My feelings exactly. It's made worse by the fact that, out of all the academic departments out there, AI and NLP research has perhaps the greatest potential to transform society in so many ways.
He leaves the field trying to create intelligent machines in order to write a Google News clone? I truly don't get it.
To me, it feels like this person's talent is wasted on this project. With such a strong background in natural language processing, why isn't this person involved in a Siri competitor, in Web real time chat, VOIP compression, or AI speech? Is this the limited scope at which a typical CS Ph.D operates?
Reach for the stars. Let people of lesser ability make news apps, even if it's a struggle for them.
A really good news aggregation/management site would help me out a lot more than a marginally better Siri. I waste a lot of time on the news and miss a lot of stuff.
Agree with pseut. I would need a Siri smart enough to aggregate and manage news for me. We need someone to build that great aggregator, and then we'll talk about Siri integrating that.
Sure, but your original point seemed to be that any small degree of progress on a Siri variant would be more important than any large degree of progress on a news aggregator. My only point is that the magnitude of the progress matters, and a big change in the "smaller" problem of news aggregation would free up a lot more of my time than a small change in the "bigger" problem. As much as I'd like to be able to dictate research papers and code up a bunch of data analysis over my phone via Siri++ while I'm on a long run on the beach, at some point you have to trust that people choose to work where they think they can make the most progress.
I appreciate your passion but before you build a tower to space, you should probably make sure you're not building on shifting sands first. It's a telling arrogance you display when you say "let those other people struggle for their small gains, I have bigger fish." As if they would never be a customer down the line or that maybe you'll "get out ahead of them" and own the space... I'm not sure what your motivation is for this perspective, anyway.
The author already addresses your view though since he shared it. We already have been using PHDs like this for some time now. I think you just don't understand that communication hubs like reddit and HN are not "a waste of talent" especially when you consider portals like these get sold to Conde Naste for millions x 10^x of dollars.
Contrary, I think "reaching for the stars" here is taking ownership of the application instead and understanding the real burden of operations and the impact to your clients and what the real net benefit is (if any) in your application, not the number of 0s on your check. It's not sexy, but nothing complicated is. You're not going to do anything groundbreaking implementing what you were taught in school in the tiny scope of your contract, you're just creating tiny bubbles of technology that may or may not ever offer a benefit to anyone outside that space; contracting yourself out to another Fortune 500 to design a protocol or format to be used in some rented-out walled garden. It might be a great model for retiring, but not so much for a society, it it certainly isn't "reaching for the stars" unless you want to be alone when you get out there.
We can waste an incredible amount of time making sure the foundation is secure. Or we can plan for the shifting sands, like Google building commodity-hardware-failure into their business plans. Larry and Sergey didn't try to make computing hardware more reliable; they planned for it to fail.
To the contrary, many complex things are sexy. The iPhone is greatly complex, both in software and hardware, but it's still sexy. By the way, what if Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak were happy just running a small electronics store in Palo Alto?
Interesting to see your opinion of "reaching for the stars". Also interesting to see you write 2x as much about what "isn't reaching for the stars".
Ok, another perspective: why would a PHD waste his time on trivial conveniences alike web chat and voice recognition just because they are hard to solve, when there are unmet needs in a much larger market called media?
Or how about this: the key to solving problems correctly is to solve them as close to the root cause as possible. Why write a speech recognition when you can get the same functionality much more effectively by eliminating the microphone altogether and interfacing directly with the user (just a hypothetical scenario)? Why write it for iOS when the only reason the person is carrying a phone is so they can be connected on the go, and the only reason they are on the go is to learn something they could have read on Prismatic this morning? You'll never tackle any of these problems if you think that the lower layers are already solved problems cemented in concrete, only worthy to be maintained by tech monkeys.
Why do we make software and hardware? Why do people farm? Why do we do anything?
It's about advancing our society. Making more efficient use of our human resources to enable us to discover new ways of making more efficient use of our human resources. To raise quality of life. To allow more humans to live, which increases our pool of labor and of brainpower, both of which we can use to multiply the other further.
Why do we do this? At this point we're descending into existential ennui. When you look into the abyss, remember the staring game -- make it blink.
I'm all for exploration and self discovery or whatnot, but we're talking about here is effective use of resources. My perspective of your opinion is you feel that PhDs should keep fitting into the spots where they are requested by big corporations, to develop their products that require high technology and expertise to be done quickly and cheaply, because everything else is just a solved problem that an expert would be wasting his time on.
My counter is that these things that we take for granted are not "solved problems" and innovation in this space is the most fundamental and disrupting innovation one can engage in, and increasingly the press would turn the public's eye away from this fact since obviously those who control the aggregation of news can control what a large number of people think about different topics. But perhaps you already knew that and find change at this level and its consequences too scary to contemplate.
He leaves the field trying to create intelligent machines in order to write a Google News clone? I truly don't get it.