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Cognitive Machines Help Decision-Making
Roland Piquepaille writes "At Sandia National Laboratories, new "smart" machines can accurately infer your intents and help you to take better decisions or avoid mistakes. They could change in a near future how we interact with computers, according to this news release. The team who developed the concept associated cognitive psychologists and robotics researchers. The Sandia team thinks that "it's entirely possible that these cognitive machines could be incorporated into most computer systems produced within 10 years." This summary contains more details, including a photo of a "Sandia software developer operating a simulation trainer while a cognitive model of the software runs simultaneously.""
Think of the possible effects that this sort of technology could have on gaming. Although AI gets better and better every day, are we looking at a future where playing against a machine would be almost the same as playing against a human?
I predict that if/when such a technology becomes prevalent, it will greatly reduce the human ability to make decisions.
Take for example any simple video game, how about MahJong (the stack of tiles that you have to match pairs on to remove them).
If you play it without the computer's aid, you develop a good eye for it and can do quite well. However, if you constantly hit the 'help' or 'hint' button, you become dependant on it showing you the next move, and never develop the skill for yourself.
To put it in context with other situations:
How many of you need a calculator to find a 10, 15, or 20% tip amount? Worse, how many of you need a calculator to add that extra 3.25 onto your 21.75 bill? I admit, it takes a great bit of effort for me to add simple numbers in my head simply because I don't exersize that ability enough.
no comment
I think calling this cognitive computing is a bit of an overstatement. It seems more like a heuristic tool that learns the behavioral patterns of a human and alerts the human when something deviates from the norm. We have a long way to go before we have real computer cognition.
The Moore-Murphy Law: The number of things that will go wrong will double every 2 years.
it seems that "intelligent machines" is a bit too much of a generalization. what they are doing is teaching a machine/software how to do something correctly, then have it correct humans when they do it wrong, based on their cognitive model. this is all well and good, but "intelligence" implies some sort of learning. this learning has to be online, i.e. the machine learns how to do something without a stimilus to learn it specifically. what sandia labs has done is get software to infer how a human made decisions to get a certain "state", but this is not exactly "intelligence". just my $0.02
BSD is for people who love UNIX. Linux is for those who hate Microsoft.
What this group has going sounds good, but so have many other things I've read about AI related. How about a video or something to show what it really does? I mean, if they have this mega software then making a video of it in action can't be all that hard can it?
Questions blatantly not answered in these articles:
- Does it read screen text? If so, how? OCR?
- What api's is it compatible with?
- What operating systems does it work with?
- What exactly is the special hardware?
- What spoken languages is it compatible with?
- Specifically, what kinds of decisions can this AI make, what decisions can it not?
- How long does it take to make a decision?
I could go on, but I think you get the point...So people would indeed consider the advice of these machines. And that would include politicians, too.
Perhaps this would even to road to a sensible politics which is immune to ideological brainwashing and massive interest group lobbying. Instead of encouraging the transfer of jobs to low-wage countries and attacking countries with large natural resources just to give a few companies more profit, politicians might really do the right thing(tm) and do something against hunger, poverty and environmental pollution.
This reminds me of Asimov where computers rule to world in the end because they are more rational and inherently more moralic.
In 2020, your average $1000 Wal-Mart Computer will be roughly complex enough to emulate a human brain in realtime. Toss in some cognitive modelling, and you have your new plastic pal who is fun to be with.
Hey, CmdrTaco, Slashdot staff, is there any way you can get an interview with these guys?
/. interview with these guys would just be awesome. I bet they are /. reader, too.
This is some awesome work, but the article is so thin. A real
Anyone care to second the motion?
"I don't know half of you half as well as I should like, and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve."
I don't know if these guys have something for real or not. Their press release is - perhaps unsurprisingly - fluff that says nothing about how their system is supposed to work. Without knowing some technical details its almost impossible to evaluate how sound their approach is and whether they've got anything new.
However a couple of things are suspicious. First they say "work on cognitive machines took off in 2002". So in less than 2 years they have essentially cracked several of the major problems that AI researchers have been struggling with for at least the last 4 decades? That seems unlikely. Second they seem to think that a combination of software engineering, cognitive psychology and robotics is the silver bullet of AI and that this is a radical new breakthrough. I hate to break it to them but these disciplines have been working together for many years in the AI community. This just isn't new.
Until we have a techical paper that describes their approach in detail and can be peer reviewed I will remain sceptical. AI got overhyped enough as it is, we don't need more extravegant claims and fluff press releases.
Sailing over the event horizon
The good thing about these systems is allowing them in an advisory capacity. I think it's just human instinct to want something to do all your work for you, but luckily it's also human instinct not to fully trust machines. This is why I don't think people will ever have cars that totally drive themselves or computers that decide when your nukes launch. It's not that they don't have the potential to do these jobs, it's just that there's always the feeling that human error is more reliable than computer error.
Oh yeah? You mean like that annoying microsoft text selection that prevents you from selecting what you actually selected by deciding for you that you wanted to select the entire word/sentence/paragraph/page (depending on its mood?
I have cursed so much because of that "feature"!
I am the apostle of the "leave me the fuck alone" tao of programming: Every application should have one button, in one simple easy to find menu, that would turn off all automatic thingamajigs. Instead of the current system in wich the are 1.5 times as many places in wich you need to select "no/off" as there are annoying automatic features.
When I place my cursor in the middle of a word, its because thats where I want the selection to end!
You can't take the sky from me...
Tell me this: If Microsoft hadn't released the details, how on earth would an attacker have known how to write an exploit for the "RPC hole?" If you think full disclosure is a good idea, tell that to the families of the victims in New York, Detroit, and Cleveland. Microsoft has willingly provided the tools necessary to cripple the United States' information infrastructure.
You do not work in the IT / Security field do you?
Microsofts explanations come LONG after the whole blackhat community knows about them. The only people who LEARNED about the RPC whole from MS were the legions of "boot camp MCSEs" that MS turns out. Very similar exploits existed long before MSBlast came out.
Before I write the next paragraph I want to add that I also question MS security practices but not like you. The patch for this as well as protective measures were described in the same release you are speaking of.
Now to get scathing:
First, if a single PC can bring down a power grid that large, many people should be fired (from the power company). Not only computer admins but those who designed the system. Most small businesses can survive a few PCs going down now days.
Second, the patch was available weeks ago. I have over a hundred PCs and a half dozen servers and have not been infected.
Finally, you give no sources. It is an interesting diatribe but it lacks any and all seblance of substance.
...the neighborhood of 10,000,000,000 neurons, each having up to thousands of connections. All of these are working in parallel.
I think you just described an epileptic seizure.
A programmer is a machine for converting coffee into code.
That is the whole point of cognitive modeling. We don't know how to make something "think like a machine". That is a meaningless statment considering machines don't think. There is nothing to base a thinking machine on except for people. This is why traditional AI research is going no where. Cognitive modelers are attempting to emulate human thought processes in software in order to better understand how people reason, learn etc. If we are able to better understand how these processes work then we will get better and better at implementing them on a computer until we eventually come up with real AI.
- C.S. and Psychology Student studying cognitive modeling.