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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)

#301

Post by emodendroket »

mojomark wrote: post #297
emodendroket wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I got a two-in-one Windows notebook and I was really, really impressed with the handwriting recognition. It can even read my cursive with like 95% accuracy, which I never imagined. That said, it's still slower than typing.

> ...That said, it's still slower than typing. Finger-on-nose! It seems to be a question of utility and efficiency rather than primarily an emotional response to effectiveness of a given UI. I type emails because it's faster. I handwrite class notes because I often use freeform groupings and diagrams that would make using a word processor painful.

On the other hand, learning to type took some effort and I see many people who do not know how to properly type. The case for handwriting might have looked better if you assumed people would not all want to become typists.

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

#302

Post by kbenson »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #235
kbenson wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 think you have a good point. Something that was fascinating for me was that one of the things the search engine did after being acquired by IBM was looking at search queries for common questions people would ask a search engine. Taking 5 years of search engine query strings (no PII[1]) and turning them into a 'question' that someone might ask. What was interesting is that it was clear that search engines have train…

> One of the bits that Jimmy Fallon does on the Tonight Show is an interviewer who asks people a question but uses nonsense words that sound "right" in the question. The most recent example was changing the question

Yeah, that's exactly what I'm talking about. I suspect this works because the interviewees have a model of what they think Jimmy Fallon is going to ask, and when hearing a question, if they can't make out words or they sound wrong, the simplest thing is to assume you heard them wrong and think what it's likely he would have asked. To that, the answer is fairly obvious.

We've all experienced those moments when we're caught off guard when this fails. For example, you're at work and someone you're working with says something that sounds like it was wildly inappropriate, or out of character, or just doesn't follow the conversation at all, and you stop and say "excuse me? What was that?" because you think it's more likely you heard them wrong than to believe you fuzzy matched their statement "Hairy Ass?" and you were correct.

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

#303

Post by fjsolwmv »

arghwhat wrote: post #214
pnloyd wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, you can kinda talk to Google assistant in a "question response" type capacity and it does pretty well.

You can also kinda talk to ELIZA. Google Assistant, Apple Siri and Amazon Echo are all quite fancy natural language parsers . After parsing, it's just a group of "dumb" (wo)man-made widgets.

There not entirely true. Google Search will answer a question with an automatically extracted excerpt from a website page. Watson did the similar with its Jeopardy system

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

#304

Post by yongjik »

foldr wrote: post #289
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, you're completely on the right track. People usually judge AI systems based on superhuman performance criteria with almost no human baseline. For example, both Google Translate and Facebook's translation system could reasonably be considered superhuman in performance because the singular systems can translate into dozens of languages immediately more accurately and better than any single human could. Unfortunatel…

>Unfortunately people compare these to a collection of the best translators in the world. I don't think that's really true. They're comparing them to the performance of a person who is a native speaker of both of the languages in question. That seems like a pretty reasonable comparison point, since it's basically the ceiling for performance on a translation task (leaving aside literary aspects of translation). If you…

> Any human who speaks two languages fluently (which is not rare, looking at the world as a whole) can translate between them well.

No, sadly, that's not the case. A bilingual person may create a passable translation, in that they can keep the main gist and that all the important words in the original text will appear in the translated text in some form, but that does not automatically make it a "well-translated" text. They are frequently contorted, using syntaxes that hardly appear in any natural sentences, and riddled with useless or wrong pronouns.

A good translation requires more skill than just knowing the two languages.

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

#305

Post by ModernMech »

goatlover wrote: post #28
ModernMech wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> since we humans have goals of things like the need to survive, etc. What makes you think AI wouldn't have similar ideas about wanting to continue its existence?

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.

> Current Ai doesn't have any ideas about existing. That's something we'd have to add in to future AI ... isn't something that comes about from crunching large data sets

(note: I'm a roboticist who spends a lot of time thinking about long-term autonomy (how can a robot go for months and years without human intervention) so that gives you a sense of where I'm coming from. Since my original comment was more of a question, I'll expound a little more here.)

I wasn't really asking in the context of current AI, but 'true' AI as the parent was talking about. They drew a distinction between how humans learn and how a "true" AI might learn based on the goals of each, and I question the notion that a "true" AI wouldn't have a notion of survival.

I think you agree with me to some extent, based on your other comment:

> 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.

I agree. I believe a robot not only would benefit from the idea of "self", but that it's fundamental to their design. We've built algorithms for a long time that operate in a very limited way. Robots break that mold in a number of ways, foremost being they can move in their world, and even physically change it. Yet we're still insisting on building them the same way we build webapps or trading software.

There needs to be a notion of "inside" and "outside" just to implement things like collision avoidance. I think there will also be notions of "group" and "individual" as well as "self" and "other" and "community" as well if we're going to call robots intelligent, as we see these notions in other species we regard as intelligent (whales, dolphins, chimps, etc).

The question is, how do they get these concepts and what do they look like? I don't know. But I think they're essential, and I think they will be a barrier to AI if we keep treating them optional instead of innate parts of an intelligent creature.

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

#306

Post by lerpa »

dahart wrote: post #128
hinkley wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

> Watson got bored of beating grand masters at chess and started refusing to play

That's when you reboot it, if that doesn't fix it good old persuasive maintenance techniques can also come into play

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

#307

Post by foldr »

yongjik wrote: post #304
foldr wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Unfortunately people compare these to a collection of the best translators in the world. I don't think that's really true. They're comparing them to the performance of a person who is a native speaker of both of the languages in question. That seems like a pretty reasonable comparison point, since it's basically the ceiling for performance on a translation task (leaving aside literary aspects of translation). If you…

> Any human who speaks two languages fluently (which is not rare, looking at the world as a whole) can translate between them well. No, sadly, that's not the case. A bilingual person may create a passable translation, in that they can keep the main gist and that all the important words in the original text will appear in the translated text in some form, but that does not automatically make it a "well-translated" tex…

Right, but I don't think many people expect machine translation to do better than that. And I don't think the ability to do good translations is quite as rare among bilinguals as you're making out. Even kids tend to be pretty good at it according to some research: https://web.stanford.edu/~hakuta/www/research/publications/(...

> They are frequently contorted, using syntaxes that hardly appear in any natural sentences, and riddled with useless or wrong pronouns.

I find it hard to believe that this is the case if the translator is a native speaker of the target language. I mean, I might do a bad job of translating a Spanish text to English (because my Spanish sucks), but my translation isn't going to be bad English, it's just going to be inaccurate.

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

#308

Post by sgt101 »

fjsolwmv wrote: post #300
mkirklions wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How do you "compare" multimillion dollar custom IT installations, before you buy?

By having people who aren't working for the vendor who know things about such installations assess them before they are bought.

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

#309

Post by dahart »

lerpa wrote: post #306
dahart wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.…

> Watson got bored of beating grand masters at chess and started refusing to play That's when you reboot it, if that doesn't fix it good old persuasive maintenance techniques can also come into play

"I'm afraid I can't let you do that, Dave" - HAL

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

#310

Post by 8bitsrule »

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…

There was a time when I'd introduce people to 'Eliza'-type programs. Those programs stashed phrases typed in by users. When new users typed in a phrase, the programs would parrot back the stashed phrases ... based on really crude algo's, or even random selection.

Nonetheless, I watched people get really worked up about what the computer was 'saying'. Partly because of the sarcastic stuff people would say, partly because of their expectations about 'cybernetic brains'.

Now the 'Cyc'le is back. And people actually working on this really hard problem are not helped by dumb marketing.

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