> we can fairly say that Hinton was wrong because his prediction did not reflect what a radiologist actually does: had Hinton bothered to ask the question, he would have learned that practitioners do much more than interpret diagnostic images.

This has been the crux, for me, of arguments I have had with non-technical people about why, as a software engineer, I am intensely relaxed about AI "taking human jobs". Recently Ford quietly started re-recruiting engineers after they discovered the hard way that their engineers had been doing more than they thought they had, and I sent articles about it to friends I had previously been discussing the matter with. It is still mind-blowing to me that a business historically famous for automating manual labour can have made this mistake, i.e. of literally not knowing what their staff actually do.

Humans aren't machines, who would have guessed? But, perhaps more importantly, machines aren't humans, and the adherence of a lot of domain experts (that should know better) to fairy tale fantasies about the tech they are literally building genuinely makes me wonder if the whole field has just gotten dumber in the 21st century.