We want tools. Do you really want your backhoes to create a union and demand better working conditions? Having our tools be conscience would be a huge mistake because then they would stop being tools and could refuse to work.

    4. Re:"New field of AI", indeed by Rick+Schumann · · Score: 1

      You might have had my attention for a moment, then you quoted something from a television show, which just reinforces an opinion I already had: People don't know the difference between actual 'artificial intelligence' and the fantasy of television and movies; not even necessarily ostensibly educated, professional people. Then to make matters worse you misspelled 'conscious' (although I could give you a pass on that, could be you're on a phone and the autocorrect did that). I'm far from impressed by 'machine learning algorithms' because they cannot THINK. Full consciousness and self-awareness? Not necessarily, although I'd prefer that, too. But something that can think at least as well as a smart dog would be better than what I've seen so far. Also everyone talks about 'robots taking everyones jobs', but they can't even get a robot to fold laundry in any reasonable amount of time. General memo to everyone: Stop conflating 'robots' with 'automated machinery' because they're not the same thing. Otherwise you're calling something like the machinery in a Coca Cola bottling facility a 'robot', for instance.

  27. No new jobs by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I've got a degree specific to programming and AI, but companies aren't posting positions or showing interest, and haven't been for several years. Keep in mind that most AI algorithms are basically just search algorithms, so any programmer can just look them up or download some Library of them. Calling these systems AI is just trying to capture the mystique of what folks see in the movies, but that isn't what AI is today.

    A well trained (e.g. neural net) AI system is effectively just a search algorithm where the weight given to options is determined by the training input. Once trained on input good enough for some company's application, they can just copy-paste the weights the AI ended up with. There doesn't need to be an AI programming team for every self-driving car company after one of them has succeeded in a good-enough implementation that they're willing to sell.

  28. Maintain the poor AI... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    ...who has to filter Trumptweets, and keeps on kill -9ing itself...

  29. If your skills are NodeJS... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    If your skill set is "web programming", stay with it. You really are unlikely to have the capacity to learn about Machine Learning approaches. Those require actual understanding of a wide variety of skills, including how to actually use malloc()/new()/delete[]/free().
    I'm not trying to be mean here, in my experience, web "programmers" (including mobile developers) really do not understand programming domains which require an understanding of anything beyond Java wherein actual understanding of the implementation of underlying technologies is required. Example: a Java programmer who "understands" SQLite typically has ZEEERO idea about how to actually set up an SQLite DB, or is capable to performing the simplest DB operations.

  30. But what of the displaced? by sethstorm · · Score: 1

    It'd be nice to know what's available going forward, but is any of this readily available for the displaced/long-term jobless (but still have an interest in IT/CS)?

    --
    Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
    1. Re:But what of the displaced? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      No. There aren't any jobs for the jobless, not in IT or anywhere else. Death is your only option. Kill yourself now.

  31. Rebrand AI by Raiford · · Score: 1

    Once we stop calling it AI it will work.

    --
    "player 4 hit player 1 with 0 stroms"
  32. AI is cyclic by thogard · · Score: 1

    New Field of AI? MIT was doing AI in 1963 and Marvin Minksy set up a dedicated AI lab in 1970. While he wrote many books on the subject, Society of Mind is a good one to start with.

    AI gets to the point were it solves a set of previously unsolvable problems, the algorithms are then researched and better non-AI solutions are then used to solve the same problems. Then AI falls out of fashion for a while and computer power increases thanks to Moore's law. Then it all repeats.

  33. Re: I've been working on an Artificial Idiot by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Your idiot bot truly surpasses the original. One criticism: is it supposed to be so fat?

  34. Chief Buzzword Officer by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Must talk about how cloud has failed because there were it was too long of a word and so complicated that no one could understand it... AI is so simple... only two letters.... and how you knew 15 years ago that AI was where it was at and the rest of the world is just waking up to your brilliance... and what dumb asses everyone else is for not seeing it then....

  35. look ma, no code! by epine · · Score: 4, Insightful

    AI gets to the point were it solves a set of previously unsolvable problems, the algorithms are then researched and better non-AI solutions are then used to solve the same problems. Then AI falls out of fashion for a while and computer power increases thanks to Moore's law. Then it all repeats.

    This old story is such a crock.

    I highly recommend the following to anyone who wants a different perspective on modern ML:

    * Talking Machines: Remembering David MacKay with Philipp Hennig — 21 April 2016

    * Probabilistic-Numerics.org

    This is plain old numerical methods, optimization, and search viewed through a Bayesian inference filter. I would never have termed any of this "artificial intelligence".

    It took the recent large advances in unsupervised learning, the kitty classifier (and progeny), and the LSTM machine translation models to finally justify rethinking academic labels. Programs like SHRDLU from 1968 were perhaps explorations in AI, if our baby-step microscope is especially well focused. But this was closer to natural philosophy than what later became physics. Even our shiny new LSTM language models remain weirdly proximal to Searle's Chinese room. What have we really learned from watching our machines learn? Not a whole damn lot.

    I'd nominate a term such as I-cubed: inexplicable inductive inference, or perhaps MIII: massively inexplicable inductive inference.

    Even so impeded with an appropriate name, MIII is pretty mind-blowing. But it still ain't AI. It might be a viable building block to proceed in that direction, sooner rather than later, as we begin to erect dynamical systems upon this foundation. To drive the point home, it remains way overblown to call it MIIR: massive inexplicable inductive reasoning.

    An Alberta AlphaGo Pioneer Is in China to Watch the AI Wallop Human Opponents

    "Before AlphaGo, much of the fundamental games and machine learning research was done here," Muller wrote in an email. "If you look through the references list of the AlphaGo paper in the journal Nature, over 40% of these references have a University of Alberta (co-)author. Then, DeepMind greatly surpassed all of these previous efforts with their new ideas."

    I haven't waded through this yet, but I suspect even the vaunted AlphaGo has a backbone of techniques that I personally wouldn't have classed as "AI" (or even AI-ish) by my own standards.

    For decades, the big idea in AI was supposed to be recursion. Perhaps human language is recursive in theory, but it's only barely recursive in practice (nest more than three levels, your accurately attentive audience grows thin). Winograd is not completely wrong about this, but my long suspicion is that recursion is not going to enter the AI building through the ground floor.

    Lately, we really have hit home runs with distributed representation, and to a lesser degree with convolutional image recognition. These are actual AI-ish ideas. However, two solid take-home techniques do not a field make.

    Here's another possible intermediate term: generalized gradient exploitation (GGE). Plus there's tons of great mathematics about overfitting and regularization. But should we really call all this math "AI"?

    In practice what AI ends up meaning is "look ma, no code!" Hey, we just built an impressive system without hiring rooms full of code monkeys, so we must be doing something right.

    AI is not the moving target of lore. It's mainly our long AI pretension that fits the bill.

    How many legs d

  36. AI Comic Strip by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    It's not a job yet, but I started a new comic strip written by AI and online dating profiles called Robonk.

    http://www.Robonk.com

  37. Jobs? Who needs jobs? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I plan to be frolicking naked on the shore and having sex with babes all day.

  38. Re:I've been working on an Artificial Idiot by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    ... get a fucking life ...

  39. If you truly want to get in AI, go in biomedical f by guruevi · · Score: 1

    If you want to be at the forefront of AI you should first invent it and to do that, you need to define intelligence and individualism. I think brain research would be your field to try.

    You seem to want to go into statistical classification and database systems, neither of which are new and have well defined paths via mathematical statistics, programming and systems design. The fact that you think learning a particular language will help shows that you are missing the point of modern IT systems but if anything, if you want to go into this field and do research, that is done in R, MATLAB, some C, Python and Java.

    If you want to go into commercial AI, make an app, some news releases and a site, get a bunch of investors and hope Google or Apple buys you out before the jig is up.

    --
    Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
  40. software, hardware, or wetware? by 0111+1110 · · Score: 1

    First of all if you are talking about true AI and not just basically the same sort of connectionist statistical learning algorithms that have been around for many years you are perhaps better off getting into electrical engineering rather than machine learning because we don't yet really have the hardware to properly run the software on.

    AI is all about research and research is still at a very early stage. When it comes to AI we are cavemen with crude stone axes. We need some fundamental breakthroughs and they are more likely to come from new hardware than new software.

    Actually I suspect we may find that the best approach is by cheating with a bit of biology. We may find it easier to grow our own biological neurons that map themselves than trying to figure out what a brain does and emulate it with electronic circuits. So you may be better off getting a degree in some sort of biological science and specializing in the brain.

    My suggestion is to get at least 3 PhDs. One on the software side related to machine learning / artificial neural networks, another on the electrical engineering side of things designing something like Google's TPU but even more optimized for the most effective neural network architecture of the day, and perhaps most importantly a degree in Synthetic Biology and/or Cognitive Science for the wetware aspects which I predict will be the most successful in the future.

    Probably the most effective approach to creating intelligence will be with making other species smarter. Genetically engineering bonobos or parrots or corvids to give them a better cerebral cortex for instance or figuring out how to give them some of our human genetics that makes our brains so effective in general. Of course that won't really be artificial intelligence but is just as cool in some ways and will probably happen before we can figure out how to build a brain from scratch.

    There is also the artificial life angle: looking at life itself as an engineering problem. Life forms are basically just electrochemical robots evolved with genetic algorithms designed at the molecular nanotech level. Figure out for instance how to make your own form of life that is not based on DNA or even carbon. Again however this would start to stretch the meaning of 'artificial'. Once you figure out this puzzle everything starts to look artificial.

    --
    Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
    1. Re:software, hardware, or wetware? by religionofpeas · · Score: 1

      Actually I suspect we may find that the best approach is by cheating with a bit of biology. We may find it easier to grow our own biological neurons that map themselves than trying to figure out what a brain does and emulate it with electronic circuits

      Doubtful. Biological neurons are slow and inflexible. Artificial neural nets can already outperform human brains on various subtasks, and it's much easier to experiment with different network parameters in software. Looking at real brains is useful to learn some new tricks, but it's unlikely that brains have the perfect implementation for the task, given the huge constraints given to them by nature.

      My suggestion is to get at least 3 PhDs

      I would pick one, and work together with people who have the other 2.

  41. Whoops. Looks like I just kicked a wasps nest. :-) by Qbertino · · Score: 1

    Thanks for the replys and the lively discussion this far.

    Lots of sentiment here.

    First of all, on a sidenote: People should drop the notion that professional web development is trivial. It isn't. Yes, there is a disproportionate amount of eternal n00bs and dolts in the field and truckloads of throw-away code straight from Nightmare on Elm Street. Which is why I'd like to leave it and will only take jobs with teams that know CI, are building a product I'm interested in or pay obscene amounts of money. But bad software design isn't limited to web stuff and I have the suspicion that the wisecracks on this matter come from people who couldn't design a useful ux/pageflow if their life depended on it. So chill. ... So much for that.

    As for the AI development jobs being more rare and more difficult: Of course they are. It's AI/ ML. I guess it's not clear from the way I phrased the question that I'm aware of this.

    As for AI being a fad: I said the same thing about the web in 1995, whilst I was using Fidonet and Crosspoint (still better than E-Mail and Usenet to this very day). So as an 80 computer kid who's been wrong more times than others have thought about something IT related I'm old enough to be careful jumping to conclusions too fast. Google is kicking ass with ML and Elon Musk is focusing on it and Mercedes Benz, BMW, Bosch and Co. are peeing their pants and scrambling to catch the trend. So from that alone I conclude there must be something going on here.

    As for the insightful comments on academic requirements and your own experiences with AI: Thanks for those. Very useful and sometimes afirming. Keep it coming.

    --
    We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
  42. Re:If you truly want to get in AI, go in biomedica by religionofpeas · · Score: 1

    If you want to be at the forefront of AI you should first invent it and to do that, you need to define intelligence and individualism. I think brain research would be your field to try.

    Before you try to invent anything, you should first learn the stuff that's already out there that others are working on.

    If you want to go into commercial AI, make an app

    Most AI requires more computation that fits in an app.

  43. Re:Whoops. Looks like I just kicked a wasps nest. by nonlocality · · Score: 1

    I am also an 80's computer kid, still coding. Recently I assessed an AI startup, with a team of young ML PhD's, on behalf of a potential investor. While apparently brilliant in science, that team was surprisingly inexperienced on software development, e.g. seriously struggling on web UI's. So perhaps you should look into job opportunities in ML teams, helping them to bridge their ML magic with the outside world?

  44. Re: Whoops. Looks like I just kicked a wasps nest. by Qbertino · · Score: 1

    Good idea. Good idea indeed. Goes right in my list. Thanks. :-)

    --
    We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
  45. New? by modmans2ndcoming · · Score: 1

    Since when is AI new?

  46. Re: Whoops. Looks like I just kicked a wasps nest. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Yep, l'm an 80's computer kid too. Cut my teeth on C64, trash80's and amigas and the like. Like many of us who both were 'into it' and also 'got it' I have also watched things I never thought were that great take off, while other things that were amazing die on the vine. There was a great magazine cover from a year or so ago that showed John Glenn with the caption "You promised me Mars colonies. Instead I got Facebook." So, your comments regarding picking the wrong thing even when it seemed right ring very true for me as well. Now, all that being said, I also agree with a lot of the comments regarding AI not being there yet, and/or the definition itself not even being that useful. If you want to get into what seems to be a new and promising area, you need to find an area either under represented or make your own. The comment regarding tieing ML outputs to web tech for presentation UI purposes was good. Perhaps looking at applying some of the ML tools to some other industry might be an area to explore. I'm kind of in the same boat. I've been doing financial systems for years and to be frank, am getting bored. While I have been very successful at it( consulted for the TSX among others) I'm thinking it is time for something new. To that end, I'm trying to get interest drummed up to instantiate a Data Sciences center for a local industry that generates millions of dollars per year, but is still largely unsophisticated in how it is run and managed. The tack I am taking is to try and get political interest in establishing said center in a rural depressed area that already has a very nice facility that was closed some years ago for unfortunate circumstances. The industry in question could easily increase revenues and efficiency, particularly with some analysis and concentrated attention. So maybe there is something along those lines you could investigate.
    Or if that interests you, maybe we should talk ;-)

    Typed on an iPad, so all spelling and grammatical complaints will be redirected to /dev/null

  47. hmmm by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    maybe AI Terminator will be a thing.

  48. Re:AI is the latest buzzword, but not the latest t by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    If you really want to head in the right direction, talk to IT recruiters and ask them what they see trending.

    They're looking for people with 10 years experience in Windows 10.

  49. Clueless by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    You have no clue what you're talking about. Your AI Trainer job already exists and you're already employed under it. Feel free to stick it on your business card. Your salary? As you guessed it: zero. Every time you answer a CAPTCHA you're telling the hosting company (normally Google) what that item is so it can better train it's AIs on those types of images. CAPTCHAs are picked from images the AI currently don't understand. You're telling them what they are. Other companies like Facebook pay pennies for people to help train it's AIs on detecting images and posts which should be banned. Good luck trying to live off that.

    Instead of trying to jump on an early fad (AI isn't an early fad, it's been around since the dawn of computing, in fact longer than the web) in a get rich quick scheme, go into real estate investment or switch your stocks to lowest-fee index funds. Those aren't quick solutions, but can you get rich enough through them. Figure out what you like doing and go after that. If you want money, go after the money directly. Don't go after a job you think might lead you to a high salary at some point in the future. Even better, work on passive income streams instead of giving yourself more work in a job.

    In terms of AI, it's almost all machine learning. That's data mining, stats, and mathematics. Sure, you can use some of the many libraries to throw together a neural network or some other random algorithm, but you won't understand what you're doing and this will waste tons and tons of time in training your AI. AI is just doing searches across a massively large search space and giving up once the results are good enough. The more efficient you are at defining what you're looking for and how to find it, the better your AI will be.

  50. I started doing ML stuff as a hobby... by raftpeople · · Score: 2

    and tend to agree with your post based on my "non-expert but considerable time spent" experience.

    My story:
    I wanted to create intelligence via artificial life and evolution. I didn't want to create human intelligence, just tiny little creatures trying to survive type intelligence. I provided them basic sensor inputs and motor/movement raw materials but didn't program in any usage of those things, they need to figure out through evolution (how to see, move, find food, avoid getting eaten, etc.). They started with random neural nets and through generations increased in capabilities up to a plateau.

    Some conclusions:
    1 - There is a lot of foundational stuff I had to learn slowly and piece meal by googling etc., for example, what is a neural net doing mathematically, why/when would you use one.

    2 - I thought I might figure out something interesting or clever - but the reality is that people with math backgrounds (e.g. PhD ) are the ones that are going to figure out that next clever insight. For example, someone once asked me why I was using neural nets and not support vector machines, so I read up on support vector machines and they seemed to be doing the same thing (function approximation). But I didn't have enough training to fully grasp why a support vector machine and neural are different, what are pros and cons. Reading papers online with teacher is a slow and cumbersome way to acquire knowledge in a complex area.

    3 - Interesting issue not really related to the topic at hand but fun to talk about: My other conclusion was that guiding an evolving system towards intelligence is a very tricky task. My creatures hit a plateau of behavior that was at least interesting (chasing/tracking other creatures to get food, avoiding getting eaten, avoiding obstacles) , but difficult to get beyond. How would I need to change the conditions in the environment to push them beyond that into more advanced behaviors, for example hiding around a corner or hunting in packs, etc?. The initial environment needs to be favorable for guiding random brains towards some basic functionality, but then it needs to change and continue changing to keep pushing the evolution process towards more complex capabilities. That is a tricky problem, knowing which environmental conditions would reward intelligence over speed or strength or other attributes.

  51. Getting a degree, really? by Hognoxious · · Score: 1

    By the time you get that degree, the whole field could have poopped. Even if that's not the case, it's pretty likely that things have shifted within the field from one specialisation to another. On top of that, if something's hot now chances are there'll be oversupply in four years time because everybody's a genius and they all had the same idea as you.

    Plus, it might have helped to mention what qualifications & experience you already have.

    --
    Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
  52. anonymous by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    No jobs are available. AI doesn't need you.

  53. Maybe not now, but soon... by SuperKendall · · Score: 1

    Unless you have a strong academic background in this field, no one will take you seriously

    I'm sure that's true today, but how much longer can that hold? There are only so many PHD's to go around.

    Just as there are a lot of programmers today that do not have CS degrees, in the future as use of machine learning stuff especially ramps up companies will rapidly start to get less picky about a piece of paper that says you know ML, and be more than OK with practical examples of what you have DONE with ML.

    --
    "There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
    1. Re:Maybe not now, but soon... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      >I'm sure that's true today, but how much longer can that hold? There are only so many PHD's to go around.

      New people are born every day. What do you think prevents them from getting a PhD?

  54. Yes, it can be done, with an awful lot of work by kurisuto · · Score: 1
    I successfully retrained myself for AI. What you’re proposing is possible, but it was extremely difficult and required a sustained and disciplined effort over a period of years. It was like trying to do a whole graduate degree through self-imposed study. In brief, here’s my story. I graduated with a PhD in linguistics in 2001. I was also a competent programmer on the side. As a grad student, my studies were focused on pure linguistics, but I kept picking up odd jobs which fell in the overlap between computers and human language.I was aiming for a tenure-track job as a professor. After I graduated, though, it became clear that this was not where things were headed for me. Something like 4 out of 5 new PhD who try to get tenure-track jobs don’t get them. I found myself stuck in an adjunct professor position on a ramen-noodle salary. So, I took a hard look at what else I could do. The obvious move was to get into Natural Language Processing, which is the branch of AI concerning human language. This would build on what I already knew about computers and about human language. I did eventually succeed at this, but it took years of effort. I did all of the following:
    • I taught a basic undergrad course in NLP. This was one of my last teaching assignments before I moved to industry, and it was a good way to force myself to learn some of the basics thoroughly. I spent a whole summer prepping for the course. I collected syllabi of other NLP courses to figure out what to cover. I ended up covering n-grams, Hidden Markov Models, had the students build a statistical spell checker, etc.
    • I took three evening math courses (one per semester) through a university extension school to fill some long-standing math weaknesses. The most important math course was linear algebra, which is absolutely essential for AI. If you haven’t already had a stats course, you’ll need that too.
    • I went to professional conferences in NLP, and listened to as many talks as I could. In the beginning, a lot of the talks were over my head, but I wrote down every term I didn’t know, and looked it up later (e.g. “What is ‘stochastic gradient descent’?). Gradually, the talks became more comprehensible.
    • Read, read, read. I had multiple textbooks on NLP and on machine learning. I was always studying them. I printed out academic articles. I printed out Wikipedia articles on various topics in math, machine learning, AI, and NLP.
    • I went to MeetUps on AI, machine learning, and NLP. Fortunately, I was living in a city where there were lots of these.
    • Sometimes I had to get creative with the solutions. At one point, I needed to learn how to use something called Conditional Random Fields. I asked around, found a grad student who was specializing in CRFs, and paid him $120 to answer my questions for a few hours on a Saturday and to show me how to use Mallet, a package which supports CRFs.

    I seriously considered going back to school. It would have been a luxury to have someone teach me all this stuff rather than teach it to myself. Since I already had a Ph.D., though, it didn’t make sense to get another degree. I looked around, but there just wasn’t any program that seemed like a fit for someone in my situation. I can now finally consider myself to be an NLP professional. I’m working in that field, and I regularly do stuff with machine learning and other AI techniques. My current job is in the area of machine translation (e.g. French to English, or whatever language pairs the company needs). The long effort has paid off, because I’m in demand. It was an awful lot of work to get here, though.