IBM is not doing "cognitive computing" with Watson (2016) • Hacker News Board

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

#151

Post by albertgoeswoof » Mon, Apr 30, 2018, 5:40 PM UTC

blattimwind wrote: post #135

phkahler wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not just them. A lot of people think that because NNs can do object identification that self driving cars are almost here. It's similar to thinking that word recognition and pattern matching are going to give us conversational AI. Things like that are prerequisites for AI, but they are hardly the whole thing. Companies are spending billions on this stuff and I hope they're just hedging in case it pans out rather…

Many people seem to think the arrival of fully autonomous cars is right around the corner; when I say that it will likely take at least 10 years, but probably more like 20, until there will be significant numbers of those on the road they are very surprised. I admit I recently upped that number from "5-10 years minimum" after seeing the media reaction to recent driver-assist systems related accidents — it became clea…

Well Jaywalking is only illegal in 10 countries. So PR campaigns won't be enough for that. The benefits of self driving cars as so massive that it will trump anything like that - but we are still a long way away from practical self driving cars.

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

#152

Post by jacquesm » Mon, Apr 30, 2018, 5:40 PM UTC

delinka wrote: post #106

albertgoeswoof wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kinda how Tesla advertises autopilot as a self driving car that's safer than human drivers? > Full Self-Driving Hardware on All Cars > All Tesla vehicles produced in our factory, including Model 3, have the hardware needed for full self-driving capability at a safety level substantially greater than that of a human driver. https://www.tesla.com/autopilot/

But it’s technically correct: the hardware is present. The software isn’t there yet, that’s true. So is this a “lie by omission”? Reading the whole page, there’s this quote: “It is not possible to know exactly when each element of the functionality described above will be available.” What else needs to be said? At some point, critical thinking is required to navigate the world. The customer should ask “and when will…

It's not a lie by omission, it's a lie. If you don't have the software then you don't know whether or not you have the hardware. It's only proven when it works.

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

#153

Post by PersistentCough » Mon, Apr 30, 2018, 5:41 PM UTC

frgtpsswrdlame wrote: post #101

Aqueous wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems to contradict your assertion: http://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-autopilot-cuts-crash-ra...

No, the NHTSA report says nothing about how Tesla's autopilot compares to human driving. Here are two comments I made last week about this: In that study there are two buckets, one which is total Tesla miles in TACC-enabled cars and then after the update total Tesla miles in cars with TACC + Autosteer and they calculated on airbag deployments. Human driven miles are going to dominate both of those buckets and there's…

I'm not sure what "safer" means. Not sure what posting your insistence in other threads has to do with this. 10x or 100x the number of deaths would be small price to pay to get everyone in autonomous vehicles. It's air travel, all over again and there's a price to pay.

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

#154

Post by _rpd » Mon, Apr 30, 2018, 5:41 PM UTC

hristov wrote: post #138

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…

One way to fix it is not to make outright false advertisements.

Or at least require cigarette style warning labels:

Warning, this advertisement is a lie. Believing this advertisement may harm your cognitive health.

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

#155

Post by jrs95 » Mon, Apr 30, 2018, 5:41 PM UTC

ghostly_s wrote: post #58

Rjevski wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hardware. That’s the keyword, and it might very well be true. Tesla doesn’t claim their software is capable of full self-driving yet and in fact the system will scream at you and stop the car if you take your hands off the steering wheel for too long.

It's deliberately deceptive, and I'm real tired of tech people tripping over each other to defend it. Technically correct? Sure. But deliberately phrased to obscure the fact that this is a hypothetical future capability that the product does not possess today. And please spare me your "well actually, the showroom attendants will clarify exactly what it means" -- they are framing this in a misleading way to generate p…

It's exceedingly clear to me that they're talking about hardware that can support future capabilities -- additional features via software upgrades is something they talk about a lot. And they're very explicit about what their Autopilot system does and doesn't do on their site. There's basically no situation in which someone is buying a $70,000+ car without knowing how the Autopilot works.

It's really not that deceptive. People would have to be a lot dumber than they actually are to be confused about it.

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

#156

Post by clavalle » Mon, Apr 30, 2018, 5:42 PM UTC

lozenge wrote: post #140

clavalle wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, the hope was that Watson, having explored and built a connected knowledge graph from various sources, could ask probing, adaptive questions to find out where a person landed. So, say I'm an undergrad at a good university and I tell the system "I'm interested in Computer Science. I am particularly interested in Scientific Computing and would like to get to a graduate level of knowledge." The system might ask "So…

This already exists, it's called adaptive testing. I guess the new part would be modelling somebody's ability, not in one topic, but many related topics.

Sure. Existing adaptive tests were an inspiration for the idea, of course. But putting together a good adaptive test is, itself, very time-consuming. And the test itself doesn't do more than measure ability. The crux of the idea is to use the adaptive test to suggest learning material from a wide swathe of sources to the individual.

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

#157

Post by wintorez » Mon, Apr 30, 2018, 5:42 PM UTC

vishvananda wrote: post #137

wintorez wrote: post #118

I'm no expert in the field of AI or Machine Learning, so I have a question for the experts here? Has there been any theoretical breakthrough in the AI in the recent years? I knew we had neural networks and different types of classifiers, etc. for more than a few of decades now, so apart from better marketing, has there been a significant breakthrough that explains this sudden surge in the interest in AI?

There have been a number of breakthroughs in specific fields recently. In fact it seems like there is a paper every week that pushes the state of the art forward in some branch of AI/ML. I think the big one that triggered the current excitement was the success of convolutional networks in image recognition tasks. You can read about that one (in 2012) here: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/530561/the-revolutionary-.…

Thank you. The very answer I was looking for.

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

#158

Post by jacquesm » Mon, Apr 30, 2018, 5:42 PM UTC

mcguire wrote: post #112

nartz wrote: post #7

The way IBM talks about it is completely bs. However, this round of AI is definitely better than the last one. Specifically, whats different this time around is that previously, expert based systems and many machine learning techniques require that you specifically hand code things like: 1. Parsing and providing the input dataset into 'features' 2. Hand coding the logic and rules for many different cases (Expert syst…

One of the neat parts of expert systems was that you could get surprising and bizarre interactions between rules, leading to entertainingly nonsensical answers. One of the neat parts of neural networks is that you have no idea what rules it's using, but it still manages to produce answers that are sometimes not entertainingly nonsensical.

The bigger problem is that they produce that are most of the time making perfect sense and then every now and then they spectacularly fail on input that is indistinguishable from inputs that gave correct answers.

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

#159

Post by DennisP » Mon, Apr 30, 2018, 5:42 PM UTC

Retric wrote: post #100

rescripting wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hand you a gun and say "you can point this gun at anyone, pull the trigger, and it wont harm them." You point the gun at a crowd, pull the trigger, it goes off and kills someone. Who do you blame? No one is saying guns, or cars, aren't dangerous. However this kind of false advertising leads people to use cars in dangerous ways while believing they are safe because they've been lied to. (Side note, there is some fin…

Safer than human hardware does not imply safe . It means this will kill people but fewer people than humans would and they have actual data that backs this assertion up. The benchmark is not an alert, cautious, and sober driver because that's often not how actual people drive. So right now it's often safer to drive other times it really is safer to use autopilot, net result fewer people die.

But if you do happen to be an alert, cautious, and sober driver, it'd be unfortunate if Tesla's marketing led you to overly rely on Autopilot.

Ideally Tesla's marketing would say it's safer than drunk, sleepy, and reckless drivers, though it might not sell as many Autopilots.

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

#160

Post by wodenokoto » Mon, Apr 30, 2018, 5:43 PM UTC

ballenf wrote: post #64

fixermark wrote: post #27

"This was about promoting expert systems. Where are they now?" In 2017, Intuit, Inc., owners of Quicken, posted revenue of about $5 billion. Not too shabby.

As someone who is currently working on successful commercial product with a strong a expert system component, I agree with the sentiment. The funny thing about this project is that the product owners nor marketers and not even the coders ever use the term "expert system". It just doesn't sell any licenses nor garner any attention. My view is that expert systems are a ubiquitous part of many products to the degree it'…

A bit off topic, but I've been wondering about what expert systems are a lot lately, and I hope you don't mind me asking a few things about them.

I started studying machine learning long after statistical models was the absolute standard, and all I really know about expert system, are passing phrases in textbooks about how the world has moved away from it.

How does one go about building one? MNIST character recognition is often called the "Hello world of machine learning" ... what is the "Hello world of expert systems?"

Is there a modern term for Expert Systems?