411–420 of 452 posts
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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.
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I think this is good. In a world that moves too quick to have review/ratings companies for everything, you should come in skeptical and be proven wrong. Its up to the merchant to make a great product, its up to you to compare and make good decisions.
Sure, but Watson isn’t really a product and IBM isn’t really a merchant here. There’s never going to be a Watson review anywhere because (AFAICT) Watson is just a marketing name for a wide range of technologies, none of which do any of the stuff shown in the TV commercials. That’s the problem. I don’t even know who those ads are targeting. Anyone who knows anything at all about this stuff will be dismayed at the shee…
At first blush he sounds like my technologically semi-literate grandma who would definitely conflate Siri and Google as being part of the same grand internet program. I had to read this twice to understand that in saying "it can pretend to have one using Siri", he meant that asking Siri a question sometimes redirects to a Google search, but wrote it in a way that personified Google as the actor with intent in that transaction. What an odd and paradigm-breaking way to look at that.
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> Current Ai doesn't have any ideas about existing. That's something we'd have to add in to future AI ... isn't something that comes about from crunching large data sets (note: I'm a roboticist who spends a lot of time thinking about long-term autonomy (how can a robot go for months and years without human intervention) so that gives you a sense of where I'm coming from. Since my original comment was more of a questi…
I think we're huge technological leaps and bounds--I mean light-years--away from AGI so advanced it requires some form of computer psychology. But I do think it might eventually happen. And I don't think people are going to do a good job of preparing for it proactively. It's going to require a huge fiasco to motivate people to take that idea seriously. So I agree that one day we may have to be careful how we treat AG…
I think you're right about this. I think the current wave of anxiety about the capabilities of AI are fueled by non-practitioners who have no idea really how hard it's going to be.
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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'd just like to see a voice interface that has any attempt at natural error correction. We do this in a hundred ways in English, emphasis, meta-words, too many to fold into a system. But with a little user prodding, I think you could cover enough of this ground to still sound almost natural. Asst.: Would you like me to read that back to you? User: Yes A: The click brown ox... U: The _quick_ brown _fox_... A: Ok. The…
If people enjoyed this kind of interaction with their computer, it would become common place and they'd likely become so much better at interaction.
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> Current Ai doesn't have any ideas about existing. That's something we'd have to add in to future AI ... isn't something that comes about from crunching large data sets (note: I'm a roboticist who spends a lot of time thinking about long-term autonomy (how can a robot go for months and years without human intervention) so that gives you a sense of where I'm coming from. Since my original comment was more of a questi…
What makes you think survival instinct has anything to do with intelligence or awareness? If anything, I’d guess that the most primitive life forms on this planet have the strongest proclivities for survival.
Once we have a thing that seems to value its own self, then we can start talking about motivations for doing so, and I think that's one of the things that can elevate life to intelligence.
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This is my most down-voted comment ever and I have no idea why.
In addition to what novia said about your first sentence, your comment is so weirdly off-base. You have very strong opinions about pen computing, but where in reality are they coming from? No, we are not talking about the 1940s, why would anyone be talking about the 1940s? How does that make any sense at all? We aren't talking about a Microsoft demo that worked well for you once, either. We are talking about the fact…
Since he didn't specify the timeframe, I gave him the benefit of the doubt and thought it he was talking about before my time.
The most ingenious trick that the IBM marketing department pulled was to get non-technical (and probably even technical people, judging by this thread) to think that Watson is some kind of singular thing. Like that it’s a single big neural network with different APIs on it, or something. I honestly think that’s what most people think Watson refers to. Watson is like Google Cloud Platform. It’s just a name for a platf…
Now a year later I’m finally being asked to clarify “what is Watson” so that the decision makers can better understand the techniques being used rather than the fantasies about what was being used that they were encouraged to develop through misleading marketing and consultants ...
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…
And it is a very old problem, at least from the time of Drew McDermot and "Artificial Intelligence meets Natural Stupidity":
https://homepage.univie.ac.at/nicole.rossmanith/concepts/pap...
From which I quote:
However, in AI, our programs to a great degree are problems rather than solutions. If a researcher tries to write an "understanding" program, it isn't because he has thought of a better way of implementing this well-understood task, but because he thinks he can come closer to writing the _first_ implementation. If he calls the main loop of his program UNDERSTAND, he is (until proven innocent) merely begging the question. He may mislead a lot of people, most prominently himself, and enrage a lot of others.
I used to work for IBM, but a few years ago. One thing about Watson that I remember is this presentation by a very senior guy. He had just come back from the US and was presenting what he learned there about Watson Healthcare (IIRC, that's what it was called), which I assumed was a division of the Watson team that was focused on cancer and stuff like that. I'm paraphrasing, but during the presentation he said somethi…