71–80 of 163 posts
Instead of purging the vocabulary, they shuld have tought it/she/him the concept of registers[0] and code switching[1]. [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Register_%28sociolinguistics%29 [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_switching
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Watson's 'memory' is just a big database of facts, rules, and statistical models. To 'forget' a source they'd just have to rebuild any models derived from it and purge any facts it had extracted.
oh yeah, I forgot it was that simple. Watson has several different teams of people to manage its different parts...
Given the wide range of unstructured sources Watson uses, and given that the linguistic rules they use to extract facts are likely to frequently change, I don't think it's unreasonable to assume they'll have a process to make building its knowledgebase and models from sources fairly straightforward.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In 2029, when we are still not able to 'upload our brains' into a computer, I will come back here specifically to call bullshit.
Depends how you define upload. Why couldn't a computer just simulate a persons outputs based on recordings of their life. Does virtualization of life really need to have consistent consciousness? Maybe rip would be a better word than upload.
It would require something along the lines of the Allen Brain Atlas Project [0], but much more advanced, since you'd have to extract all the information out of one brain. The Allen project has several atlasses, built out of different brains. They've yet to map the circuitry of a mouse brain (the project was started in 2011).
Even if it were possible to extract the relevant info, since the extraction would destroy the brain, you'd better have a conscious clone, which preserves the identity of the original. What happens to one's identity is also troubling, since you could, theoretically, instantiate several copies of someone. I'm not sure the identity would be carried over, actually.
By identity, I mean the fact that you're the same person in the morning that you were when you fell asleep. Your consciousness dissolves and re-emerges, and you're still yourself. We take it as granted, but it is extremely puzzling to me.
Another problem is that the relations between time and consciousness have yet to be understood. The fact that the brain processes information in parallel is probably important, meaning that a fast serial simulation by turing machines would not necessarily cut it, even with "massive" supercomputers. The level of parallelism in the brain will not be achieved in a long time in silico, at least not with the current approach.
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allen_Brain_Atlas
--
Side note: you should remove the four spaces at the beginning of your post.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Then I suppose someone should tell Google their bullshit detector is broken.
In 2029, when we are still not able to 'upload our brains' into a computer, I will come back here specifically to call bullshit.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The worst thing is that translated into normal speak that's actually a reasonable sounding proposition: "We use our experience in this field to provide practical advice to our clients which helps them improve their way of doing business and ROFL-stomp their competition 10x over."
ROFL-stomp? That's a new one on me.
What an interesting reflection on who we are as a species. We build systems to organize who we are (urbandictionary) but hate it when the systems use that information tell us who we are (watson). It feels so much like the emperor isn't wearing any clothes. Perhaps an appropriate response would be for the computer to measure the tension in the human voice response to it's queries and optimize for lower tension. So it…
I'm not an "angel" by any means, but any time I visit Urban Dictionary, I come away feeling filthy. I typically go there to look up some abbreviation I heard on reddit or IRC or a blog post somewhere and what I look up usually ends up being middling-dirty, but the stuff that I see there "on my way" to the word I'm looking for makes me cringe and gives me a bleak vision of what the next generation is going to be like should Urban Dictionary actually be representing the majority of the population (I firmly hold that it does not).
Nothing that Watson learned from the Urban Dictionary could possibly be any dirtier than what I hear from enterprise people all the time: "We use our deep subject matter expertise to deliver value through actionable advice that enables our clients to harness the power of best practices in order to shift their paradigms and achieve 10X deltas against competitive industry metrics."