Guest Opinion: Data is Holding Back AI

I remember grumbling, "Good lord this is a waste of time," in 1992 while I was working on an AI application for lip-reading. The grumble escaped my lips because I felt like I was spending half my time inputting data cleanly into the video processing neural network. Bouncing from a video capture device to a DEC workstation to a Convex Supercomputer to a Cray, I felt like I had been thrown into a caldron of Chinese water torture. Sitting over my head was a joke happy birthday poster from Arthur C. Clarke's Space Odyssey series featuring HAL 9000. I found it ironic that I was essentially acting like a highly-trained monkey, while a fictional AI stared down at me, laughing.