IS AI A SCIENCE? Nobels Aside, Machine Learning is Making the World Much More Mysterious

“The pooling operation used in convolutional neural networks is a big mistake, and the fact that it works so well is a disaster”. Geoffrey Hinton

“Machine learning isn’t limited to the latest technology, and neural networks aren’t magic. As much as many people prefer to think of NNs as revolutions, because that justifies higher costs, they are more evolutionary — as are their impacts on many aspects of business. Neural networks are very impressive and extremely useful bodies of code, but never forget that they are code”. David A. Teich

“AI is not revolutionary. It is a way of portraying the control of powerful people over society’s material resources as rational, a way to reframe social and economic hierarchy as progress.” R.H. Lossin & Jason Resnikoff

“Looking back at the history of neural networks tells us something important about the automated decisions that define our present or those that will have a possibly more profound impact in the future… There is a long-held pursuit of the unexplainable… It is not just about the systems becoming more complex or the control of intellectual property limiting access (although these are part of it). It is instead to say that the ethos driving them has a particular and embedded interest in ‘unknowability’. The mystery is even coded into the very form and discourse of the neural network”. David Beer