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Ask Slashdot: How Can Programmers Move Into AI Jobs?
"I have the seriously growing suspicion that AI is coming for us programmers and IT experts faster than we might want to admit," writes long-time Slashdot reader Qbertino. So he's contemplating a career change -- and wondering what AI work is out there now, and how can he move into it?
Is anything popping up in the industry and 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", 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... 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...?
Is there a degree program, or other paths to skill and knowledge, for a programmer who's convinced that "AI is today what the web was in 1993"? And if AI of the future ends up tied to specific providers -- AI as a service -- then are there specific vendors he should be focusing on (besides Google?) Leave your best suggestions in the comments. How can programmers move into AI jobs?
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... 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...?
Is there a degree program, or other paths to skill and knowledge, for a programmer who's convinced that "AI is today what the web was in 1993"? And if AI of the future ends up tied to specific providers -- AI as a service -- then are there specific vendors he should be focusing on (besides Google?) Leave your best suggestions in the comments. How can programmers move into AI jobs?
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you can't.
To get a job with actual AI (aka machine learning, it's not really AI or if it is only a very narrow part of it) you'd need to have started already in college and then done your master thesis or Phd about something in this area: pattern recognition, genetic algorithms, neuronal programming, whatever your chosen field would be.
There are no jobs in AI actually, at least not a lot of them. There will be the aforementioned people who do the heavy lifting but they are part of a few small teams in mostly big companies and few small ones, many of them then bought out by the big ones resulting in a few small teams at big companies.
There will be many many sharecropper jobs where one writes stuff for some AI platform by the big companies. E.g. something that adds an interface to website or service X to the AI platform Y's API so Y's and X's customers can use the platform with their cool AI toy. Or many guys massaging geodata, placing of roadblocks of varius kinds etc into the databases for the so called "self driving cars" which are anything but self driving, etc. Those are not "AI jobs" however, they are pure McJobs without anything special, same sort of monkey webprogrammer like before. At most you need to know what JSON, XMLRPC or whatever the API uses ist.
The whole point of "AI" is to not needing many people doing the jobs. If you do want a job, create something with this buzzword "AI" aka machine learning, start whatever you want yourself and get totally obsessive about it 36h a day. That's about the only chance to break in from such an outsider position as you seem to be right now.
If AI's supposed to be able to create opportunity, why not use it to help connect the displaced and long-term jobless?
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Math. Math. And then more math. ML needs linear algebra, multiple regression analysis, multivariate calculus and lots of statistics, as well proficiency with MatLab, Octave, or R. Then you can tackle the programming side: algorithms and big data analysis.
Or you can let the quants build the models and just determine new and cooler ways to use them....
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
Is there a degree program, or other paths to skill and knowledge, for a programmer who's convinced that "AI is today what the web was in 1993"?
Well you have to be smart enough to earn one or more PhDs. Someone who believes that is probably not going to be able to do that, but if he tries he will probably quickly learn what a stupid idea it was. Hopefully he will still decide to get his PhD though. We can always use more AI researchers. Although dumb ones are less valuable you never know who might get lucky and stumble upon some cool breakthrough.
The first point is that the only example we have of intelligence is intimately tied to life and can only really be viewed as an aspect of that and the idea that intelligence can be separated from life or at least some form of artificial life is speculative at best. As someone who was quite interested in a career in AI research back in the 80s and has been following the feeble creep of its progress since then I am convinced that wetware is going to be the real future and not so much neural net ASICs like Google's TPU or whatever Nvidia is working on to run neural network architecture which although useful is I think not going to be the foundation for real AI that can give a nice robot chassis like Boston Dynamic's Atlas some level of general intelligence or common sense.
Think of something more like putting a rat/pig/monkey brain into an Atlas Robot. That is figuring out how to digitally interface with a brain-in-jar and train it directly as if it were a complete living animal. Even a rat brain is a far more sophisticated neural network machine than anything we will probably build from scratch in the next few hundred years.
Current neural network architectures are based on a highly simplified model of how real brains actually work. We still really don't know how real brains work. There are projects like The Allen Brain Atlas, The Human Connectome Project, The Brain Activity Map, or whatever Henry Markram is currently up to. There is an interesting Wired article about him that you should read. Maybe consider pursuing a career path like his.
I'd also suggest maybe thinking in at least as much in terms of DNA programming as CPU or GPU programming via Synthetic Biology and follow a career more like Craig Venter who famously made his own artificial bacteria or rather wrote the DNA and inserted it into an empty host cell. That's just a small start of course but it may eventually lead to being able to build artificial life forms that we can make intelligent just by giving them a large enough brain or encephalization quotient. Ultimately even an Atlas Robot with something like an Nvidia P100 cluster running deep learning style neural nets is a kind of very primitive life form. Going fully wet and nano is just another way to attack the same problem in a more integrated fashion: the way I think a far more advanced civ tech would do it.
I guess you should really think in terms of which vision of AI you want to follow or place your bets on. Silicon based connectionism is in vogue at the moment and I think that is great because a lot of progress was lost back in the 80s when it was considered a dead end. It is certainly a more powerful and promising approach than trying to hand code intelligence into a piece of software, but I still think we are just nipping at the heels of an even better approach: biology. Ultimately we are copying the only machine in existence that can create intelligence and that is the
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
Just back from WWDC17 and I have this takeaway: leave the creating/training/designing/refining machine learning models to the academics and companies with deep pockets. You're not going to catch up with the PhDs that have a head start on you, especially without a unique authentic problem at hand that nobody else is working on yet. Instead, USE the models that exist. Maybe train 'em with new/different data if you feel compelled, but mainly learn what models exist (natural language processing? Sentiment analysis? Image recognition? Speech recognition? Real-time identification of objects in video?). Learn how to use those models to solve the problems you're working with, or another team is dealing with, or that isn't even being considered for technology and humans are still doing it. The PhDs will keep creating new and better building blocks, just like we started out with basic web tools and now we have WebRTC. Our jobs will be to apply them. And that requires a lot less linear algebra. I think we can all say amen to that.
..yeah. that one. learn what you're even asking and you might have the answer.
the question "how do I get into AI?" makes sense if you don't know shit all nothing about state of AI.
it's not like you have to have a degree but it helps because NOBODY FUCKING KNOWS WHAT AI IS. those who claim to know the most are usually futurologists who know even less than you(which makes them able to spout all the bullshit they want).
Do you want to get into machine learning? object recognition? download opencv and play around. some people call that AI, some people don't.
you see, right now, companies will splatter AI on everything that 25 years ago they would put "fuzzy logic" on - yet nobody actually has actual artificial intelligence. some companies have facsmiles of AI - again, not the same thing. nowadays you could get away with a regular old fuel injection system and calling it AI. seriously.
Basically, anything that analyzes anything can and will be called AI. it's not right but that's how it is.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.