Been trying to explain to a bunch of sales people today why current "AI" technologies aren't "generic" and can't just be pointed at any question they can imagine, it was an uphill battle.
Of course that's the way that these kinds of techniques are often presented in the advertising media and on dumbed-down TV shows. I also often find that people more driven by emotion are less able to recognise bullshit when they see it than those at the more rational end of the spectrum, my audience was mainly composed of people in the former camp. I can't say this is a uniformly applicable scientific conclusion but was certainly true of the people in the room today. I left them pondering why someone hasn't simply taken every lottery result from the past and used a "machine learning algorithm" to predict what the numbers will be next week, I could sense that many couldn't really understand why this wasn't possible. Tricky stuff this software/math/logic malarkey, but sometimes you have to remind people that it's not "magic".
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