Rise of the Machines - an intro to Machine Learning

this talk was hilarious, prescient, and insightful for what AI can do and can't do.

I am perpetually Oscar the Grouching about AIs these days. Too many folks calling every resource hungry automation toy AI and claiming that it will be smarter than all of us and solve the world's problems has been an exhausting fad in the tech industry.

I didn't attend this talk to troll the speaker, but rather because I enjoy and respect Josh very much. I expected him to pleasantly surprise me with his talk on AI, and wasn't disappointed.

Rather than grandstanding or magical thinking, Josh treated us to the technical basics of an actually useful subset of the currently kitchen-sink category of AI: machine learning. He even used a real world use case that makes sense and could theoretically compensate for the resource cost of utilizing this technique for positive real world benefit through the analysis of the data output of the fleets of sensors that cover solar farm installations.

I would have probably enjoyed a whole additional hour of deep diving that use-case but also understand that was outside the scope of this talk, which probably has a broader audience appeal than my personal preferences would have.

As usual, Josh mixes comedy, pragmatism, and his smooth, radio-ready voice for a talk full of great information.

I really enjoyed a (mostly) hype-free discussion of what ML is and what it can do for me. I really appreciated the talk of wind farms and the various outputs that ML can help operators monitor for deviations from the mean.

Well presented (as always by Josh), engaging, interesting, entertaining, and educating - everything you could ask for from a tech talk!