IBM is not doing "cognitive computing" with Watson (2016) • Hacker News Board

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

#221

Post by mkirklions » Mon, Apr 30, 2018, 6:43 PM UTC

PaulHoule wrote: post #103

ChuckMcM wrote: post #15

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.

I think this is good.

In a world that moves too quick to have review/ratings companies for everything, you should come in skeptical and be proven wrong.

Its up to the merchant to make a great product, its up to you to compare and make good decisions.

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

#222

Post by mkirklions » Mon, Apr 30, 2018, 6:44 PM UTC

briffle wrote: post #84

ryandrake wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is Marketing 101 though. It's easier to sell someone a dream or some emotional state than it is to sell an actual product/thing that you have. I'd give people a little more credit. Adults know what advertisements are and that they're all phony.

IE, unlimited data plans where unlimited is defined as de-prioritized after X GB per billing month.

I hate tmobile for this reason.

Totally crap, especially since tmobile runs ads that have pink background and 1 word on the screen:

UNLIMITED

No. Its not unlimited. I know because I paid 25 extra dollars for a month for their international plan. Truly unlimited.

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

#223

Post by jcranmer » Mon, Apr 30, 2018, 6:45 PM UTC

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...

Musk's statements, and Tesla in general, have gone to cultivating an impression that Tesla almost has self-driving. An impression that, okay, it's not perfect, but it's good enough that you can act like it is for most of the time. This impression is far enough from the truth that it's fundamentally dishonest, particularly when the response from Tesla after incidents amounts to "the driver is completely at fault here, we don't need to change anything" (in other words, their marketing says it's basically self-driving, their legal defense says self-driving is only at your own risk).

In the moralistic sense, yes, Tesla needs to be reprimanded for its actions. However, lying in this manner is often well-protected by law, if you manage to include enough legalese disclaimers somewhere, and I suspect Tesla has enough lawyers to make sure that legalese is sufficient to disclaim all liability.

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

#224

Post by Diederich » Mon, Apr 30, 2018, 6:45 PM UTC

mrj wrote: post #192

dsfyu404ed wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 b…

Agreed that their are trade-offs made, of course. But this society spends a ton of time trying to prevent all kinds of death. That's because life is sacred. It seems odd to argue that. Yeah of course we can't stop doing things, but it doesn't mean we don't try really hard to avoid killing people.

> try really hard to avoid killing people

Yes, and both Elon Musk as an individual and Tesla Motors as an organization agree. How they approach that idea is somewhat different from what we're used to though.

Their basic assertions are (in my words): 1. Vision and radar based technology, along with current generation GPUs and related hardware, along with sufficiently developed software, will be able to make cars 10x safer. 2. How quickly total deaths are reduced is tied directly to how quickly and widely such technology is rolled out and used. 3. Running in 'shadow' mode is a good source of data collection to inform improvements in the software. 4. Having the software/hardware actually control cars is an even better source of data collection to accelerate development. 5. There is additional, incremental risk created when the software/hardware is used in an early state. 6. This is key: the total risk over time is lessened with fast, aggressive rollouts of incomplete software and hardware, because it will allow a larger group of people to have access to more robust, safer software sooner than otherwise would be possible.

That last point is the balance: is the small additional risk Tesla is subjecting early participants to outweighed by how much more quickly the collected data will allow Tesla to produce a more complete safety solution?

We don't know for sure yet, but I think the odds are pretty good that pushing hard now will produce more total safety over time.

> life is sacred

This is my background as well, and its an opinion I personally hold.

At the same time, larger decisions, made by society, by individuals, and by companies, must put some sort of value on life. And different values on different lives. Talking about how much a life is worth is a taboo topic, but it's something that is considered, consciously or otherwise, all day, every day, by many people, myself included.

Most every big company, Tesla Motors included,make decisions based on these calculations all the time. Being a 'different kind of company' in many ways, Tesla makes these calculations somewhat differently.

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

#225

Post by lowbloodsugar » Mon, Apr 30, 2018, 6:45 PM UTC

mcguire wrote: post #112

nartz wrote: post #7

The way IBM talks about it is completely bs. However, this round of AI is definitely better than the last one. Specifically, whats different this time around is that previously, expert based systems and many machine learning techniques require that you specifically hand code things like: 1. Parsing and providing the input dataset into 'features' 2. Hand coding the logic and rules for many different cases (Expert syst…

One of the neat parts of expert systems was that you could get surprising and bizarre interactions between rules, leading to entertainingly nonsensical answers. One of the neat parts of neural networks is that you have no idea what rules it's using, but it still manages to produce answers that are sometimes not entertainingly nonsensical.

It's funny that we are willing to disqualify an AI as an I simply because it comes to some startlingly nonsensical result, yet history is full of humans doing the same thing (from placing a plastic cup on a hot stovetop through to gas chambers).

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

#226

Post by _blz2 » Mon, Apr 30, 2018, 6:47 PM UTC

>A point of view helps too. What is Watson’s view on ISIS for example?

>Dumb question? Actual thinking entities have a point of view about ISIS. Dogs don’t but Watson isn't as smart as a dog either. (The dog knows how to get my attention for example.)

Ouch. But at the same time, for something that didn't grab his attention he sure had a lot of words to say about it.

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

#227

Post by bobthechef » Mon, Apr 30, 2018, 6:49 PM UTC

Watson's marketing is obnoxious, but it's not just Watson. There is plenty of bullshit, ignorance, and pseudo-intellectualism to go around. Mind you, many of the technical fruits of AI itself, properly understood, are not bullshit (the name "AI" is misleading IMO; I wouldn't be able to tell you what distinguishes AI from non-AI because it seems largely a matter of convention rather than a substantive difference). The field offers plenty of useful techniques for mechanizing things people have had to do preiously. However, the very idea of a "thinking computer" is unjustifiable and superstitious. There's too much sloppy, superficial thinking.

The author of the article mentions concepts and indicates a distinction between them and word counting. Certainly, there is a difference between word counting and conceptualization, and it is patently obvious computers don't do the latter. But it's worse than that. Technically, computers aren't even counting words. They aren't even counting, nor do they have any concept of a word (we count words by first knowing what it is that we should be counting, i.e., words). What we call word counting when a computer does it is a process which produces, only incidentally, a final machine configuation that, if read by a human being, corresponds to a number. The algorithm is a proxy for actual counting. It is a process produced by thinking humans to produce an effect that can consistently be interpreted as the number of words (tokens) in a string. That's not thinking. There is zero semantic content and zero comprehension in that process, and no number of tortured metaphors or twisted definitions can change that. AI, as it becomes more sophisticated, is at best a composition of processes of the same essential nature. No degree of composition -- no matter how sophisticated or complex -- magically produces thought anymore than taking sums of ever more composed and expansive sequences of integers ever gets you the square root of two. It's not a mystery.

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

#228

Post by komali2 » Mon, Apr 30, 2018, 6:54 PM UTC

landonxjames wrote: post #177

nilkn wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

James we can all see you with your phone under the table

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

#229

Post by joshmarlow » Mon, Apr 30, 2018, 6:55 PM UTC

kbenson wrote: post #211

ChuckMcM wrote: post #15

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…

> Unfortunately many, many people think that talking to your computer in actually already possible, they just haven't experienced it yet. Given how often another person can't correctly infer meaning when people talk, I doubt it will ever be how people imagine it. Initially, I imagine it will be a lot of people trying to talk normally and a lot of AI responses asking how your poorly worded worded request should be car…

> I imagine we'll probably develop some AI pidgin language that provides more formality that as long as we follow it AI voice interactions become less annoying (but you have to spend a bit of time before to formulate it).

There's been some tentative discussion of using Lojban as a basis for just that!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lojban#Lojban_as_a_potential_m...

http://www.goertzel.org/new_research/Loglish.htm

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

#230

Post by jcranmer » Mon, Apr 30, 2018, 6:55 PM UTC

laichzeit0 wrote: post #195

nilkn wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 only know specifically about the NLP stuff, e.g. Natural Language Understanding (AlchemyLanguage), Natural Language Classification (it's just a multi-label text classifier) and Watson Knowledge Studio (Basically allows you to create your own named entity recognition classifier (NERC), also supports relations and co-reference resolution. You manually hand-annotate examples through a Web UI). So by platform I mean, l…

> I personally think it's disingenuous because when people hear Watson they think Jeopardy and they think that somehow that technology is involved when they use any of the Watson.* products.

The use of the Watson name is a deliberate attempt to take advantage of the Jeopardy game. It's a name that has cachet, and I've seen just enough of the marketing perspective to know that marketing will push very hard to reuse a successful name.