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

rogerschank.com

361–370 of 452 posts

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

#361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a previous job I looked into the viability of pen computing, specifically which companies had succeeded commercially with a pen-based interface. A lot of folks are too young to know this, but there was a time when it was accepted wisdom that much of personal computing would eventually converge to a pen-based interface, with the primary enabling technology being handwriting recognition. What I found is that compute…

I've always thought it'd be nice to be able to code at the speed of thought - you can often envisage the code or classes that'll make up part of a solution, it's just so slow filtering that through your fingers and the keyboard; if the neural interface 'thing' could be solved that'd be a winner I think, both for coding and manipulating the 'UI'. It seems within the bounds of possibility to me (from having no experien…

>I've always thought it'd be nice to be able to code at the speed of thought - you can often envisage the code or classes that'll make up part of a solution,

In my experience that 'solution' isn't a solution but rather a poorly guessed attempt at one single part of it. Whenever I've thought I have the architecture of a class all figured out there is one corner case that destroys all the lovely logic and you either start from scratch on yet another brittle monolith, or accept that you are essentially writing spaghetti code. At that point documentation that explains what does what and why is the only way to 'solve' the issue of coding.

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

#362
post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Like, using a word for "(economic/technological) development" to describe "advanced cancer" That sounds like a mistake caused by the translator having a (relatively) poor knowledge of English. A bilingual English/Korean speaker wouldn't make that mistake. I mean, I don't know your linguistic background, but you clearly know enough English and Korean to know that that's a bad translation, and you presumably wouldn't…

> A bilingual English/Korean speaker wouldn't make that mistake. Well, "bilingual" is not black and white. I think you have a point here, but considering that people who are paid to translate can't get these stuff right, the argument veers into the territory of "no true bilingual person". Anyway, my pet theory is that it is surprisingly hard to translate from language A to B, even when you are reasonably good at both…

People paid to do something are rarely the best at it.

They are however consistent since their pay check depends on it.

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

#363

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.

This would be the third or fourth AI winter in my estimation going back to John McCArthy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter

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

#364
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.

Sounds like every IBM product: WebSphere, Tivoli, WSSR, RAD, fuck even AIX. Many of those can be replaced with open source tools at a fraction of the cost and at a huge increase in performance.

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

#365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This comment is way too long to justify whatever point you are making. First of all, how long ago do you mean? Are you 100 years old and people in the 1940's thought computers would be operated by pens? But also, when my college had a demo microsoft tablet in their store in 2003, I could sign my name as I usually do (typical poor male handwriting) and it recognized every letter. That seems pretty good to me. I also h…

This is my most down-voted comment ever and I have no idea why.

The first sentence is being seen as combative.

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

#366

Question: how can the author know what Watson really is doing unless the author worked on Watson? If you're going to try and explain the above to me, don't do it by explaining what Watson "really" is doing (unless you worked on Watson yourself). Explain exactly how you can tell the difference from the outside. As far as I can tell all the author did was point out that Watson made a mistake (saying that Dylan's songs…

I am not sure if the author did this (he certainly doesn't mention it), but a lot of what constituted Watson at the time of Jeopardy was published as a set of 17 papers called "This is Watson" in the IBM Journal Of Research and Development.

Other than that too, I think you can make a reasonable assessment of any NLP system at this level of abstraction by looking at what is cutting edge in NLP today (by following conference proceedings etc).

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

#367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He specifically addresses that he _wasn’t_ doing “real AI” then, and given they’re doing fundamentally the same or similar things, IBM aren’t now either.

Yes, that is my point (sorry that I mis-stated it a bit). He is offended by the claims of these charlatans when he knows the technology hasn't advanced to the point of being AI. How dare they claim otherwise. Also, he knows that they know it's a lie. Unforgivable. But he's fixated on the literal (once-true) meaning of "AI". It doesn't mean that anymore, not to the lay person and not to the average technologist either…

Not to the lay person? Really? Do you have any evidence to back it up? Hint: HN is not full of lay persons.

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

#368
Had IBM sales people present on Watson as a security solution recently. The stench of BS was so bad I nearly had to leave the room. It wouldn't bother me if they kept things generic, but they deliberately sprinkle the presentations with specific terms referencing hyped technology (deep learning, etc), with the clear objective of deceiving the audience into thinking they are using those technologies when they clearly aren't. It was unethical IMHO.

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

#369

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…

In my limited understanding, isn't this just the state of A.I. in general? I don't know of anyone trying to solve the general intelligence problem. Everyone's just finding formula for specific applications and using M.L. to curve fit.

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

#370
post #249

Oh wow, Roger Schank [1]! Haven't heard that name in a while - he was quite famous in the early days of AI. I wonder if he has figured out a good way to marry ML to his theory of Conceptual Dependency (CD) [2] - because that would could be ground-breaking for hard NLP problems. Interestingly I started reading the article without paying much attention to who the author is. A few lines in I began to wonder if this is g…

In the 1980s I spent too much time trying to use Conceptual Dependency in a few small R&D projects. Looked promising, but I had little success with it.
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