Magic cutter that cuts thru ceramic trial#

This is the famous вЂњusefulness of useless knowledge,вЂќ advanced by Abraham Flexner in his seminal 1939 essay (itself a play on the very American concept of вЂњuseful knowledgeвЂќ that emerged during the Enlightenment).ДЄ canonical illustration of this flow is Albert EinsteinвЂ™s general theory of relativity. ItвЂ™s simply that weвЂ™re more familiar with its opposite.ДЄfter all, itвЂ™s easy to imagine knowledge flowing downstream, from the source of an abstract idea, through the twists and turns of experimentation, to a broad delta of practical applications. We have nothing to fear and much to gain from embracing this approach.

Magic cutter that cuts thru ceramic trial#

It is just a necessary adolescent phase that many fields have experienced, characterized by trial and error, confusion, overconfidence and a lack of overall understanding. He argues that the current state of AI research is nothing new in the history of science.

Not so fast, says Yann LeCun, co-recipient of the 2018 Turing Award for his pioneering work on neural networks. By deferring so much to machines, are we discarding the scientific method that has proved so successful, and reverting to the dark practices of alchemy? It would be hard to have a computer program teach chemistry or physics classes. With deep learning impacting so many branches of current research - from drug discovery to the design of smart materials to the analysis of particle collisions - science itself may be at risk of being swallowed by a conceptual black box. This discussion within the AI community has consequences for all the sciences. Instead, they operate within a black box, seemingly unknowable to humans and even to the machines themselves. These new forms of AI are very different from traditional computer codes that can be understood line by line. ItвЂ™s true that we have little fundamental understanding of the inner workings of self-learning algorithms, or of the limits of their applications. Modern engineers, the thinking goes, assemble their codes with the same wishful thinking and misunderstanding that the ancient alchemists had when mixing their magic potions. Is artificial intelligence the new alchemy? That is, are the powerful algorithms that control so much of our lives - from internet searches to social media feeds - the modern equivalent of turning lead into gold? Moreover: Would that be such a bad thing?ДЄccording to the prominent AI researcher Ali Rahimi and others, todayвЂ™s fashionable neural networks and deep learning techniques are based on a collection of tricks, topped with a good dash of optimism, rather than systematic analysis.