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No, machines can’t read better than humans

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Re: No, machines can’t read better than humans

#31

Post by svantana »

TremendousJudge wrote: post #4
iambateman wrote: post #2

Hmm, yes computers can’t outpace (highly literate) humans in reading comprehension today, but give it a couple of years and we will have a very different situation.

we're much farther away than 'a couple of years'. these reading comprehension bots basically cheat tests, using grammar rules and keyword matching. they don't actually build a body of knowledge based on what they read, they just go to the source text and search. it may look smart, but it isn't, which is what the article is saying

You're really underselling the achievements of MS and Alibaba here. These are machine learning systems that are most likely not using grammar rules and matching, but learning patterns from large amounts of text data. Most of these systems use a word embedding, which can be viewed as a body of knowledge -- it knows how words relate to eachother.

Re: No, machines can’t read better than humans

#32

Post by ghaff »

freehunter wrote: post #29
mc32 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even at the height of the 2000 bubble the Industry Standard, Business 2.0, Wired, etc., had some semblance to journalism. At most I could call them optimistic, but, at least, I fail to recall, them engaging in hedging, that is on the one hand have a writer extol some company or tech as virtue, then, the next page deride the same thing for being obviously of extremely dubious value, of not outright liability. This thi…

Back then people were more willing to pay for news (newspapers and magazines), no one blocked ads, and people visited real websites where ads paid for the original content (rather than just skimming headlines on Reddit, Facebook, etc). What we're seeing today is journalism outfits that went out of business a long time ago and the remnants of the companies were acquired by a very different organization with very diffe…

>Journalism went out of business a long time ago because no one will buy it.

With some exceptions. And there's also good tech commentary from various people who get food put on their plate from other sources which admittedly creates at least the potential for greater biases that aren't obvious. Although bias-free has always been an aspiration that generally hasn't existed in its purest form in practice.

And a lot of popular science has always been pretty shallow.

Re: No, machines can’t read better than humans

#33

Post by freehunter »

liberte82 wrote: post #27
ghaff wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The current round is probably that deep learning can do some impressive things through some combination of CPU/GPU/TPU computing advances, the ability to collect and process a lot of data, and algorithmic/neural net architectural improvements in more or less that order. However, even some of the leading researchers are effectively cautioning that deep learning can probably only take you so far. [1] And we've arguably…

For all the advances in AI (and in specialized AI we can do some incredible things, now) - when it comes to generalized AI, it seems that we're still, ultimately, playing the same game of feeding the machine as much information as possible and then waiting for "something" to happen.

To be fair, that's what we do to humans as well. We feed them all the information they can consume, and after it's all been processed, then we try to figure out what all the output means. From that point forward, we heavily specialize them until their general purpose skills are basically deprecated in favor of their new specialization.

Humans aren't born with the capabilities they possess at adulthood, they're fed data constantly, every second of the day, for decades until they're ready to show their true potential. Yes it sucks that AI right now needs so much data, but then again so do humans, to a far greater extent. And no wonder we're better than AI.

Re: No, machines can’t read better than humans

#34

Post by make3 »

nkoren wrote: post #24
make3 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I meant the scientists, not the tech journalists. Clearly tech "journalists" is a very loose term nowadays

Yes, but the source article is clearly addressing the general public, not scientists. And it's doing a much better job of representing the state of technology than other sources that are addressed to the general public. So not sure what your complaint is.

my complaint is that the verge is one of the journals the more guilty of overhyping ai stuff there is, that it's one of the hardest cases of the pot calling the kettle black I've seen

Re: No, machines can’t read better than humans

#35

Post by freehunter »

O_H_E wrote: post #6
rm_-rf_slash wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps once a computer can understand context to the point of the human and produce a worthy set of opinions, we could automate the Hacker News comments section and save us all some time.

And automate the readers and save the rest of the time Seriously: if bots can produce 'worthy set of opinions' we would be totally useless

>if bots can produce 'worthy set of opinions' we would be totally useless

False. That's actually my ideal vision of AI, a machine that produces a worthy set of opinions, which a human then chooses from and carries to implementation.

To me sitting here at my computer, every person here on HN may as well be an opinion-generating bot. The value I get from reading your programmatically-generated comment is the epiphany that leads me to a breakthrough on what I'm working on. Because you, as a comment-writing robot, aren't working on my project. All you're doing is evaluating my work and making suggestions as to where to go next.

A bot that's capable of coming up with its own opinions and then carrying them out is what may render us useless. A bot that tells a doctor what diagnosis to make and shows documentation to carry out treatment is valuable. A bot that makes the diagnosis then carries out the treatment itself with no human involvement is kinda scary.

Re: No, machines can’t read better than humans

#36

Post by imh »

make3 wrote: post #23
Karnickel wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm pretty sure no one is seriously remotely claiming that machines understand text better than humans. Just some of the headlines: - http://money.cnn.com/2018/01/15/technology/reading-robot-ali... "Computers are getting better than humans at reading" - http://fortune.com/2018/01/15/artificial-intelligence-ai-chi... "Computer AI Can Now Read Better Than You Do" - https://gizmodo.com/ai-used-to-sell-you-more-stuff-c…

I meant the scientists, not the tech journalists. Clearly tech "journalists" is a very loose term nowadays

Microsoft's own blogpost sure doesn't help (https://blogs.microsoft.com/ai/microsoft-creates-ai-can-read...)

>Microsoft creates AI that can read a document and answer questions about it as well as a person

Re: No, machines can’t read better than humans

#37

Post by freehunter »

ghaff wrote: post #32
freehunter wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Back then people were more willing to pay for news (newspapers and magazines), no one blocked ads, and people visited real websites where ads paid for the original content (rather than just skimming headlines on Reddit, Facebook, etc). What we're seeing today is journalism outfits that went out of business a long time ago and the remnants of the companies were acquired by a very different organization with very diffe…

>Journalism went out of business a long time ago because no one will buy it. With some exceptions. And there's also good tech commentary from various people who get food put on their plate from other sources which admittedly creates at least the potential for greater biases that aren't obvious. Although bias-free has always been an aspiration that generally hasn't existed in its purest form in practice. And a lot of…

>With some exceptions.

I would argue, with very few exceptions. The NYT is capable of some great journalism. Same with WSJ and a number of other outfits. That doesn't change the fact that their opinion articles share the same domain and letterhead in an intentional effort to confuse facts with truth to gain clicks.

To flip the argument around: Buzzfeed has some surprisingly good journalists working for it, including Pulitzer Prize winners. The only difference between Buzzfeed and NYT is that NYT is historically known for good journalism due to their long history of being a strong journalistic outfit, while Buzzfeed is known for trash tabloid nonsense and only recently had hired actual journalists.

If I gave you just a headline, could you tell me which company it's from?

>Investigators Are Scrutinizing Newly Uncovered Payments By The Russian Embassy

Surprise. That's the top article on Buzzfeed.com right now. Not even cherry-picked, that's number one, the very first headline.

>Is This the Golden Age of Drag? Yes. And No.

Again, very first headline, number one, most important thing on the page, not cherry-picked. That's nytimes.com. There's absolutely nothing wrong with either of these articles or either of these websites. I'm just highlighting the fact that you can't tell them apart. Because journalists now work for tabloids and clickbait-generators.

And tech journalism is owned by exclusives (which are paid for), access (which can be revoked if you write something bad), and advertisers (who will pull sponsorships to influence the news). If there are ads, there is no such thing as independent and unbiased news.

Re: No, machines can’t read better than humans

#38

Post by foobiekr »

freehunter wrote: post #33
liberte82 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For all the advances in AI (and in specialized AI we can do some incredible things, now) - when it comes to generalized AI, it seems that we're still, ultimately, playing the same game of feeding the machine as much information as possible and then waiting for "something" to happen.

To be fair, that's what we do to humans as well. We feed them all the information they can consume, and after it's all been processed, then we try to figure out what all the output means. From that point forward, we heavily specialize them until their general purpose skills are basically deprecated in favor of their new specialization. Humans aren't born with the capabilities they possess at adulthood, they're fed da…

There is actually not a good reason to believe that humans - like most animals - are not born with a with a significant set of capabilities that they use through their lives into adulthood. Facial recognition as a function in humans is not a function that magically evolves by the presentation of data, neither is language acquisition.

Re: No, machines can’t read better than humans

#40

Post by rm_-rf_slash »

freehunter wrote: post #35
O_H_E wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And automate the readers and save the rest of the time Seriously: if bots can produce 'worthy set of opinions' we would be totally useless

>if bots can produce 'worthy set of opinions' we would be totally useless False. That's actually my ideal vision of AI, a machine that produces a worthy set of opinions, which a human then chooses from and carries to implementation. To me sitting here at my computer, every person here on HN may as well be an opinion-generating bot. The value I get from reading your programmatically-generated comment is the epiphany t…

Even scarier: a bot that can make the diagnosis and could carry out the treatment itself, but is required by law to seek approval from a human of equivalent expertise.

Let that happen, and eventually you get a situation where the human disagrees with a bot and the human does something different. The patient suffers or dies as a result of the bot’s decision being ignored.

That’s when we start to lose our autonomy.

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