Comment by zimablue
6 years ago
You can only reliably say that something which has happened several times is something that will always happen if you know the reason why it happened several times. This article seems to think it's Moore's law, which has ended. I think history tends to go in cycles as people over-index on whatever worked well for the last n decades.
This seems to be a trait of humanity in general, not just IT. Look at the finance industry: banks loan based on historical track records, right up until the bubble pops. Every. Single. Time.
Momentum lends itself to easy statistical support, and paradigm shifts are notoriously difficult to predict with any degree of confidence.
No matter how long in the tooth a particular trend might be, matter how certain you are that a reversal is imminent, it's hard to push against the weight of trend-line evidence.
This kind of over-indexing to statistical correlations in past data, without understanding the casual mechanism is a common criticism of contemporary AI techniques, especially "deep" RL ;-)
Maybe as someone who hasn't been steeped in AI for the past several decades, I'm not able to appreciate the depth of emotion behind Sutton's statements. I find this kind of vague pontificating to be boring. It seems aimed more at convincing the author of a position, than doing a critical analysis and convincing the reader.
Will compute+data solve AI? Will structured algorithms solve AI? Will neuroscience provide key breakthroughs? Who knows? We'll find out when we find out. This article provides little value beyond historical reminiscing.
In the meanwhile, there are many interesting problems begging for attention where data or compute is limited.
I'll believe it when these techniques can solve real problems in a robust way. More importantly, when it can solve real problems in a robust way, opinions don't matter! Proponents won't need to go around trying to convince people almost in the manner of superstitions belief.