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January 7, 2020 01:54 pm PST

AI, machine learning, and other frothy tech subjects remained overhyped in 2019

Rodney Brooks (previously) is a distinguished computer scientist and roboticist (he's served as as head of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and CTO of Irobot); two years ago, he published a list of "dated predictions" intended to cool down some of the hype about self-driving cars, machine learning, and robotics, hype that he viewed as dangerously gaseous.

Every year, Brooks revisits those predictions to see how he's doing (to "self certify the seriousness of my predictions"). This year's scorecard is characteristically curmudgeonly, and shows that Brooks's skepticism was well-warranted, revealing much of the enthusiasm for about AI to have been mere froth: "I had not predicted any big milestones for AI and machine learning for the current period, and indeed there were none achieved... [W]e have seen warnings that all the over-hype of machine and deep learning may lead to a new AI winter when those tens of thousands of jolly conference attendees will no longer have grants and contracts to pay for travel to and attendance at their fiestas"

Some of the predictions are awfully fun, too, like "The press, and researchers, generally mature beyond the so-called 'Turing Test' and Asimov's three laws as valid measures of progress in AI and ML" (predicted for 2022; last year's update was, "I wish, I really wish.").

Brooks is pretty bullish on the web for piercing hype-bubbles, noting that it provides "outlets... for non-journalists, perhaps practitioners in a scientific field, to write position papers that get widely referenced in social media... Read the rest


Original Link: http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/pkqs7BZwWQ0/mired-in-asimovism.html

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