Having had some level of access to inside IBM the whole cognitive initiative has just been this bizarre self-feeding marketing sales escalation where the real engineering has to 'bring the cognitive' in the most Dilbert pointy-haired boss sort of way.
IBM is not doing "cognitive computing" with Watson (2016)
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Re: IBM is not doing "cognitive computing" with Watson (2016)
#12Chomsky calls it a sophisticated form of computational behaviorism. Just like the research program of behaviorism died out, this will eventually too. There are other respectable criticisms of AI, like Hubert Dreyfus' 'What computers can't do'.
Neither Chomsky nor Dreyfus claimed that machine learning and/or AI won't solve any problems, but rather that the kind of problems these solve are not relevant in terms of aspiring to be humans.
Re: IBM is not doing "cognitive computing" with Watson (2016)
#13I think the biggest concern is that the general public outside of this industry think that AI and machine learning is Hey Google not understanding them and their bank working out you’ve run out of money – which they already know. When AI _actually_ arrives, they’ll be bored, ignore it, and then, well, I guess it’ll know and take over the world. We’re all doomed.
Re: IBM is not doing "cognitive computing" with Watson (2016)
#14I saw a demo of Watson a couple years ago at a trade show and was not super impressed. Looked like a glorified Markov chain to me.
Re: IBM is not doing "cognitive computing" with Watson (2016)
#15The 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 out side specific, tightly constrained, decision trees (like voice mail or customer support prompts).
If SpaceX were to advertise like that, they would have famous people sitting in their living room, on mars, and talking about what they liked about the Martian way of life. In that case I believe that most people would understand that SpaceX wasn't already hosting people on Mars.
Unfortunately many, many people think that talking to your computer in actually already possible, they just haven't experienced it yet. Not sure how we fix that.
Re: IBM is not doing "cognitive computing" with Watson (2016)
#16It’s an unusually beautiful written article, well worth the read just for the prose. As for the main sentiment that we have a new AI winter, I’m not so sure. My lay person view is that we see quite a lot of commercial success with these systems so the current wave will be well funded for at least a decade.
What are the big successes? Speech recognition? Which still seems rather bad to me.
Language translation (which for the languages I’m interested in (Japanese) is still almost totally unusable?
Self driving cars? Which are not yet in production (and where the social issues are probably far harder than the technical ones, and likely have been since the 90s).
Is there some big application if ML that I’m missing that is a clear win?
Re: IBM is not doing "cognitive computing" with Watson (2016)
#17It's not new! IBM does what it's best at which is advertising.
Re: IBM is not doing "cognitive computing" with Watson (2016)
#18AI is definitely starting to enter the “through of disillusionment” in its hype cycle.
Is it really? I don't see that at all. Rather I see AI as finally being entrenched in normal, everyday products and services. AI is here to stay and the hype hasn't even started yet, at least not compared to what's coming.
Billions of people own devices that they can talk to, that can talk back, that can translate between more languages than humans can, that know facts about you that you didn't even know yourself, etc.
Basic AI has come to be an expectation of many consumer products now. And real AI is coming faster than ever.
Fake audio and fake video, generated from computers/AI is here. Self-driving cars may be just a domain-specific expertise, but it is still AI by any traditional definition.
AI is not reaching any kind of trough of disillusionment that I can tell. We're still obviously just getting started with what can be done.
Re: IBM is not doing "cognitive computing" with Watson (2016)
#19I briefly worked with a Watson team on a cool idea to map a person's 'knowledge space' (or probable knowledge space given their background) against Watson's knowledge space and guide them to relevant learning materials and journal articles and the like.
The idea was to save people time so they aren't rehashing stuff they know down pat or jumping ahead into material they cannot understand but, instead, find that next step into what they almost know. The idea from there would be to let them specify where they want to go and guide them, step by step, exposure by exposure, to that summit.
In a few days, it turned into Just Another News Article Recommendation Engine based on interest and similar profiles with other clients. Yawn.
Re: IBM is not doing "cognitive computing" with Watson (2016)
#20Watson 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.