For most products to be useful, they must be (perhaps not perfectly, but near-perfectly) reliable. A fridge that works 90% of the time is useless, as is a car that breaks down 1 out of every 10 times you try to go to work. The problem with AI is inherently that it’s unreliable—we don’t know how the inner algorithm works, so it just breaks at random points, especially because most of the tasks it handles are really hard (hence why we can’t just use classical algorithms). This makes it really hard to integrate AI until it gets really good, to the point where it can actually be called reliable
The things AI is already used for are things where reliability doesn’t matter as much. Advertisement algorithms just need to be as good as possible to make the company as much revenue as possible. People currently use machine translation just to get the message across and not for formal purposes, making AI algorithms sufficient (if they were better maybe we could use them for more formal purpose’s!). The list goes on.
I honestly think AI won’t become super practical until we reach AGI, at which point (if we ever get there) its usage will explode due to massive applicability and solid reliability (if it doesn’t take over the world, that is).
For all the hypothetical products I listed, I think this level of unreliability is totally fine! Even self-driving cars only need to beat the reliability of human drivers, which I don’t think is that far from achievable.
For most products to be useful, they must be (perhaps not perfectly, but near-perfectly) reliable. A fridge that works 90% of the time is useless, as is a car that breaks down 1 out of every 10 times you try to go to work. The problem with AI is inherently that it’s unreliable—we don’t know how the inner algorithm works, so it just breaks at random points, especially because most of the tasks it handles are really hard (hence why we can’t just use classical algorithms). This makes it really hard to integrate AI until it gets really good, to the point where it can actually be called reliable
The things AI is already used for are things where reliability doesn’t matter as much. Advertisement algorithms just need to be as good as possible to make the company as much revenue as possible. People currently use machine translation just to get the message across and not for formal purposes, making AI algorithms sufficient (if they were better maybe we could use them for more formal purpose’s!). The list goes on.
I honestly think AI won’t become super practical until we reach AGI, at which point (if we ever get there) its usage will explode due to massive applicability and solid reliability (if it doesn’t take over the world, that is).
For all the hypothetical products I listed, I think this level of unreliability is totally fine! Even self-driving cars only need to beat the reliability of human drivers, which I don’t think is that far from achievable.