Comment by RamblingCTO
2 years ago
I had that since I was doing my masters in data science (5 years ago?). I love the models, the statistics and just the cleverness of everything but I just can't stand the "scene" anymore and moved almost entirely away from it. It's not as exciting as it was anymore.
When I started with the topic I watched a documentary with Joseph Weizenbaum ([1]) and felt weirded out that someone would step away from such an interesting and future-shaping topic. But the older I get, the more I feel that technology is not the solution to everything and AI might actually make more problems than it solves. I still think Bostrom's paperclip maximizer ([2]) is lacking fundamental understandings of the status quo and just generated unnecessary commotion.
[1] http://www.plugandpray-film.de/en/ [2] https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/paperclip-maximizer
Yes, PoW crypto is now a much more concrete example of the potential damage from poorly aligned utility functions, as well as the challenges in containing a system once it is released.
I'm finding the current hype cycle very frustrating from both sides. On one side there is frequent overplaying current capabilities, and cherry picked examples given as it they're representative. On the other side there is an over simplistic "AI is evil" reaction. It's hard to deny that progress in the past few years greatly exceeds expectations and could make a significant improvement to individual creativity and learning, as well as how we cooperate but so much of the discussions are fear based.
Same here, didn’t do a masters, but worked as a data scientist for a good while.
> I love the models, the statistics and just the cleverness of everything but I just can't stand the "scene" anymore
This really sums up my feelings too.
you mentioned you moved almost entirely from the AI / data science "scene." Where did you move to?
Being a CTO (doing manager stuff), regular coding. By moving away I also meant I don't follow along anymore and don't contribute to the projects I did so in the past. I just lost interest.