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this post was submitted on 15 Sep 2023
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Programming
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The original problem was posited... 60 years ago?
It's a bit like saying "I wonder how the dinosaurs died?" in the early '00s, a few years before meteor theory really got nailed down. Like, ignore the last century of postulation. We just knocked this out real quick.
Oh wow thanks, TIL. I was a kid in the 90s, and always taught and read "there's many guesses, but the most likely theory is a massive impact causing global changes". And only today I learnt that it was a relatively new theory at the time, and the crater wasn't even identified until the early 90s!
The one that blew my mind is that plate tectonics is only a widely accepted theory since the 70s.
yeah, the comic describes it as "the virtually impossible" and directly notes we've spent 50 years trying. it's just a really interesting perspective that it was a recent truism that this stuff is virtually impossible, and we've solved it and a huge number of other very difficult problems in less than a decade.
I'm not saying we aren't building on centuries of work, i'm saying the rate of recent progress is remarkable. I feel like you missed the point on purpose in order to have a hot take.
We are a lot better at it now than we were, say, ten years ago. But it is nearly trivial to outwit a "bird detecting algorithm" by holding up a vague facsimile of a bird. That gets us back to the old TrashFuture line about AI just being "some dude at a computer filling out captchas".
The recent progress is heavily overstated. More often than not, what a computer does today to recognize a bird is to pull on a large library of data labeled "birds" and ask if there's a close-enough match. But that large library is not AI driven. Its the consequence of a bunch of manual labeling done by humans with eyes and brains. A novel or rare species of bird, or a bird that's camouflaged, or even just a bird that's out-of-focus or badly rendered, will still consistently fail the "Is this a bird?" test.
In short: post title is dumb.