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'We Can't Compete': Universities Are Losing Their Best AI Scientists (theguardian.com)
The Guardian shares the story of a PhD student at Imperial College London who abruptly stopped coming to the facility, even as he had one-year of studies left. From the story: Eventually, the professor called him. He had left for a six-figure salary at Apple. "He was offered such a huge amount of money that he simply stopped everything and left," said Maja Pantic, professor of affective and behavioural computing at Imperial. "It's five times the salary I can offer. It's unbelievable. We cannot compete." It is not an isolated case, the report says. Adding: Across the country, talented computer scientists are being lured from academia by private sector offers that are hard to turn down. According to a Guardian survey of Britain's top ranking research universities, tech firms are hiring AI experts at a prodigious rate, fuelling a brain drain that has already hit research and teaching. One university executive warned of a "missing generation" of academics who would normally teach students and be the creative force behind research projects. The impact of the brain drain may reach far beyond academia. Pantic said the majority of top AI researchers moved to a handful of companies, meaning their skills and experience were not shared through society. "That's a problem because only a diffusion of innovation, rather than its concentration into just a few companies, can mitigate the dramatic disruptions and negative effects that AI may bring about."
The trouble is we're heading for another industrial revolution. And if you know your history that means decades of unemployment until some new tech comes along. We need political and social solutions for the near term. Or we can just accept a declined standard of living.
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I would argue that if academia is completing for labor with industry in a particular area of study, then has advanced the technology enough to get out of the market. It is time to move on to some other area of research.
We tried, but the AI was really intelligent and didn't want to do it either, so it's busy writing another AI program to do all of its work for it.
Perhaps when they stop paying football and basketball coaches obscene salaries and pay professors and grads what they are actually worth the quality at universities will improve.
How do you gauge what is obscene and what people are actually worth? For instance, back in 2010, it was estimated that Tom Izzo was paid $3 million, but the basketball program generated roughly $11 million for the university. So do you think the professors and grads should be paid 27% of the revenue they generate for universities? How do you calculate that? What if they don't generate any revenue? Do you pay them nothing?
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
AI is the special case. It grew from machine vision for self driving cars and robotics
Did you just erase several decades of AI research in one fell swoop?
to Big Data data mining
That's more like statistics. That doesn't inform your cognitive models in any way, and one of the huge things in AI is forming improved cognitive models. I don't quite see where there's a contribution in AI from big data in this particular area.
Ezekiel 23:20