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IBM is not doing "cognitive computing" with Watson (2016)

rogerschank.com

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Re: IBM is not doing "cognitive computing" with Watson (2016)

#101
post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One person died from that accident. There are now at least 4 deaths where Tesla's autopilot was involved (most of the deaths in China don't get much publicity, and I wouldn't be surprised if there are more). And the statistics do not back up your claim that Tesla is safer (despite their attempts to spin it that way).

This seems to contradict your assertion: http://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-autopilot-cuts-crash-ra...

No, the NHTSA report says nothing about how Tesla's autopilot compares to human driving. Here are two comments I made last week about this:

In that study there are two buckets, one which is total Tesla miles in TACC-enabled cars and then after the update total Tesla miles in cars with TACC + Autosteer and they calculated on airbag deployments. Human driven miles are going to dominate both of those buckets and there's a reason the NHTSA report makes zero claims about Tesla's safety relative to human drivers. It's totally outside the scope of the study. Then add in that some researchers who are skeptical of the methodology and have been asking for the raw data from NHTSA/Tesla have yet to receive it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16932350

Autosteer, however, is relatively unique to Tesla. That’s what makes singling out Autosteer as the source of a 40 percent drop so curious. Forward collision warning and automatic emergency braking were introduced just months before the introduction of Autosteer in October 2015. A previous IIHS study shows that both the collision warning and auto emergency braking can deliver a similar reduction in crashes.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16932406

Re: IBM is not doing "cognitive computing" with Watson (2016)

#102
post #83
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hardware. That’s the keyword, and it might very well be true. Tesla doesn’t claim their software is capable of full self-driving yet and in fact the system will scream at you and stop the car if you take your hands off the steering wheel for too long.

What about "safety level substantially greater than that of a human driver" being the keyword? Isn't Tesla's autopilot doing better than humans do in the same number of miles? We just all hear about it every time a Tesla is in a crash. If we heard about every human driver car accident, it would be overwhelming. edit: from this article: https://electrek.co/2018/03/30/tesla-autopilot-fatal-crash-d... In the US, there i…

This is again deceptive. They are comparing against total miles driven by Tesla vehicles with Autopilot hardware, not necessarily in Autopilot mode.

Since a Tesla is often owned by people with better economic means, their statistics is not representative of all vehicles. The average vehicular fatality rate of this demographics and vehicle type could be well below that of Tesla with Autopilot.

Re: IBM is not doing "cognitive computing" with Watson (2016)

#103

The author's particular gripe is that the Watson advertisements showing someone sitting down and talking to "Watson." They bother me as well (and did so when I was working at IBM in the Watson group) because they portray a capability that nothing in IBM can provide. Nobody can provide it (again to the author's point) because dialog systems (those which interact with a user through conversational speech) don't exist o…

What's bad about it is that it leads to a "market for lemons" for anyone working in the A.I. field in either engineering or sales. People see so much bullshit that they come to the conclusion that it is all bullshit.

Re: IBM is not doing "cognitive computing" with Watson (2016)

#104

I briefly worked with a Watson team on a cool idea to map a person's 'knowledge space' (or probable knowledge space given their background) against Watson's knowledge space and guide them to relevant learning materials and journal articles and the like. The idea was to save people time so they aren't rehashing stuff they know down pat or jumping ahead into material they cannot understand but, instead, find that next…

I'm interested in the original idea. Can you expand on how your ideal system would function?

Well, the hope was that Watson, having explored and built a connected knowledge graph from various sources, could ask probing, adaptive questions to find out where a person landed.

So, say I'm an undergrad at a good university and I tell the system "I'm interested in Computer Science. I am particularly interested in Scientific Computing and would like to get to a graduate level of knowledge."

The system might ask "Sort the following operations by their worst-case run-time...". Then, if they do well there, maybe "Which of these two examples of auto-parallelization using Matlab's parfor would fail to parallize the code.." or something like that. Over the course of so many questions, the system would start to paint a more and more reliable picture of where contours of a person's knowledge.

This is time-consuming, of course, but over time it would get easier and faster to find contours by using the 'average' of people with similar backgrounds as a starting point.

Once a fairly good mapping is done of the person to Watson's cognitive model, Watson would need to trace back to the source(s) of nearby concepts and offer them to the user, which, ideally, are then rated by the user for relevance and perceived difficulty to further refine the person's model and rank the material offered for that particular profile.

Now imagine a Grad Student asking a similar question. Or a middle school student. What would those interactions look like? The mappings? The suggestions?

Don't get me wrong...mapping a person's knowledge space is a Very Hard Problem. Watson takes a kitchen sink approach that just isn't possible for a human being. And maybe it wouldn't be possible to tease apart the resulting cognitive model into tidy nodes enough to map anything to. These were questions I'd hoped that IBM could help answer. Instead, it was on to the easy, well-understood problem and solution.

Re: IBM is not doing "cognitive computing" with Watson (2016)

#105
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about "safety level substantially greater than that of a human driver" being the keyword? Isn't Tesla's autopilot doing better than humans do in the same number of miles? We just all hear about it every time a Tesla is in a crash. If we heard about every human driver car accident, it would be overwhelming. edit: from this article: https://electrek.co/2018/03/30/tesla-autopilot-fatal-crash-d... In the US, there i…

The numbers are wrong since it compares expensive new cars versus everything else(old cars with no safety features, bikes, buses) if you compare with similar cars you get numbers that are not in Tesla favor. So try not to spread this false numbers, also the Tesla numbers are not open to be examined by third parties.

Not to mention that

every 320 million miles in vehicles equipped with Autopilot hardware.

does not mean 320 million miles with autopilot controlling the vehicle. Who knows how many of those miles are human driven?

Re: IBM is not doing "cognitive computing" with Watson (2016)

#106

The author's particular gripe is that the Watson advertisements showing someone sitting down and talking to "Watson." They bother me as well (and did so when I was working at IBM in the Watson group) because they portray a capability that nothing in IBM can provide. Nobody can provide it (again to the author's point) because dialog systems (those which interact with a user through conversational speech) don't exist o…

Kinda how Tesla advertises autopilot as a self driving car that's safer than human drivers? > Full Self-Driving Hardware on All Cars > All Tesla vehicles produced in our factory, including Model 3, have the hardware needed for full self-driving capability at a safety level substantially greater than that of a human driver. https://www.tesla.com/autopilot/

But it’s technically correct: the hardware is present. The software isn’t there yet, that’s true. So is this a “lie by omission”? Reading the whole page, there’s this quote: “It is not possible to know exactly when each element of the functionality described above will be available.” What else needs to be said?

At some point, critical thinking is required to navigate the world. The customer should ask “and when will the software catch up?” And I’ll concede that the overwhelming majority of the population doesn’t think like that. Should Tesla update the site with statements to confirm the negative cases? e.g. “Our software can’t yet do X, Y, Z, etc”

Re: IBM is not doing "cognitive computing" with Watson (2016)

#107
post #83
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hardware. That’s the keyword, and it might very well be true. Tesla doesn’t claim their software is capable of full self-driving yet and in fact the system will scream at you and stop the car if you take your hands off the steering wheel for too long.

What about "safety level substantially greater than that of a human driver" being the keyword? Isn't Tesla's autopilot doing better than humans do in the same number of miles? We just all hear about it every time a Tesla is in a crash. If we heard about every human driver car accident, it would be overwhelming. edit: from this article: https://electrek.co/2018/03/30/tesla-autopilot-fatal-crash-d... In the US, there i…

When the Autopilot software is disabled, what about the Autopilot hardware makes the car any safer?

What is the accident statistic for Teslas not equipped with Autopilot hardware?

If Autopilot enabled cars are so much safer than human drivers, can they pass a written and road side driver's license test?

Re: IBM is not doing "cognitive computing" with Watson (2016)

#108

Watson is the IBM marketing department going mad about ways in which IBM can continue to remain relevant in a world that increasingly doesn't care about what hardware a particular computer program runs on. If there is going to be a 'second AI winter' I fully expect Watson and other such efforts to be the cause.

IBM hasn't been about the hardware for a long time, instead it has been about the consulting services contract. And when we, as a startup, first engaged with the Watson folks it was clearly a sales funnel for their consulting services. That said, IBM has a tremendous amount of research they have done in AI over the years. It is not that they don't have a lot of interesting technology they can throw at different busin…

The Watson stuff is so oversold it is almost comical.

And yes, sure IBM hasn't been about hardware for a long time, they've been a services company for decades now. But as far as AI/ML is concerned Google and Facebook are attracting the top talent these days, Apple and Microsoft much further down the line.

What would be nice is if they would take the opposite tack, rather than marketing the hell out of it quietly solve lots of problems that are hard to solve in a traditional way. Every time I hear about Watson it is in the context of something where I ask myself "What's the point of being able to do that?". If all there is to hype is the hype itself then it is hollow.

Re: IBM is not doing "cognitive computing" with Watson (2016)

#109

The author's particular gripe is that the Watson advertisements showing someone sitting down and talking to "Watson." They bother me as well (and did so when I was working at IBM in the Watson group) because they portray a capability that nothing in IBM can provide. Nobody can provide it (again to the author's point) because dialog systems (those which interact with a user through conversational speech) don't exist o…

Kinda how Tesla advertises autopilot as a self driving car that's safer than human drivers? > Full Self-Driving Hardware on All Cars > All Tesla vehicles produced in our factory, including Model 3, have the hardware needed for full self-driving capability at a safety level substantially greater than that of a human driver. https://www.tesla.com/autopilot/

"...have the hardware needed for...". Nothing about the full capability. So no actual claim about the capability, just that the hardware is in place.

Still a bit deceptive, to me. Reminds me of "...electroplated in 16 carat gold...".

Re: IBM is not doing "cognitive computing" with Watson (2016)

#110

The author's particular gripe is that the Watson advertisements showing someone sitting down and talking to "Watson." They bother me as well (and did so when I was working at IBM in the Watson group) because they portray a capability that nothing in IBM can provide. Nobody can provide it (again to the author's point) because dialog systems (those which interact with a user through conversational speech) don't exist o…

Kinda how Tesla advertises autopilot as a self driving car that's safer than human drivers? > Full Self-Driving Hardware on All Cars > All Tesla vehicles produced in our factory, including Model 3, have the hardware needed for full self-driving capability at a safety level substantially greater than that of a human driver. https://www.tesla.com/autopilot/

It's not just them. A lot of people think that because NNs can do object identification that self driving cars are almost here. It's similar to thinking that word recognition and pattern matching are going to give us conversational AI. Things like that are prerequisites for AI, but they are hardly the whole thing. Companies are spending billions on this stuff and I hope they're just hedging in case it pans out rather than planning their future around it.
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