Thanks! HN was part of the origin story of the book in question.
In 2018 or 2019 I saw a comment here that said that most people don't appreciate the distinction between domains with low irreducible error that benefit from fancy models with complex decision boundaries (like computer vision) and domains with high irreducible error where such models don't add much value over something simple like logistic regression.
It's an obvious-in-retrospect observation, but it made me realize that this is the source of a lot of confusion and hype about AI (such as the idea that we can use it to predict crime accurately). I gave a talk elaborating on this point, which went viral, and then led to the book with my coauthor Sayash Kapoor. More surprisingly, despite being seemingly obvious it led to a productive research agenda.
While writing the book I spent a lot of time searching for that comment so that I could credit/thank the author, but never found it.
It's hard to miss the similarity between your book's title and Cliff Stoll's 1995 Silicon Snake Oil, an indictment of the general concept of the "information superhighway" that was starting to resonate with the public. Stoll is a really smart guy, but that particular book hasn't held up too well:
Few aspects of daily life require computers...They're
irrelevant to cooking, driving, visiting, negotiating,
eating, hiking, dancing, speaking, and gossiping. You
don't need a computer to...recite a poem or say a
prayer." Computers can't, Stoll claims, provide a richer
or better life.
Expert futurologist? Anyway. The article has very little substance. "See those ridiculous predictions," mostly. If there's anything about fundamental or practical limitations of the current machine learning approaches (deep learning, transformers, RL, and so on), I haven't seen it.
That's one of the things that drives me nuts about all the public discourse about AI and our future. The vast majority of words written/spoken on the subject are by generic "thought leaders" who really have no greater understanding of AI than anyone else who uses it regularly.
A characteristic of the field since the beginning. Reading What Computers Can't Do in college (early 2000s) was an important contrast for me.
> A great misunderstanding accounts for public confusion about thinking machines, a misunderstanding perpetrated by the unrealistic claims researchers in AI have been making, claims that thinking machines are already here, or at any rate, just around the corner.
> Dreyfus' last paper detailed the ongoing history of the "first step fallacy", where AI researchers tend to wildly extrapolate initial success as promising, perhaps even guaranteeing, wild future successes.
And the article agrees with you, and is pretty scathing about all the books except Narayanan’s (which is also the only book with a balanced anti-hype perspective):
> A puzzling characteristic of many AI prophets is their unfamiliarity with the technology itself
> After reading these books, I began to question whether “hype” is a sufficient term for describing an uncoordinated yet global campaign of obfuscation and manipulation advanced by many Silicon Valley leaders, researchers, and journalists
Ok so what is this publication? Because apparently they’ve been around since the 90s. I’ve never heard of them though. Their title and its reference suggests a very strong philosophical stance about something and I imagine that because of that they have political leanings, but I can’t tell what their leanings are
The Hedgehog Review? Yes, they've been around since 1999, and publish a few times a year. But I'm not sure where you're leaping to a strong political leaning. They're an academic journal published by the University of Virginia. I don't religiously follow them, but I've been cursorily aware of them for a while. I don't think I've ever considered them to lean one way or another when reading their publications.
They don't have any political leanings but they do have a philosophical project. If you dig into the site a little you'll find that they're published by the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture (housed at UVA) and IASC exists to promote research into the contradictions of modernity, by examining how culture manifests itself in metaphor, symbol, ideals, principles, institutions, and material objects [1]. I've been a reader of THR for a few years and I'd say generally they publish articles that promote moral realism and humanism. They're sort of metaphysically open-minded.
Just finished reading The Thinking Machine. Highly recommend it if you're interested in how Nvidia became the most valuable company on earth: https://amzn.to/42z8JPF
Aravind Narayanan seems to be the only guy qualified enough to be called an expert.
HN's own https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=randomwalker!
Thanks! HN was part of the origin story of the book in question.
In 2018 or 2019 I saw a comment here that said that most people don't appreciate the distinction between domains with low irreducible error that benefit from fancy models with complex decision boundaries (like computer vision) and domains with high irreducible error where such models don't add much value over something simple like logistic regression.
It's an obvious-in-retrospect observation, but it made me realize that this is the source of a lot of confusion and hype about AI (such as the idea that we can use it to predict crime accurately). I gave a talk elaborating on this point, which went viral, and then led to the book with my coauthor Sayash Kapoor. More surprisingly, despite being seemingly obvious it led to a productive research agenda.
While writing the book I spent a lot of time searching for that comment so that I could credit/thank the author, but never found it.
It's hard to miss the similarity between your book's title and Cliff Stoll's 1995 Silicon Snake Oil, an indictment of the general concept of the "information superhighway" that was starting to resonate with the public. Stoll is a really smart guy, but that particular book hasn't held up too well:
(excerpted from the Amazon summary at https://www.amazon.com/Silicon-Snake-Oil-Thoughts-Informatio... ).So, was this something that you guys were conscious of when you chose your own book's title? How well have you future-proofed your central thesis?
Expert futurologist? Anyway. The article has very little substance. "See those ridiculous predictions," mostly. If there's anything about fundamental or practical limitations of the current machine learning approaches (deep learning, transformers, RL, and so on), I haven't seen it.
That's one of the things that drives me nuts about all the public discourse about AI and our future. The vast majority of words written/spoken on the subject are by generic "thought leaders" who really have no greater understanding of AI than anyone else who uses it regularly.
A characteristic of the field since the beginning. Reading What Computers Can't Do in college (early 2000s) was an important contrast for me.
> A great misunderstanding accounts for public confusion about thinking machines, a misunderstanding perpetrated by the unrealistic claims researchers in AI have been making, claims that thinking machines are already here, or at any rate, just around the corner.
> Dreyfus' last paper detailed the ongoing history of the "first step fallacy", where AI researchers tend to wildly extrapolate initial success as promising, perhaps even guaranteeing, wild future successes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubert_Dreyfus's_views_on_arti...
And the article agrees with you, and is pretty scathing about all the books except Narayanan’s (which is also the only book with a balanced anti-hype perspective):
> A puzzling characteristic of many AI prophets is their unfamiliarity with the technology itself
> After reading these books, I began to question whether “hype” is a sufficient term for describing an uncoordinated yet global campaign of obfuscation and manipulation advanced by many Silicon Valley leaders, researchers, and journalists
Ok so what is this publication? Because apparently they’ve been around since the 90s. I’ve never heard of them though. Their title and its reference suggests a very strong philosophical stance about something and I imagine that because of that they have political leanings, but I can’t tell what their leanings are
The Hedgehog Review? Yes, they've been around since 1999, and publish a few times a year. But I'm not sure where you're leaping to a strong political leaning. They're an academic journal published by the University of Virginia. I don't religiously follow them, but I've been cursorily aware of them for a while. I don't think I've ever considered them to lean one way or another when reading their publications.
They don't have any political leanings but they do have a philosophical project. If you dig into the site a little you'll find that they're published by the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture (housed at UVA) and IASC exists to promote research into the contradictions of modernity, by examining how culture manifests itself in metaphor, symbol, ideals, principles, institutions, and material objects [1]. I've been a reader of THR for a few years and I'd say generally they publish articles that promote moral realism and humanism. They're sort of metaphysically open-minded.
[1]: https://iasculture.org/about/vision
Read "brainmakers", even though it completely ignores Europe's and the East's significant contributions to AI history https://www.newquistbooks.com/brainmakers/brainmakers.html
Just finished reading The Thinking Machine. Highly recommend it if you're interested in how Nvidia became the most valuable company on earth: https://amzn.to/42z8JPF
The four books discussed in that passage are:
AI Snake Oil – by Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor
Nexus – by Yuval Noah Harari
Genesis – by Henry Kissinger, Craig Mundie, and Eric Schmidt
The Singularity Is Nearer – by Ray Kurzweil
In 20 years, Kurzweil will write another book entitled, "The Singularity is Almost Here".
He's 77 years old. Let the man retire, damn.
Pills in; books out. That's the deal.
Henry Kissinger, noted AI expert.
As criticized in the featured article, yes.
it's not complimentary about them, FWIW
well craig mundie and eric schmidt not much better