AI/Automation Just How Much Benefit?

The IRR of AI is the worst of any computer industry wave.

Depends entirely on how it is applied. For example, Spotify, Netflix, Apple Music, Tidal, etc. are simply not possible without machine learning. Drug discovery has benefited from ML already as have other uses in medical. Fraud detection is an example of ML. Face detection and naming of the faces in photographs on my iPhone are only possible with ML. Let’s not forget driver-less cars. And I used the term ML for a reason, rather than saying AI. AI is an over-used term.

ML is a more appropriate term in my opinion. It refers to a fundamental difference in how the code works. In “programming” you outline the steps to take to solve some problem. But some problems are impossible to solve in this manner. Instead, ML programs learn from experience, rather than being told. This is exactly how humans learn to walk, for example. We are not “told” by our parents what to do, we learn what to do by experience. This is what training data is all about.

Consider a programmer writing an algorithm to sort data. Something computers do a lot. Something sophomore Computer Science students do in class work. If my sort algorithm is slow I have to re-write the code to find a way to sort faster. An ML version of the same thing would simply sort lots and lots of data sets and find the fastest way to sort data. And have the chance to continuously improve on its own. But this is not necessary, or applicable, to all problems that we need computers to work on of course.

The more extreme example is, of course, the ML programs that learned to play (and master) the games of Chess and Go by being told only the rules and the definition of win/loss. As well as the ML programs that learned to drive cars.

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Depends entirely on how it is applied…

ML is a more appropriate term in my opinion…

Early versions of AI were ‘expert systems,’ not what I would call AI. They were attempts to ‘mechanize’ or ‘automate’ human knowledge. Sort of mechanized encyclopedias.

The current version, more accurately called Machine Learning (ML), is closer to real AI in that it imitates how the brain works, not what the brain has stored.

Expert systems relied on the rational or boolean brain which seems to be exclusive to humans. Machine Learning imitates most if not all brains. It stores massive quantities of patterns and tries to match the pattern of the present input so what it has in store, i.e. Pattern Matching. We don’t know how it’s done but neural networks do something quite similar. What Machine Learning needs is infinite amounts of memory and reasonably fast access to it.

About the AI IRR, discard everything pre Machine Learning, it’s irrelevant.

The Captain

Google search is not AI, it is a very efficient archive and retrieval system of human knowledge, what ‘expert systems’ thrived to be.

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“Expert systems relied on the rational or boolean brain which seems to be exclusive to humans. Machine Learning imitates most if not all brains. It stores massive quantities of patterns and tries to match the pattern of the present input so what it has in store, i.e. Pattern Matching. We don’t know how it’s done but neural networks do something quite similar. What Machine Learning needs is infinite amounts of memory and reasonably fast access to it.”

In 2010, IBM created ‘Watson’ - a gigantic supercomputer system that was ‘programmed’ to learn to play Jeopardy! using past programs/answers to clues, and discover ‘patterns’ and be able to ‘think’ of ways to solve the clues often involving tens of thousands of bits of knowledge across a broad spectrum of subjects. Beat existing Jeopardy champs in games.

However, it was for one specific task…and took hours and hours of tweaking and revisions and upgrades. Same computer would likely fail at tie-toc-toe and chess without changes, and wouldn’t know how to ride a bicycle or swim backstroke. Or jump hurdles or drive a race car.

Plus it sure wasn’t the size of a ‘brain’ to go into a robot or autonomous car driving in snow, on icy roads, in fog, drenching rain, etc.

t.

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No. Companies using AI will benefit. Most Americans own stock through retirement plans, 401Ks, etc and will benefit - as will consumers with lower prices - or prices not rising as fast.

Sure, but a lot of others will be negatively affected. From this thread’s perspective AI is just an enhanced form of automation, so its effect will be similar to the impact of automation and robots. Consider this graph of coal production over the past century. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_mining_in_the_United_Stat…
Compare that with this graph of coal workers over the same time period: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_mining_in_the_United_Stat…

US coal production has generally increased since 1920 while coal employment has declined precipitously during the same time period. In short, the poverty we see in coal country is mostly due to unemployment caused by automation. Tell the folks in Appalachia about the benefits of robots. Certainly the country as whole has benefitted from automation. The question is do we owe something to the minority who continue to pay the price for that transition. We can ask the question more specifically: Should we as a nation spend money to help those who have been unable to adjust to the increased automation of coal mining? Or steel production? Or auto manufacturing?

AI will make a lot more jobs open to automation. AI can write news articles. AI can compose music. AI can perform customer service. AI can diagnose X-rays and EKGs. Sure, new jobs will emerge. But history tells us that these occupational transitions require substantial worker retraining. Someone has to pay for that.

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Google search is not AI, it is a very efficient archive and retrieval system of human knowledge, what ‘expert systems’ thrived to be


very efficient...yes

human knowledge...often not....more like more sales calls.

AI, ML.....bull....just computer programs managing databases. That is not the machine's intelligence nor learning. That is just feeding up a result without a more direct equation. Something of a derivative result. A toy that often fails.

There are special computer languages for AI. The reason is the class functions need to be very specific. Smalltalk is such a language. It is still failing.

Expert systems relied on the rational or boolean brain which seems to be exclusive to humans. Machine Learning imitates most if not all brains. It stores massive quantities of patterns and tries to match the pattern of the present input so what it has in store, i.e. Pattern Matching. We don’t know how it’s done but neural networks do something quite similar. What Machine Learning needs is infinite amounts of memory and reasonably fast access to it.

I would say it is more correct that machine learning generally imitates the brain functions that includes neural nets (i.e. deep neural nets). This doesn’t mean it works like a human brain. For example, in computer vision you train a neural net using millions of images with many of each class of object you want it to learn. The neural net is tested on never seen images to PREVENT just learning by memorizing to attempt to generalize.

However when a human does this you can learn a new object class by someone just telling you (without seeing it) that animal X is just like animal Y but has some slight different characteristic. Humans can easily merge all the prior image examples knowledge plus other verbal or written info and accelerate their further learning. In machine learning (as it exists now) you pretty much have to obtain thousands of image examples of the new creature and retrain the entire network. If you attempted to just program in a few exceptions, eventually you’d have a mess of exceptions bolted to a neural net that would become inefficient and a mess to maintain.

Mike

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If the Climate Alarmists are right then the most practical solution is to cull the human race.

Really? Culling the human race is more practical than going to solar, wind, and EVs?

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I would say it is more correct that machine learning generally imitates the brain functions that includes neural nets (i.e. deep neural nets). This doesn’t mean it works like a human brain.

Obviously! :wink:

However when a human does this you can learn a new object class by someone just telling you (without seeing it) that animal X is just like animal Y but has some slight different characteristic.

Give it time, this is the top of the first inning! :wink:

The Captain

Really? Culling the human race is more practical than going to solar, wind, and EVs?

Sorry, can’t get any deeper into politics. It would upset Wendy. :wink:

On the non-political side of the issue, why is growth an economic imperative? Wouldn’t some kind of middle class level be good enough? Many tell us to live below our means which to me in my old age makes perfect sense. Why do we have to keep beating records?

Maybe some ten years ago I was pondering about the life of Indian gurus wandering about with just their begging bowls. Back then I was trying to get rid of an awful lot of ‘stuff’ that had accumulated over the years and which I never used.

The incentive for immigration is to have lots of workers to improve the economy. Why not shut the door and let the country live below its full potential?

The above is not an anti immigration stance. I belong to a family of immigrants that have made new lives in at least three continents and are grateful for it. The question is entirely rhetorical. Why groth?

The Captain

George Carlin Talks About “Stuff”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvgN5gCuLac

“US coal production has generally increased since 1920 while coal employment has declined precipitously during the same time period. In short, the poverty we see in coal country is mostly due to unemployment caused by automation. Tell the folks in Appalachia about the benefits of robots. Certainly the country as whole has benefitted from automation. The question is do we owe something to the minority who continue to pay the price for that transition. We can ask the question more specifically: Should we as a nation spend money to help those who have been unable to adjust to the increased automation of coal mining? Or steel production? Or auto manufacturing?”

Part of the coal industry went from deep mines in Appalachia to surface mining in WY using gigantic machinery. Meanwhile, in the mines of WV/KY, automation did replace workers and old mines shut down as their coal seems were depleted, and due to ever increasing levels of OSHA restrictions, fewer and fewer new mines opened.

Just like it used to take a gazillion farmers, each with a mule or two, farming a few acres to raise crops, with little towns with a half day so farmers could get there on a Saturday to sell their goods and buy/trade for other goods…and now you have 10,000 acre farms with giant machines that let 3 people farm what took 3000 a century ago.

Cars were made by hand for the first 30 years…then Henry Ford came along - the price of cars dropped by 90%… and still, we keep adding new factories for 8 different brands in the US, and now lithium mining and processing plants popping up, battery assembly plants, etc.
Yeah, the auto industry used to employ millions…now it’s what, 250,000 ? But IT had none 40 years ago…nor did Facebook or Amazon or Meta or other software firms that hire millions and millions…


Yeah, retraining and finding jobs in eastern KY and WV is a real problem - most folks probably don’t have a high school education - but it’s a long long road. Folks don’t want to move.


“AI will make a lot more jobs open to automation. AI can write news articles. AI can compose music. AI can perform customer service. AI can diagnose X-rays and EKGs. Sure, new jobs will emerge. But history tells us that these occupational transitions require substantial worker retraining. Someone has to pay for that.”

It might be quite a while till computers write classical music folks want to listen to. To date I know of no rap songs, rock and roll, country western, or other genre of music…computer written.

as to who pays - it’s always the tax payer…

t.

On the non-political side of the issue, why is growth an economic imperative? Wouldn’t some kind of middle class level be good enough?

The most important justification, I think, is that so many people don’t get to live at what we in the U.S. would consider a middle-class level. Certainly globally, but also here in the U.S. Economic growth is one way to change that - to improve the lives of hundreds of millions, probably billions, of people.

To illustrate, one of the greatest economic success stories in the history of all humanity is the recent elevation of more than one billion people out of subsistence agricultura and less-than-dollar-per-day poverty in Asia (mostly China and India) in the last few decades. That was driven almost entirely by globalization and classical economic growth - the opening of western developed markets to Indian and Chinese workers through the twin vectors of international trade and communications technology.

That improvement in human lives - that reduction in misery - was on a scale unparalleled in human history. Arguably, no other force or institution has ever accomplished so much benefit for so many deeply impovershed people in so short a time. Perhaps nothing has done more to increase the quality of human lives (en masse) than the opening of Asia to global economic growth. Okay, maybe Edward Jenner. I’m hard-pressed to think of another.

Even the poorest people in countries that have experienced long and consistent economic growth (Western developed nations) have qualities of life that vastly exceed those of even average citizens in countries that haven’t. Continued economic growth makes it possible (both financially and politically) to elevate the bottom quintile of those developed nations in ways that would have been unimaginable, and opens the possibility that the many billions on earth who currently live with conditions far, far, far worse than our ‘middle-class’ lifestyles might be able to achieve that someday.

Albaby

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Albaby, thanks for your reply but you are just repeating old mantra, not thinking outside the box. According to Climate Alarmism this level of improvement is destroying our Home Planet and has to stop.

BTW, American middle class is royalty level in most of the rest of the world.

BTW2, American middle class is Obesity Epidemic!

BTW3, American middle class can’t afford healthcare and higher education

Is American middle class an illusion?

The Captain
it’s hard to look at yourself from the inside out

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Albaby, thanks for your reply but you are just repeating old mantra, not thinking outside the box. According to Climate Alarmism this level of improvement is destroying our Home Planet and has to stop.

I would suggest that Climate Alarmism is wrong. Or, if we’re being charitable, not keeping up with the effects that even the modest efforts we’ve made so far have had on the anticipated trajectory of warming. For a succinct summary, here’s Matt Yglesias’ take:

[P]eople should know that we’ve gotten a lot of good news about RCP 8.5 over the past few years. Think about every optimistic climate story you’ve ever read: the falling cost of solar power, improvements in lithium-ion batteries, surging sales of electric vehicles. Even closures of coal plants under economic pressure from cheap natural gas — a fossil fuel that, while not exactly clean, is definitely cleaner than coal.

The upshot of all of this is that future industrial development is on track to be cleaner than past industrial development, even without any new policy changes or technological breakthroughs. Is it on track to stabilize global emissions and limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius? It is not. But we can pretty confidently say that scenarios that just project the past upward emissions curve forward are very unlikely. For that to happen, we’d need a huge resurgence of the coal industry and for every single auto company in the world to be somehow wrong about electric cars.

https://www.slowboring.com/p/people-need-to-hear-the-good-ne…

There are consequences to growth, of course. But there are benefits - economic growth has allowed billions to escape a shortened life span filled with penury an want.

Albaby

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The incentive for immigration is to have lots of workers to improve the economy. Why not shut the door and let the country live below its full potential?

I think that is superficial. I will try real hard not to make this political. There are many studies showing that immigrants work harder. Immigration is hard and so selects for personalities with the “pioneer mentality”. Not surprising that so many immigrants start businesses. Immigrants also bring in new perspectives. This can be disrupting socially, but in a competitive free market new ideas are in demand. Just one example, immigrants are more entrepreneurial than natives. Free markets thrive on entrepreneurs.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/immigrants-outperform-na…

That is a long way of saying that immigrants don’t just quantitatively add to the number of workers. They qualitatively improve the work force. Even poor immigrants.

This is anecdotal, but I was talking to an acquaintance who runs a landscaping company. He loves immigrant workers from Mexico. They work hard, are always on time, and send half their pay check to their families in Mexico and so don’t drink or do drugs. All they do is save money. In comparison, the domestic workers he found only work long enough to get enough cash for whatever and require constant supervision. He found jobs take twice as long with domestic workers than immigrants.

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It might be quite a while till computers write classical music folks want to listen to. To date I know of no rap songs, rock and roll, country western, or other genre of music…computer written.

I’m afraid the world is passing you by.

“‘Beautiful with a sweet voice’ AI singer enrolls at prestigious Chinese music university and generates massive public interest” https://www.scmp.com/news/people-culture/trending-china/arti…

“Capitol Records, the music label behind iconic artists like Nat King Cole and Frank Sinatra, announced that it had signed a rapper by the name of FN Meka. Unlike “Ol Blue Eyes” and his other famous predecessors, FN Meka is not human. He is a virtual avatar. More importantly, Meka’s songs are created through A.I.” https://fortune.com/2022/08/23/capitol-records-signs-ai-rap-…

"AI will be center stage, composing, texting, and singing in a world first at the opening of the new season, with a piece later traveling on to Hong Kong in November. ”Chasing Waterfalls” is the first ever opera in which AI creates parts of the music, text, and interpretation at times, live and with full autonomy, the opera house says."https://www.dailysabah.com/arts/performing-arts/artificial-i…

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“Really? Culling the human race is more practical than going to solar, wind, and EVs?”

Yes. Also more effective if not overdone.

And if done selectively, even better. (I have a list…)

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“He found jobs take twice as long with domestic workers than immigrants.”

Perfect starting place for the cull…
:-}

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The Pareto Distribution doesn’t care what system you use, it’s going to be 80/20.

Just so y’all won’t have to look it up (like I did;-).

Pareto Distribution
The Pareto principle or “80-20 rule” stating that 80% of outcomes are due to 20% of causes was named in honour of Pareto, but the concepts are distinct, and only Pareto distributions with shape value (a) of log45 ˜ 1.16 precisely reflect it.

Empirical observation has shown that this 80-20 distribution fits a wide range of cases, including natural phenomena[5] and human activities.[6][7]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_distribution

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Expert systems relied on the rational or boolean brain which seems to be exclusive to humans.

The classes are still often coming out wrong. It is better for fantasy than business. Unless your business is fantasy.

The problem with boolean as “the brain” human beings have basic instincts, needs and wants. Boolean math does not explain them nor weight them. The last thing our brains are is boolean.

Besides other animals like dolphins may have boolean abilities. Hunting and gathering are where that comes from in the first place. We can not even get that right.

Our fantasies build businesses or bankrupt them.