Comment by philipwhiuk
5 hours ago
> The models will learn good engineering principles at some point.
This is just silly. It's fairly clear that the current design (by which I mean the entire concept of the deep neural network) has its limits and that they just aren't that good. We're seeing lots of other AI and software engineering brought to bear, but there's nothing 'inevitable' that means this is close.
"at some point" is so vague as to be irrelevant. Fusion might be the dominant source of electricity "at some point". Equally, AI knowing good principles could be 30 years away.
Don't assume that hard intellectual challenges are solvable on faith. Look at what's currently possible.
AI has always been a field where https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/tasks.png applies heavily.
> It's fairly clear that the current design (by which I mean the entire concept of the deep neural network) has its limits
Maybe, but people have been saying deep learning is about to hit a wall since 2012, and many reasonable-sounding "machines fundamentally can't do X" have since fallen.
Feels like we're standing on a roof with floodwater up to our ankles - maybe it stops rising now, but we didn't foresee it getting anywhere near this high in the first place.
I do agree that progress will probably be more slow/gradual than others seem to predict, no "hard takeoff", but even being decades away is still relevant to someone starting a career in software development.