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Ray Kurzweil Is Building Your ‘Cybernetic Friend’

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Re: Ray Kurzweil Is Building Your ‘Cybernetic Friend’

#21
post #14

If they make it look like ED-E[1] then I'm sold.. [1] http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/ED-E_(Lonesome_Road)

Nope. They've already got a prototype running: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Assistant

Oh god, I clicked on that without thinking about what it was, and pretty much spit out my drink.. thanks..

Re: Ray Kurzweil Is Building Your ‘Cybernetic Friend’

#23
"It fundamentally deals with language." Language, Kurzweil argues, is the window to creating a genuine artificial brain, that can understand the meaning of ideas and concepts.

This sounds like the same old intelligence-as-symbol-manipulation bullshit of the 70s. Language is not thought, as anyone who's spent time with animals or children or introspecting their own mind would know. A "genuine artificial brain" would mean something that can learn language itself if exposed, not something built around linguistic concepts.

Re: Ray Kurzweil Is Building Your ‘Cybernetic Friend’

#24
There's plenty of joking and 'it'll never work' here, but doesn't this worry anyone at all?

A system that 'knows you better than you know yourself', means a system that is able to predict your responses to different stimuli more accurately than you can.

By definition such a system can manipulate you.

Let's set aside the idea of an 'AI' - which conjures up all sorts of mythical images of talking computers.

Instead consider the implications of a single corporation with a machine learning system that has access to the private communications, personal documents, and physical location and web viewing history for a billion people and can use that information to predict the behavior of each one of them better than they can predict their own behavior.

That's what we'll get if Kurzweil and Google are only partially successful in this endeavor. It sounds to me like the greatest concentration of power in human history, and an extremely dangerous thing that we should be considering the implications of today.

Now many people seem to think that Moore's law means that machine learning systems of this power are inevitable and that it's better that it's Google than a worse entity like a government who controls it.

I think that's a dangerous dismissal for two reasons - firstly it presumes that this tool wouldn't be taken over by governments once it came into existence, or that it wouldn't be used to manipulate governments to prevent its takeover.

Secondly, even if super-powerful AI is an inevitability, it's not inevitable at all that we should be routing all of our personal information to its creator so that it can be used to model and predict our behavior en masse.

Re: Ray Kurzweil Is Building Your ‘Cybernetic Friend’

#25

There's plenty of joking and 'it'll never work' here, but doesn't this worry anyone at all? A system that 'knows you better than you know yourself', means a system that is able to predict your responses to different stimuli more accurately than you can. By definition such a system can manipulate you. Let's set aside the idea of an 'AI' - which conjures up all sorts of mythical images of talking computers. Instead con…

> Instead consider the implications of a single corporation with a machine learning system that has access to the private communications, personal documents, and physical location and web viewing history for a billion people and can use that information to predict the behavior of each one of them better than they can predict their own behavior.

Funny the corporation that makes that more visible to me is Netflix. After rating so many movies it can pretty well predict if I would like a move or not. It does it better than me reading the description and the title.

It is kind of nice but a bit worrying. Wonder what kind of psychological profile it could build and sell to other companies if it wanted to.

Re: Ray Kurzweil Is Building Your ‘Cybernetic Friend’

#26
Eric Schmidt: "“Is it a ‘hot dog’ or a ‘hotdog.’ And, if you knew something about whether the person had dogs, or whether the person was a vegetarian, you’d have a very different potential answer to that question.”"

The problem with this semantic search "problem solving" is that a vegetarian who had a dog is still searching for the food. If their dog was overheating they would search "What to do about an overheated dog".

Conclusion: This isn't the problem they are trying to solve.

Re: Ray Kurzweil Is Building Your ‘Cybernetic Friend’

#27
It's my belief that the first computer programs that we would consider a real AI have already been built, and quite recently. Somehow or other, when enough information is finally available for such a breakthrough, there is a kind of 'leakage' that happens into the public domain. News articles, science and tech articles in particular, begin to converge. From this 'leakage' it is possible to piece together how such a thing might be accomplished. And usually, within five years or so, a big announcement is made by a big company. The funny thing is, I can already see what the big limitation of AI is going to be. It's not going to draw up plans for a warp drive or cure cancer any time soon, as some have imagined. Instead, we are going to learn something very interesting about the current rate of scientific progress.

Re: Ray Kurzweil Is Building Your ‘Cybernetic Friend’

#28
post #27

It's my belief that the first computer programs that we would consider a real AI have already been built, and quite recently. Somehow or other, when enough information is finally available for such a breakthrough, there is a kind of 'leakage' that happens into the public domain. News articles, science and tech articles in particular, begin to converge. From this 'leakage' it is possible to piece together how such a t…

>Instead, we are going to learn something very interesting about the current rate of scientific progress.

...Which would be?

Re: Ray Kurzweil Is Building Your ‘Cybernetic Friend’

#29
post #25

There's plenty of joking and 'it'll never work' here, but doesn't this worry anyone at all? A system that 'knows you better than you know yourself', means a system that is able to predict your responses to different stimuli more accurately than you can. By definition such a system can manipulate you. Let's set aside the idea of an 'AI' - which conjures up all sorts of mythical images of talking computers. Instead con…

> Instead consider the implications of a single corporation with a machine learning system that has access to the private communications, personal documents, and physical location and web viewing history for a billion people and can use that information to predict the behavior of each one of them better than they can predict their own behavior. Funny the corporation that makes that more visible to me is Netflix. Afte…

[deleted]

Re: Ray Kurzweil Is Building Your ‘Cybernetic Friend’

#30
post #28
post #27

It's my belief that the first computer programs that we would consider a real AI have already been built, and quite recently. Somehow or other, when enough information is finally available for such a breakthrough, there is a kind of 'leakage' that happens into the public domain. News articles, science and tech articles in particular, begin to converge. From this 'leakage' it is possible to piece together how such a t…

>Instead, we are going to learn something very interesting about the current rate of scientific progress. ...Which would be?

...that it isn't limited by how 'smart' we are. That's the cheap answer to your question of course. The more expensive answer relates to the role of creativity in scientific advance, and how creativity is limited by experience. When you look at the history of scientific advance, very rarely are discoveries made out-of-time. They occur when the conditions are right. They rarely occur sooner because they are meaningless without the context of the times in which they were developed. So, scientific advance is essentially limited by us humans and the rate that we progress as a race. In other words, the rate of scientific advance is just about optimal, or approaching a limit set by us. :-)
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