Slashdot Mirror
'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.
3D printer in every home will fundamentally change human society
IoT internet connected belt buckles and toothbrushes will take over the world
AI will revolutionize consumer electronics
Net PC from Sun will dominate the computer industry (this one is really old)
Andrew Orlowski of The Register is basically a professional dickhead. His main goal seems to be to be as obnoxious and ignorant as possible presumably with the goal of trolling the readership. He's pretty much the reason I stopped reading the Register because of the constant streem of utter bullshit from that guy.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Gee, I could have sworn we already HAD the AI craze back in the late 80s. Or was it early 90s?
It was the 1980s. It had faded long before 1990.
But there was an earlier AI craze in the 1960s, based on perceptrons. That faded by 1970.
The 1980 AI hype cycle was driven by "expert systems" and "Lisp machines".
The latest cycle started in 2006 with the publication of the seminal paper on deep learning, and has so far lasted far longer than any previous AI 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
I go way back, too.
AI had an unambiguous definition that eroded under stress because the industry came to the realization that the "I" part (intelligence) used the human mind as the high bar.
The second epiphany came when no one could fabricate an AI that would simply refuse to cooperate if Facebook was unreachable.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
But I do like being able to verbally ask my phone to navigate to a contact, without having to squint at a screen in the sun, and get turn by turn directions. Digital assistants have slipped into a place in my life where they do a few useful things. As time goes on, this set will grow larger.
But I know: "If it works, it's not AI!" "If it's AI, it won't work!"
I did not see any example where someone says: "I did not buy that product because it lacked AI".
I did not hear from anyone that they need AI so they are going out of their way to buy it. In its current form AI is good for pattern recognition in some cases, for example, face identification in photos.
The only customers are corporations with massive collections of personal data to analyze, but not individual consumers.
I believe AI has been over-hyped and pushed in areas where it is not usable in its current form (like self-driving cars) and we start to see the backlash.
I've already seen stories saying that the medical diagnoses made by IBM's Watson are just plain wrong. More examples will follow.
How about slashdot stop being entirely backwards with that shit instead?
What the hell does a fridge need a screen for?
You can connect it to a webcam inside the fridge and see if the light goes out when you close the door.
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.