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

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

#121

Post by laichzeit0 »

The most ingenious trick that the IBM marketing department pulled was to get non-technical (and probably even technical people, judging by this thread) to think that Watson is some kind of singular thing. Like that it’s a single big neural network with different APIs on it, or something. I honestly think that’s what most people think Watson refers to.

Watson is like Google Cloud Platform. It’s just a name for a platform with a bunch of technologies.

E.g. Watson Natural Language Understanding was previously AlchemyLanguage. It was just rebranded.

It’s very clever though, I’ll give them that. Use a human name so it has all the anthropomorphic connotations and let people think it’s some kind of AI learning things.

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

#122

Post by Filligree »

NeutronStar wrote: post #113
rescripting wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hand you a gun and say "you can point this gun at anyone, pull the trigger, and it wont harm them." You point the gun at a crowd, pull the trigger, it goes off and kills someone. Who do you blame? No one is saying guns, or cars, aren't dangerous. However this kind of false advertising leads people to use cars in dangerous ways while believing they are safe because they've been lied to. (Side note, there is some fin…

Their claim is about hardware, not software.

That is not a distinction most people understand.

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

#123

Post by dsfyu404ed »

Judgmentality wrote: post #44
albertgoeswoof wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

Am I extreme in feeling someone should go to jail for that? It was bad enough when they were originally advertising it, but now that they're defending it even after people died...ugh. https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/28/17172178/tesla-model-x-cr...

Jail, no?

Financial ruin for the company that was willing to put that BS below it's letterhead? Yeah, sure, in proportion with the harm caused. That said, human life isn't sacred. It and everything else gets trades for dollars all the time. A death or three shouldn't cripple a big company like Tesla unless they were playing so fast and loose that there's significant punitive damages.

In a large company like Tesla it shouldn't be marketing's job to restrain itself. That's not safe at that scale. There should be someone or a group who's job it is to prevent marketing from getting ahead of reality just like it's security's job to spend all day playing whack-a-mole with the stupid ideas devs (especially the web ones) dream up. Efficiently mediating conflicting interests like that is what the corporate control structure is for.

People using your product in accordance with your marketing should be considered almost the same as in accordance with your documentation. While "people dying while using the product in accordance with TFM" is not treated as strict liability it's pushing awfully close.

I see it as a simple case of the company owning up to its actions. It failed to manage itself properly, marketing got ahead of reality. You screw up and someone gets hurt then you pay up.

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

#124

Post by genofon »

InTheArena wrote: post #85

It's a pretty open secret in the community that what IBM pitches that Watson can do, versus what it (or any state of the art system) really does is pretty much bunk. This author calls it fraud, but a more charitable interpretation would be extreme marketing. We've seen a lot of failures with Watson, particularly in the medical space - MD Anderson's Cancer work for example ( https://www.forbes.com/sites/matthewherper/…

but their message is for outside the community, so I don't think they deserve any charitable interpretation, they lost this privilege a long time ago. I have to say I'm biased, I wish I can see them disappear soon, but I think I have the right motivations.

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

#125

Post by Judgmentality »

NeutronStar wrote: post #113
rescripting wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hand you a gun and say "you can point this gun at anyone, pull the trigger, and it wont harm them." You point the gun at a crowd, pull the trigger, it goes off and kills someone. Who do you blame? No one is saying guns, or cars, aren't dangerous. However this kind of false advertising leads people to use cars in dangerous ways while believing they are safe because they've been lied to. (Side note, there is some fin…

Their claim is about hardware, not software.

Just about every expert agrees though that their hardware is NOT capable without LiDAR (which is probably why they churn through people running their Autopilot program), although proving that in court is a whole thing.

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

#126

Post by dvorak365 »

rescripting wrote: post #96
earenndil wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So...one person died? Do you know how many people die in normal, non-self-driving cars? It's never possible to get 100% accuracy.

I hand you a gun and say "you can point this gun at anyone, pull the trigger, and it wont harm them." You point the gun at a crowd, pull the trigger, it goes off and kills someone. Who do you blame? No one is saying guns, or cars, aren't dangerous. However this kind of false advertising leads people to use cars in dangerous ways while believing they are safe because they've been lied to. (Side note, there is some fin…

I would blame the person, because the best case scenario of shooting an allegedly harmless gun into a crowd is equivalent in effect to the worst case scenario of doing nothing in the first place.

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

#127

Post by rifung »

delinka wrote: post #106
albertgoeswoof wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I would argue even if something is technically correct but deliberately misleading companies should get in trouble for it. Nobody has time or energy to learn about every single thing they may buy.

Also, how can we even know the hardware is sufficient unless said software exists and shows that what we think is possible is indeed possible?

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

#128

Post by dahart »

hinkley wrote: post #88
clavalle wrote: post #19

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…

In a similar vein, I find a machine beating a grand master fairly boring. Show me a machine that can teach someone to become a master (or even a very good amateur) and we can talk. That is, don’t beat the game, beat the opponent, understand why, and then model an adaptation strategy for the opponent (teach).

> In a similar vein, I find a machine beating a grand master fairly boring.

I know a lot of people felt that way even before it happened. It feels like an accounting problem rather than intelligence. But, it's fun to remember when it was thought by some very smart people that chess required more accounting than was ever possible by a machine, so beating a grand master would have to be a demonstration of intelligence.

> don’t beat the game, beat the opponent, understand why, and then model an adaptation strategy for the opponent (teach).

Yeah that would be closer. My favorite Turing test, if you will, is whether the AI can tell you you're asking it the wrong question. If Watson got bored of beating grand masters at chess and started refusing to play, maybe then a case could be made it was reasoning.

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

#129

Post by kthejoker2 »

jbob2000 wrote: post #90
chisleu wrote: post #72

I worked on data systems that fed weather data into Watson. IBM's technology, and IBM's marketing are very different beasts. The marketing is somewhat trivial, but the reality of ML and the Watson data systems is incredible. They are pumping a huge amount of data into it and they have data scientists doing incredible things with the data already. It is the largest growing segment of the company (and maybe the only gr…

The problem is that all of this AI and ML is being used to target Ads better. You don't need AI and ML to do this, it is a solution looking for a problem. Your example about routine elevator maintenance does't need AI at all. Whoever logs the elevator maintenance can just press a button to send a notification message. Hell, it can be wired up such that when you submit a notification notice, it automatically sends an…

Speaking for OP - I think the idea was that ML would determine that your elevator was in need of maintenance and place the order without human intervention.

Although the word "routine" belies that, but so.

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

#130

Post by jononor »

wintorez wrote: post #118

I'm no expert in the field of AI or Machine Learning, so I have a question for the experts here? Has there been any theoretical breakthrough in the AI in the recent years? I knew we had neural networks and different types of classifiers, etc. for more than a few of decades now, so apart from better marketing, has there been a significant breakthrough that explains this sudden surge in the interest in AI?

Before 2005 experts estimated that AIs that could beat humans at Go would take many years still. In October AlphaGo came out and in March 2016 beat everyone. In 2017 AlphaGo Zero came out, which was only trained on self-play. It beats all previous versions.

But it is not so much these big breakthroughs that cause current optimism, as much as the large amounts of continuous improvements and refinements.

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