A friend pointed me to the article about Bitter Lessons learned from 70 years AI research. I found this a very interesting article making clear what AI or machine learning is able to do.
The bitterness comes from the point of view that doing search and learning at scale is like “brute force”. All approaches to build a system which tried to implement the human knowledge reached a plateau relatively fast. The automated learning could be scaled and could beat the expert systems.
I was not disappointed about this at all. In contrast – it made clear to me what the capabilities and limitations of AI are. A computer given all the data can approximate the equation to calculate the energy from the mass but it will never come up with the beauty of the formula e = m c2.