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'I've Seen the Future of Consumer AI, and it Doesn't Have One' (theregister.co.uk)
Andrew Orlowski of The Register recounts all the gadgets supercharged with AI that he came across at IFA tradeshow last week -- and wonders what value AI brought to the table. He writes: I didn't see a blockchain toothbrush at IFA in Berlin last week, but I'm sure there was one lurking about somewhere. With 30 vast halls to cover, I didn't look too hard for it. But I did see many things almost as tragic that no one could miss -- AI being squeezed into almost every conceivable bit of consumer electronics. But none were convincing. If ever there was a solution looking for a problem, it's ramming AI into gadgets to show of a company's machine learning prowess. For the consumer it adds unreliability, cost and complexity, and the annoyance of being prompted.
[...] Back to LG, which takes 2018's prize for sticking AI into a superfluous gadget. The centrepiece of its AI efforts this year is a robot, ClOi. Put Google Assistant or Alexa on wheels, and you have ClOi. I asked the booth person what exactly ClOi could do to be told "it can take notes for your shopping list." Why wasn't this miracle of the Fourth Industrial Revolution let loose on the LG floor? I wondered -- a question answered by this account of ClOi's debut at CES in January. Clearly things haven't improved much -- this robot buddy was kept indoors.
[...] Back to LG, which takes 2018's prize for sticking AI into a superfluous gadget. The centrepiece of its AI efforts this year is a robot, ClOi. Put Google Assistant or Alexa on wheels, and you have ClOi. I asked the booth person what exactly ClOi could do to be told "it can take notes for your shopping list." Why wasn't this miracle of the Fourth Industrial Revolution let loose on the LG floor? I wondered -- a question answered by this account of ClOi's debut at CES in January. Clearly things haven't improved much -- this robot buddy was kept indoors.
Excessive hype is always followed by a trough of disillusionment. But as the TOD fades, plenty of mature, practical applications are likely to emerge. The technological naysayers are usually even more wrong than the hypesters.
Hype cycle
... because consumer AI is *ALREADY* ubiquitous and all around us.
From the face detection in your phone, to the fuzzy logic controllers in washing machines, to the ant colony algorithms being used to route network traffic, to finding directions with google maps, to Netflix and Amazon's recommendation algorithms, to OCR for cheques and mail, to NEST thermostats, to robot vacuum cleaners and lawn mowers, to expert systems in medical diagnosis... (I could keep going)
AI in consumer products is literally *already* ALL around us.
Saying that consumer AI "has no future" is like looking around at the world today and saying "personal cars have no future" - it's completely idiotic because to anyone with half an ounce of perception that future is ALREADY here.
It's like looking at a forest and claiming there are no trees
If smart phones and tablets are any indicator ...
AI, too, is an evolutionary dead end.
It's a buzz word with a vacuous definition.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
The thing no one can consider is time.
"AI" being jammed into things now is probably lame, awkward, and of very limited use. Much like computers were back in the punch card days with devices that. Less than 100 years later we've got computers in our pocket. We are in the early days of AI - we'll look back on it decades from now as we do with things like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
This article is just another example of someone who can't see past their nose to the road ahead and the million different branching paths this technology could take.
I chose not to pursue AI as a career and haven't suffered for that.
Learning Lisp would not have helped you. Modern AI uses mostly Python based libraries such as Tensorflow and PyTorch. C++ is used for performance critical stuff. Nobody uses Lisp for AI anymore. It was a dead end.