Is it just me, or is using an ANN to solve a problem just the "Easy Way Out (tm)"...

Is it just me, or is using an ANN to solve a problem just the "Easy Way Out (tm)"? How many real-world problems could be solved more quickly using traditional algorithms and a little more dev time/ research than just handing them off to an ANN?

What kind of traditional algorithm would you use to solve vague, ill-defined problems like "is there a person in this picture" or "what is the genre of this music"? You could try to give them clear and unambiguous definitions, but that seems like a fool's errand. What you really need is a heuristic built from many examples of answers to those questions, which is what a neural network is. And I can't even imagine how tedious it would be to build such a heuristic manually, without something like backpropagation.

Even if you "cheat" with a ANN, it still gives you an O(1) approximation using simple matrix operations.

Easy? No. Efficient? Yes.
Take for instance, identifying lewd images. Researchers spent years trying to develop patterns that identified nudity. No matter what they did, they always failed. Either they didn't identify anything, or they had a ridiculous amount of false positives. Neural nets pretty much changed that overnight. Suddely identifying nudity was possible with very low amounts of false positives.

Score one for ANN

That's because the AI did not spend 90% of its work time jerking off.

We must remember to give AI a sex-drive, if we wish to stay the dominant species.

Sex drive is the key factor behind human behavior. We will be competing with them for resources before long if we give them that.
No, AI must be programmed to receive gratification from serving humans.

It's called an objective function.

traditional methods reach a limit to their predictive value. Increasing the dataset size doesn't help. Increasing the model complexity doesn't help improve fidelity.

Neural Nets surpass traditional methods in this domain: very large datasets, very large NN size. They leave traditional methods behind in terms of predictive fidelity. Normal methods simply cannot do what NN can do in this domain.

To be fair, your gut reaction seems naive now but for about 30-50 years it was the norm.

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