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

rogerschank.com

171–180 of 452 posts

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

#171

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/

"Self-driving" is not the same as "Never going to crash."

People just assume that if a computer does something, it's going to be perfect. It isn't.

Most humans can't even "self-walk" without occasionally stumbling and falling. Does that make human locomotion dangerous and false?

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

#172
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Current Ai doesn't have any ideas about existing. That's something we'd have to add in to future AI, which goes to the point of the article and over-exaggerated claims about current AI. Caring about one's existence (or even having the notion of a self) isn't something that comes about from crunching large data sets. ML isn't going to result in existential feelings or consciousness.

I think that consciousness is a collection of experiences and observations ('data'), nothing more. I am curious what lead you here: > Caring about one's existence (or even having the notion of a self) isn't something that comes about from crunching large data sets. ML isn't going to result in existential feelings or consciousness. My opinion is that 'consciousness' by the human definition will be a spontaneous and em…

> I think that consciousness is a collection of experiences and observations ('data'), nothing more. I am curious what lead you here:

Consciousness is part of having an experience. Observations don't require consciousness, since they can be performed by measuring equipment, although one can get deep in the woods on the whether observation needs a mind to make it meaningful, and thus an observation, not simply a physical interaction.

> I am curious what lead you here:

Being a self isn't about crunching data, it's about having a body and needing to be able to distinguish your body from the environment for survival and reproductive purposes.

An algorithm has no body and thus no reason to be conscious or self-aware. That it's even an algorithm and not just electricity is an interpretive act on our part (related to the deep semantic debate over what counts as an observation).

A robot might someday be a self. It would certainly be advantageous for robots to avoid damaging themselves, and being safe around other robots and humans (treating them as selves). But how we go about making robots self-aware, and more problematically, how they have experiences is something nobody knows how to do. Saying it will emerge once the robot is sophisticated enough is the same as saying nobody knows how to make a machine conscious.

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

#173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

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.

Many people also die when they fall from the stairs.

But if you build faulty staircases that make people slip, they can still put you in jail or sue you.

Same if you push them down the stairs.

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

#174
post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

"That said, human life isn't sacred. It and everything else gets trades for dollars all the time." Wow. Uhm, slavery is illegal if you haven't heard. We made it illegal because life is sacred.

It's not that cut and clear. Yeah killing and maiming is bad but those things always (and will for the foreseeable future) happen at large scale and you have to be able to have a reasonable discussion about the trade-offs. "Well we can't guarantee we won't kill anyone in an edge case so let's all just go home" isn't an option.

You can build a highway overpass with a center support on the median for X and there will by a small chance of someone crashing into it and getting killed. You could design one without a support on the median but it will cost Y (Y is substantially more than X). Now scale that decision to all overpasses and you've got a substantial body count. At the end of the day it's a trade-off between lives/injury and dollars.

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

#175

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…

> Not sure how we fix that

How about prosecuting them for false advertising? Seems like a classic case, albeit in a new domain.

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

#176
I'd like to make a plug for my company (http://www.cyc.com) whose "AI" is not machine-learning based, does actual cognition and generalized symbolic reasoning, and lived through the AI winter of the 80s. We've gotten some contracts as a direct result of companies being disenchanted with Watson's capabilities.

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

#177
post #167

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 platf…

I'm not even convinced Watson is a platform. My impression is that it's just a consulting division of the company that deploys teams to build solutions that are in some way related to AI, with each solution or implementation potentially being completely unique from the ground up. Perhaps someone from IBM can correct me though.

I'm currently sitting in a meeting about implementing the Watson Enterprise Search product in my company and that is more or less the impression I've gotten. They sell it as a platform that is easy to customize and then once you're in they bill you tons of hours to help you because the system is indecipherable and poorly documented.

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

#178
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.

Yep, as shown by the stats in the latter half of this article: https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-tesla-and-elon-musk-exagge...

Disclosure: I am one of the co-authors

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

#179

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/

Are you for real? Statistics prove that Tesla is right on this. I’m not saying human life has no value, and I do empathise with the people who lost someone due to a Tesla crash, but we can see what is the percentage. It IS lower compared to human error, and yes that includes DUI and every other time it was a human error. Tesla is safer for the community based on the statistical data. Also it is safer than a human dri…

> It IS lower compared to human error,

What is lower and compared to what? I am tired of this vague misleading statements by Elon musk, Tesla and their supporters.

They claimed Autopilot + driver is 40% safer than a driver alone. And that includes Automatic emergency braking. Is it a surprise that AEB reduces accidents?

Why is that used as proof that Tesla's software is FSD. FSD implies that the car is capable of driving without a driver.

Is Autopilot alone safer than a driver? There is no proof of that

But what you should compare is Autopilot alone compared with a driver assisted by Autopilot. So, is Autopilot better than Driver+Autopilot? I can assure you its not, the driver still adds value.

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

#180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm not sure what "safer" means. Not sure what posting your insistence in other threads has to do with this. 10x or 100x the number of deaths would be small price to pay to get everyone in autonomous vehicles. It's air travel, all over again and there's a price to pay.

>I'm not sure what "safer" means.

You can define it however you want. By any common sense definition of safety Tesla has not proven that their autopilot is 'safer' than a human driver.

>10x or 100x the number of deaths would be small price to pay to get everyone in autonomous vehicles.

This supposes a couple things. Mainly that autonomous vehicles will become safer than human drivers, that you know roughly how many humans will have to die to achieve that and that those humans have to die to achieve it. Those are all unknown at this point and even if you disagree about the first one (which I expect you might) you still have to grant me two and three.

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