Deep Learning is not Magic Learning

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Arthur C Clarke

"Deep Learning is Teaching Computers New Tricks"

"Andrew Ng: Why 'Deep Learning' Is a Mandate for Humans"

"The real innovation challenge to us then it seems will not be to apply deep learning to replace humans but to use it to create new ideas, products and industries that will generate new jobs and opportunities for skilled workers."

Deep Learning Deep Learning Deep Learning

Holy crap! Use Deep Learning to create new ideas? You may be thinking that I'm being too harsh; of course article and title writers stretch things out to be more provocative, details left to the gross middle of the article that no one reads. Well, then, yes, I'm being too harsh, not because the details are left out, but because their implications of the details are ignored.

Deep learning is not Magic Learning. Deep Learning isn't what its name says. It is 'just' a more complex (= many more layers than traditional) neural network (which is itself not exactly what its name say, it is 'just' a set (OK I'll grant network) of linear regression models, where some depend on others.  It's not magic. It's not human like learning or deep cogitation on concepts. It is just a mathematical model. It can distinguish two almost identical things. It can identify one thing out of many. But that's the all that the technique itself does (just the best in a long line of similar techniques). It (like many other techniques: logistic regression, decision trees, random forests (ooh..they're magical! Their names are so exotic!) needs to be put in a larger framework (like in a process that determines the outlines of faces in a set of cat pictures, or splitting words n a speech to text analyzer). By themselves, there's nothing magical.

This is not to say that there's something wrong with Deep Learning. On the contrary, it is a great recent development, with lots of successes (which is exactly what happened to its simpler self in the late 80's). But in the end it is 'just' a regression model, either saying yes or no to some inputs, or calculating a complex function. But that's it. It is not 'an' artificial intelligence, responding and implementing our requests like a valet. It's just (one of the more) recent advances in discrimination methods. It is an important part of the field of artificial intelligence, but not the entire thing.

Is extracting 100's of initial petroleum products (fuel, plastics, lubricants, medications, etc) magic? not to mention 1000's of downstream products created from manipulation of these?

Frankly Siri is closer to magic because at least 40 years of electrical engineers and phoneticians have worked on converting sound waves produced by a humans oral and nasal cavity, modulated by teeth and tongue, into readable letters.

Deep Learning is not magic. They are a great development in neural networks (an incremental development (a very big incremental development)), but they're not magic and they won't make you your toast for you in the morning.

(this morphed from the inarticulate unfinished beginning of a rant I had planned about ML (Machine Learning). And NLP (Natural Language Processing (not Neuro-Linguistic Programming which actually is horseshit))).