The computer scientists Rich Sutton and Andrew Barto have been recognised for a long track record of influential ideas with this year’s Turing Award, the most prestigious in the field. Sutton’s 2019 essay The Bitter Lesson, for instance, underpins much of today’s feverishness around artificial intelligence (AI).
He argues that methods to improve AI that rely on heavy-duty computation rather than human knowledge are “ultimately the most effective, and by a large margin”. This is an idea whose truth has been demonstrated many times in AI history. Yet there’s another important lesson in that history from some 20 years ago that we ought to heed.
