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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.""
"I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that"
False fears! These are decision support machines they don't do anything.
"I'm sorry Dave, I don't think you should do that"
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.
;-) Philosophers still have not agreed that we are cogniscient, they would enjoy this conversation. I myself even send e mail to clippy (and also Santa) so I have to believe/
Exactly, this is nowhere near the level of the current heuristic tool which learns patterns all around it and makes decisions in the best interest of its' supporting system.
I refer to the Brain and the body
As agent Smith put it: "as soon as we started thinking for you it really became our civilization"
Oh here, let me decode that and run it for you...
Support Israeli punk bands. Man Alive.
We've all seen this so many times before. Artificial Intelligence is a sham. It's analagous to alchemy. If you just put enough ingredients together, you've got intelligence. Bullshit. We don't even know what is necessary and sufficient for intelligence. We can't agree on the concept/definition, and I fear that if we could, no human would qualify.
As pertaining to this article...it's easy to get something that resembles intelligence in a closed, restricted, experimental environment. When you try to expand it, you get something like clippy. Annoying and unhelpful, and certainly not intelligent.
There are good, efficient algorithms that can help humans in many ways. But don't call it a "synthetic human," don't call it "intelligence," and don't believe it's going to start thinking for us in general terms. That fad went out in the 70's.
...just my 2 gil.
Of course, once the cognitive model becomes good enough, the temptation (economic imperative?) will be to offload some of the actual work onto it. This idea, taken to an extreme, is the topic of an excellent short story:
"I was six years old when my parents told me that there was a small, dark jewel inside my skull, learning to be me." (Greg Egan, "Learning to be me", Axiomatic collection)
Back on the topic of augmented intelligence, Kasparov has been advocating allowing mixed human/computer teams in "Advanced Chess" tournaments. It seems that the human/machine combination, with the right interface, yields far better chess play than either alone.
In Notes From The Underground, he discussed tables (now would be computers) which would show and calculate the response to evertything and what people would do. People would not want to see that, if they did see it, they would rebel that and choose crazy decisions, just to rebel.
This doesn't exactly relate to the article, but the article reminded me of this.
. . . how will we know wether the error is software or user?
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If your machine starts arguing with you, how do you determine the flaw? When it keeps making consistently wrong decisions, who is to blame.
I'm seeing a WHOLE new way around tech support here. Just keep telling the users that the machine is right and they're wrong. How will the average user know?
All jokes aside, as we humanize software, we need to develop ways to evaluate it and debug it that will require whole new ways of thinking.
Ten years? I'm not so sure it'll be that quick . .
"The Sage treasures Unity and measures all things by it" - Lao Tzu
Agreed. It always makes me suspicious to see statements like "a combination of software and hardware able to think as a person." News flash: we have to understand our own cognitive processes before we can model them. And we really, really, don't. We don't even have a firm definition for concepts like induction.
That's why "Cognitive Psychology," A.K.A. "Cognitive Neuroscience," is not yet a hard science - it's much closer to psychology or sociology.
In all matters of opinion, our adversaries are insane. -Oscar Wilde
I share your frustration totally (sometimes Word expands my selection to include the punctuation at the end of a word... wtf!?). However, when people say "I don't need any help from my computer!" I feel they aren't thinking it through -- your computer is always assisting you to some degree. This notion of "overzealous assistance" is all relative. My mom needs AOL in order to "see the Internet" (it's like fingernails on a chalkboard when she says that to me), but I find the level of "help" that AOL provides as frustrating and cumbersome.
Perhaps that's where this technology could be put to it's best use: correctly intuiting exactly how much assistance you may need. So, for example, Clippy v2.0 would ask you if you need help with that letter when you are a newbie, but scale back the assistance when it intuits that you don't need help.
And in ten years, when natural language parsing and voice recognition are perfected, it could go like this.