Slashdot Mirror
Executive Secretary In Every Computer
An anonymous reader writes "BusinessWeek Online just ran an interview with a researcher from Sandia National labs whose team has developed an alternative approach to artificial intelligence. They have come up with a software program that models a computer user's behavior and gives the user advice, corrects his errors or saves files according to the user's own logic. The idea is for computers to learn how to use with users -- instead of vice versa. The software has already been tested with air traffic controllers."
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What happens when the user is a sick, twisted and sadistic person. Will the computer adapt to that kind of user?
Indeed, this sounds exactly like Clippy. I read an article on Clippy a few years ago. Clippy was a great idea, that was supposed to help in just these ways. During R&D it worked very well.
Then MS marketing got involved. They decided that Clippy didnt get activated enough. Clippy in its research version might have popped up once a month when a user really needed help. However, once a month would not justify the expense of development and marketing, nor could it be hailed as a great new feature if the users almost never saw it.
Enter the new and marketing improved Clippy any MS office user over the last decade has had the misfortune to experience. Junk the I part of AI, and just make an annoying paperclip instead of a helpful tool. I can only imagine how the researchers felt about having their nice idea turned into something like what Clippy got to be.
Maybe we'll see a real implementation of this kind of technology at some point in time. But I'll bet any commercial application of this is more likely to get written by popup ad companies, and jog the ATC guys elbow by suggesting which airline he should be using or something...