Machine learning has become alchemy (2017) [video]
The problem with ML in my opinion is not that we're missing some sort of fundamental theory, but that there simply is none. ML is essentially fancy pattern matching roughly resembling the human visual system, which is why it happens to be good at tasks related to perception.It's not some master algorithm, it's not going to produce sci-fi AI, and it probably isn't even suited to solve most problems in the realm of intelligence.In fact it basically hits the worst possible spot on the problem solving scale. It barely learns anything given the amount of computation effort an data that goes into it, but it just happens to be good enough to be practically preferable to old symbolic systems.It is completely mysterious to me how networks that approximate some utility function are a huge step forward to giving insight into cognition, reasoning, modelling, creation of counterfactuals and the sort of mechanisms we actually need to produce human like performance.