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Forget virtual assistants, Asteria wants to be your AI friend

wareable.com

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Re: Forget virtual assistants, Asteria wants to be your AI friend

#51

Post by fallous »

electic wrote: post #14

I am going to take a step back from the technical merits of this and say the whole thing seems sad. I don't need a need a dog collar on my neck or a badge on my shirt. Lastly, you know life is over when you spend your time talking and hanging out with a AI bot. Our society has become so isolated because people are on Facebook and Instagram instead of talking to each other.

Many people already treat other humans as an enabling "bot" of one kind or another, think of the job of an executive assistant or a performer who needs the feel of an audience but has no personal relationship with any members of that audience.

An assistant, AI or otherwise, that can handle the minutiae of life isn't a bad thing if you're focusing on greater problems or concerns within your life. The danger is that many people are already obsessed with nothing but minutiae and will instead be ruled by their bot rather than vice versa. See also everyone obsessed with the Tamagotchi-like behavior of their cellphones.

Re: Forget virtual assistants, Asteria wants to be your AI friend

#52

Post by posterboy »

neurotech1 wrote: post #26
crashedsnow wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree the term has become somewhat throw-away, but to be fair any AI system probably IS just ML/DL algorithms. That is, ML/DL are avenues to create AI. I think most people would agree that AlphaGo is an example of AI and was achieved via DL, so by that definition it's just some DL algorithms.

I would define AI as an autonomous form of DL. DL is processing an input to provide an output. AI is more like a bot that runs its own process autonomously.

> AI is more like a bot that runs its own process autonomously.

That is a contradiction. An AI is a process. A process doesn't run itself. At most, it runs.

Re: Forget virtual assistants, Asteria wants to be your AI friend

#53

Post by shostack »

sapphireblue wrote: post #45
tedmiston wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like an interesting dystopia, and definitely geared toward programmers. Synopsis from the publisher: > By day, Angie, a twenty-year veteran of the tech industry, is a data analyst at Tomo, the world's largest social networking company; by night, she exploits her database access to profile domestic abusers and kill the worst of them. She can't change her own traumatic past, but she can save other women. > When…

Am I the only one who thinks that dystopian scifi got boring a decade or two ago, while utopian scifi is an almost entirely neglected genre? I prefer a techno-optimistic point of view shown here http://foundersfund.com/anatomy-of-next/

I've wondered if that correlates with many of the old themes of such stories becoming mainstream realities that it turns out people don't care much about.

Re: Forget virtual assistants, Asteria wants to be your AI friend

#55

Post by dharma1 »

neurotech1 wrote: post #30
iampims wrote: post #18

Really curious about how this will pan out as everything said in the article screams at me like someone has no clue how difficult making the device is going to be, regardless of how much ”AI” runs on it. Hardware is really hard.

Not disagreeing that hardware is hard, but IMHO Its possible to get a comparable level of AI/DL performance in the "Asteria" device, using relatively available technology like Zynq FPGA[0] based boards like the Parallella[1]. I got my Parallella board from Kickstarter about 2 years ago. [0] http://www.xilinx.com/products/silicon-devices/soc/zynq-7000... [1] http://www.parallella.org/

I've got a parallella knocking about not doing anything. Did anyone write any interesting software for it in the end, that's worth putting it to use?

Re: Forget virtual assistants, Asteria wants to be your AI friend

#56

Post by neurotech1 »

dharma1 wrote: post #55
neurotech1 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not disagreeing that hardware is hard, but IMHO Its possible to get a comparable level of AI/DL performance in the "Asteria" device, using relatively available technology like Zynq FPGA[0] based boards like the Parallella[1]. I got my Parallella board from Kickstarter about 2 years ago. [0] http://www.xilinx.com/products/silicon-devices/soc/zynq-7000... [1] http://www.parallella.org/

I've got a parallella knocking about not doing anything. Did anyone write any interesting software for it in the end, that's worth putting it to use?

I think some people did, but I mainly used mine as a FPGA dev board. $99 Zynq board is still good value, even without using the custom Epiphany processor.

Re: Forget virtual assistants, Asteria wants to be your AI friend

#59

Post by crashedsnow »

behnamoh wrote: post #19
crashedsnow wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree the term has become somewhat throw-away, but to be fair any AI system probably IS just ML/DL algorithms. That is, ML/DL are avenues to create AI. I think most people would agree that AlphaGo is an example of AI and was achieved via DL, so by that definition it's just some DL algorithms.

>> ...any AI system probably IS just ML/DL algorithms... I don't think so. ML/DL is just the beginning. Better AI solutions will be discovered in the future. Note that computer neural networks are just simulations of some reality, they're not complete yet. Many intricacies are still to be researched on.

I agree that AI != ML/DL, that's not what I'm saying. Tests like the Turing test don't prescribe anything about implementation. I mean, if you could roll together some Excel macros that passed the test then great. My point is that if you do pull the curtain back on most "AI" systems today, at worst you'll find some sort of basic adaptive learning system and at best you'll find a [deep] neural net that supports both supervised and/or unsupervised learning.

I think the general spirit of the root of this comment thread is valid though. There's a lot of "we're using AI and machine learning!" going on when in fact all they're doing is remembering how frequently you pushed the blue button, then recommending the blue button.

Re: Forget virtual assistants, Asteria wants to be your AI friend

#60

Post by schoen »

kuschku wrote: post #39
acobster wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Detecting and adapting to volume isn't that big of a challenge in comparison to natural language processing. But if you mean something more subtle, like discretion or taboo...that's probably much harder than NLP.

Yes, and also adapting to mental concepts of different things. That starts with phrases, but also applies to other concepts – different cultures have different orientation systems even (some use cardinal directions (north, east, south, west), some use relative directions (front, right, back, left), etc)

I've only heard of one example of the cardinal directions being used as a main orientation reference in day-to-day language: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/magazine/29language-t.html...

I never read the research about this but examples are http://anthroweb.ucsd.edu/~jhaviland/Publications/ETHOSw.Dia... and http://pubman.mpdl.mpg.de/pubman/item/escidoc:66622:3/compon... (very interesting stuff!).

Edit: I would highly recommend reading the 2nd paper (which includes some practical experiments testing how Guugu Yithimirr speakers thought about and remembered spatial positions and orientations). It's astonishing.

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