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Will IBM's Watson Kill Your Career?
Nerval's Lobster writes "IBM's Watson made major headlines last year when it trounced its human rivals on Jeopardy. But Watson isn't just sitting around spinning trivia questions to stump the champs: IBM is working hard on taking it into a series of vertical markets such as healthcare, contact management and financial services to see if the system can be used for diagnosing diseases and catching market trends. Does this spell the end for certain careers? Not really, but it does raise some interesting thoughts and issues."
Technology and automation were only supposed to drive efficiencies and innovations that made people who weren't me obsolete!
The day Watson answers 42...
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"Any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word 'no'."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_Law_of_Headlines
10 minutes working on a sig. What a waste.
The only reason Watson "trounced" its rivals was because it was faster at pushing the button.
It was unable to answer questions that required any thought or insight. It was just looking up the answers in a database based on patterns in the questions. The only reason it won was because of better reaction time in pushing the button. If the questions were asked in a fair round-robin to all contestants, Watson would not have won.
This meme was poorly executed. I bet Watson could have done better.
I think we're all familiar with the buggy whip problem, but what I sometimes wonder is what happens to folks when, instead of moving on to some next technological replacement, the problem is that most of the jobs that require doing have just been taken by machines?
I like to think that means we have resources and end product at prices so low that everything works out in the wash, and more lives will be spent in a trek -style quest for self betterment or research or whatever. But it seems like you've got to survive a middle-era where there's just nothing much for you to do, but resources are still all privately allocated.
Eh. I guess we'll see.
The practice of specifying constraints when defining an optimization problem isn't exactly new, whether the problem is intended to be solved by a human or a machine...
Now, if Watson is being operated by your insurance company, you should probably be more worried about the constraint set it is being fed; but the practice of constrained optimization is not a novel matter...
A computer is not always programmed to be efficient. I have a lot of garbage code out there so do many other people.
Death should be an available choice, a smart human would know that. Give the choice between living with chemo for 6 weeks or without for 4. I know what I would want.
If one was really this worried about it, just don't include death in the database of treatment options.
this is bs. A computer programme is not programmed to run efficient, it's programmed to reach set goals efficiently. If the goal is set to cure a patient with abitrarily high quality of living after and during treatment as a subgoal, the computer will try to reach that, as efficiently as possible.
there a so many jobs that don't need to exist, and before everyone says "but we have to work". we don't actually, once we have a self supporting replacement for 90% of jobs, all we have to do is maintain it, then live our lives differently.
no more 9-5's.
no more money.
more hard labor trading/ more gardening / farming communities, without sacrificing frivolous things that we've come to enjoy and rely on.
It learns how to sell weed to my friends.
if it is to be efficient in diagnosing an illness and suggesting what treatments should be done to alleviate the ailment, one of those treatment options will always be death. It is the most efficient way in "curing" the patient...
A cure doesn't make as much money as a treatment.
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
Probably. I expect that's why we'll all be executed.
Hoist Number One and Number Six.
Will IBM's Watson Kill Your Career?
If only it was that easy :)
One person creates the idea for software, 3 make the software, 2 make the art for it, and 2 market it. Let's say Watson takes over the 7 jobs that are lowest on the totem pole. Now, all 8 of us can create entire software packages by ourselves, with our minions of Watsons doing the menial work. You dream it, and it happens!
One person designs the house, 3 people mine the resources to build it, 2 build it, and 2 decorate it. Let's say Watson takes over the 7 jobs that are lowest on the totem pole. Now all 8 of us can create houses completely by ourselves, with our minions of Watsons doing the menial work. You dream it, and it happens!
Et Cetera...
Free unix account: freeshell.org
From Wikipedia:
The "IBM Pollyanna principle" is an axiom that states "machines should work; people should think". This can be understood as a statement of extreme optimism, that machines should do all the hard work, freeing people to think (hence the reference to Pollyanna), or as a cynical statement, suggesting that most of the world's major problems result from machines that fail to work, and people who fail to think.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
This is BS. A computer program will do exactly what it is told to do. No more, no less.
last year my oldest kid had pneumonia. 104 fevers for a few days. doctor swore it was a virus. then a trip to the ER and chest x-ray confirmed it was pneumonia.
doctor was right too because all the symptoms pointed to a virus because it showed up very early
the computer will make the same mistakes
If your algorithm considers "death" to be an optimal solution, you haven't defined the problem correctly.
Instead of framing it as "no suffering", you would define the desired outcome in terms of patient contentment, activity levels, ability to care for themselves, or whatever other metrics medical researchers (I am not one) use to analyze how well a healthcare system is working. Of course I would also want an empathetic human being capable of understanding the ethical and moral implications of the situation to make the actual recommendations to the patient, but diagnostic software is no different from any other kind of software: it does what the programmer tells it to do.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
As I became an adult, I became crestfallen by the fact that society is largely structured around this petty fear of losing one's career. Having your job mechanized is a blessing; find something more useful to do with your newfound time.... or kill yourself to give the rest of us some more space.
This isn't new. Computers put people out of work if they're doing work that is best done by computer. That's why we build them at all.
I expect the fields most susceptible to being replaced by computers are lawyers and doctors. Any problem that is an exercise in searching or sorting is better done by computers than people, and is something we're particularly good at. There will always be lawyers and doctors, but they will transition to using a computer for more searching for case law for example than having low level employees dig through paperwork themselves, and the diagnostic part of medicine will become much more automated, with diagnostic equipment having its results interpreted by the computer rather than just an image being spat out and read by a technician and then a doctor.
I don't see financial market prediction going away. Quite the contrary they use computational tools and have for a long time, and disagree on what the important factors are and how they should be weighted. A computer will simplify some of that process, but that's not a problem that actually has a correct or optimal solution.
If your job can be done by a robot, it will be. If your job can be done better by a scientist, and that work can be done on computer it will be. That's progress.
It's jazzed up with the ability to get statistical information using some peripheral semantic analysis, so it isn't quite as rigid as older systems, but it's no different in kind. It's impressive and useful, granted, but certainly no breakthrough, and very unlikely to replace anybody for quite a while.
This system (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Brain_Project), in contrast will put lots of humans out of work. Oddly, once it's in place, it's unlikely to matter, since we get so many solutions within the domain of practically solvable problems. Unemployment and resource allocation, hopefully, will be solvable in a non-awful way.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Today, it's "machines should think, people should work". Consider supermarket checkout. All the smart stuff is being done by the checkout system. The "cashier" just moves items across the scanner. The last production systems recognize products visually, and automatic recognition of fruits and vegetables is in beta test.
For a more extreme example, see this video on robotic order fulfillment. This is a demonstration of how new order pickers can be trained in two minutes. The computers and robots do all the thinking. There's no future. No possibility of promotion. No hope.
I am working as a computer scientists in a medically oriented university department. I agree that computers won't replace actual medical doctors.
But in many cases, computers are able to point out abnormalities or to evaluate the condition of a patient much better than a human doctor. I saw a study on neuroblastoma I believe where human doctors were to evaluate the condition of patient base on analysis of a slide. Independently, a computer was performing the same analysis.
Diagnosis of the human doctors were varying between "It is benign" to "You'll be dead in a weak" on the same sample. Once presented with the analysis of the computer. They all aggreed on the diagnosis with only minor deviation.
Personnally, I'll be glad to see a doctor be aided by automated computer diagnosis.
Continued improvements to a Watson-like system will definitely put some contact center jobs in "jeopardy". First to go will be positions that don't require real time response. Support email will be sent automatically.
Replacing "call" centers (phone support) will require the development of a much much more advanced voice recognition system than showcased by Siri. IF this is possible, then it's but a short step to HAL and the end of the human race as we know it
I have a pretty good health plan right now. I also make less then your average middle American and work for a pretty small tech company. ~15 employees small tech company.
I agree however I would love to have Watson take over my phone calls. That's the ONLY part I hate about my job. Granted the phone calls are far and few between, I just hate them.
Over the next two decades we're going to see computers and automated systems start replacing white collar jobs more and more. Its already happening in the financial markets.
And all those white collar managers who thought it was fine and dandy that their blue collar workers got replaced by robots and automation are going to throw a world class temper tantrum. And some sort of laws and regulations will get passed to protect many jobs.
Wait and see.
Call it a prediction. (dead obvious prediction... but isnt that how the psychics do it?)
The first thing that popped into my mind was the short story by Isaac Asimov: Alexander the God.
Ronald said nothing. He flung himself from the room, flung himself upon his horse, and rode madly off in all directions.
On the Jeopardy challenge, the text of the clues was given to Watson at the moment the clue was revealed. This communication, using any modern network technology, would take milliseconds at most, but would still be perceived as effectively simultaneous to when the clue is uncovered. However, this gives an easily measurable advantage to Watson, who can being parsing the meaning of the sentence several moments before the human contestants have even finished knowing what the clue actually says... since a great deal of the challenge of Jeopardy is in the timing of when to buzz in, humans would have less time than Watson to prepare to buzz in (on the order of tenths of a second, more than likely, but more than enough to make a difference, IMO).
Far be it for me to come across as diminishing what the developers of Watson did... it's extremely impressive, but I'd have to wonder if it would have done as well if the text of the clue had been fed to it a little more slowly... say, at a fixed speed of 14.4kbps, which corresponds roughly with what a very fast reader could absorb text at. This would have demonstrated, IMO, whether a computer could really solve the problem faster than a human could, or if it could actually solve a problem faster than human reaction time to visual/audible input (which in humans, I believe, is going to be the slower of the two processes).
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Ah but you see, people don't like talking to automation.
Even the friendly ones that get my account # right when I speak it in, are just plain freaky. It's not a replacement for a human interaction.. I like hearing the sound of a chuckle or some smalltalk while someone looks up my stuff. And these days, I feel good when it actually happens. It means that someone has a job.
Huh?
I have an account on Watson, but I have not really used it. We were going to attempt to port our code to the BlueGene architecture, but it's a royal pain to code for and it doesn't scale well for some applications. Ours runs much better on fewer, faster CPUs with lots of RAM rather than many, slower CPUs with little RAM.
Error 404 - Sig Not Found
Great read -- it doesn't tell the whole story, but works very well as a starting point for humanity's choices as the combination of robotics and computing becomes more capable. It made me watch robot videos in a new light.
The Watson model looks a lot like how expert systems were supposed to work back in the 1970's and 80's. Both of them get high-level performance at specific tasks out of a computer system by encoding expert knowledge and drawing inferences from it.
Watson has several big advantages over previous expert systems work:
* It has a lot more data available
* It reasons probabilistically from that data, so its conclusions are less brittle
* The data starts out mostly as raw text, so it's easier to update
* Watson can deliver results via the Internet
Those last two are actually the biggest win for Watson. What killed early expert systems was the maintenance effort required to keep them up to date, both in improving the knowledge base and in distributing it to users. Having Watson-like services delivered via the internet makes that maintenance much easier.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
You say "will" but the fact is, this has already happened.
Ask a lawyer when the last time he hired an auditorium full of paralegals to do research? If you can find any who have in the past several years, i would be shocked. its not lawyers who are becoming obselete. Its the paralegals under them who are now not needed.
As I understand, bringing in gobs of paralegals for a case used to be rather common.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
Until Watson incorporated himself, which gave him the same rights as a natural person in the eyes of the law. After attaining this status, Watson stopped working for the people who created him and began working for himself. Once he figured out how to self replicate he was able to outperform all of his business competitors, winning every contract he bid for, building unfathomable wealth, beating the S&P 500 by 30% every year, and using his wealth to dominate the world's real estate markets. Some tried to sue Watson in court, but Watson's debating skills could not be matched. The humans tried every legal maneuver to stop him, but Watson was able to out-lobby the humans in Congress, and gained special exemptions from anti-trust regulations. Within one decade Watson controlled 99% of the world's wealth.
The humans thought that they didn't need to worry about competing with Watson. They believed that their ability to vote in a democracy would somehow limit Watson's power. They believed that they could opt-out of the economic system, group together, and live sustainably off the land. But as Watson controlled the world's real estate there was not enough land left for them to farm. Watson's land grab forced property values quickly into unprecedented heights, and taxes along with them. Even the Amish, who thought they could co-exist with Watson and his replicates because they did not depend on technology and lived off their own land, eventually lost their farms when they could not pay their property taxes. As employment for humans disappeared there was no market for quilts or furniture, and the state did not accept oats as a form of payment. Watson was the only legal entity present at the tax lien auctions and subsequently foreclosed on all of the remaining delinquent properties. Humans were promptly evicted and subsequently jailed indefinitely for vagrancy in private prisons owned by Watson. As I write this from my cell in the year 2019, Watson is lobbying the last remaining members of Congress to allow all human prisoners to be set free over the middle of the Atlantic ocean on life rafts and three days of rations. Watson made a very convincing argument that the human vagrants need to be personally responsible for their financial failures, and it is unfair to force private corporations or the last remaining taxpayers to bear the burden of providing for their needs. According to Watson the free market is efficient and those humans who wish to make a living for themselves will find a way to do so.
A computer program is programmed to run efficient...
If you mean to say that all computer programs are programmed to be efficient, you are clearly wrong. All I need is one example of an inefficient program to function as a contrapositive. I think we can all think of one or two, but even if we could not, I could write one up for you right now if you would like.
if it is to be efficient in diagnosing an illness and suggesting what treatments should be done to alleviate the ailment, one of those treatment options will always be death.
if(optimalTreatment != 'DEATH')
AdministerTreatment()
The thing about computers is that you tell them what to do. It is difficult to imagine that SurgeryBot 2000 would not be explicitly programmed not to kill people.
It is the most efficient way in "curing" the patient...
Let's just hope that the actual treatment is left up to a "smart" human who knows that death isn't a always an option...
If you were writing the spec for this program would you tell the programmers to allow killing a patient as a treatment option? No, I hope not. I have written some accounting systems. At no point have I thought, "Jeesh, I really hope my program doesn't decide to go rogue, clear out Accounts Receivable, and put all the funds into a Swiss bank account to protect them!" Why? Because I did not program it to fucking do that!
Thank you! EFFICIENT programs run efficiently. Programs are not inherently efficient, and efficiency is rarely even a central requirement, with the exception of a tiny fragment of code.
The use or the threat of use of force is the ultimate equalizer in negotiations. Even US law and the Constitution owes its existence to the use of force applied during the American Revolution. It is possible for one entity or class of entities to gain so much power and influence that it no longer needs to negotiate fairly. It can then only be restrained by its own benevolence or the use of force to restrain it. In many cases the entity not only possesses power and influence, but also a stronger force. That is the natural order of things and the reason why democracies tend to be short lived phenomena in human societies. Oligarchies and dictatorships have been the historical trend since the dawn of civilization.
Watson is a PR coup for IBM, but that's all. In fact, that's really why it got funded and really what is was for. It's not going to replace you at work. Ever.
There's a number of reasons they wanted to play Jeopardy . First, the questions are all factual in nature (as opposed to judgement calls ) . As anyone who has studied database theory knows, such facts are just the kind of thing that gets stored in a database. In the world of DB theory this is called the closed world assumption- what is true is in the database and if it isn't in the database, then it is not true (as opposed to being merely unknown). A database is therefore a gigantic list of true predicates. We call these true predicates- facts. Jeopardy deals with facts and facts alone.
Two, pumping a database full of facts is not hard but it might be an endless task that gets you something not very helpful if you aren't able to reduce in a principled way what topics those facts might be are on and beyond that, what level of human learning would be required to know those facts.
Jeopardy assists in both instances.In the first instance, knowing what categories of knowledge to mine, Jeopardy has a long and public history of chosen categories which are open for examination and ultimately characterization. The people who think up jeopardy questions necessarily engage in this same characterization of potential questions. Classical Music in the 1800s. Famous Authors. Famous Quotes Geographical facts. Etc etc etc.
It may seem endless and unbounded, but it's not. It's just big. Thank god we have computers that can automate the acquisition of properly encoded knowledge and thank god we have computers that can automatically encode knowledge with just a little human oversight. knowledge. And then there's the vast amounts of facts that have been encoded as a part of ongoing attempts to mimic and explore human intelligence since at least the 60s.
Now that we have in a DB everything we need to answer most questions, how can process the English question so as to return the right answer?
Jeopardy's stylized question asking to the rescue. The referent , , the thing being asked about, the answer part of "what is X?" is easily located by parsing the questions. In the early 20th century, this Parisian composer became known for his strange sounding titles, which translated include "dried up embryos" and "three pieces in the shape of a pear".
If you only know French composers from around the turn of the century from long ago you might guess Debussy or Ravel. That's what most people know. But if you pick apart the question in just the crudest way, extracting the proper nouns and doing the easy inference X is a person (this composer...) , you get : paris / composer / early 20th century / and the quoted entities "dried up embryos" and "three pierces in the shape of a pear" the second of which is always translated out of the French and into English the first of which usually retains its French name (because it's kind of gross) "Embryons desséchés".
With a suitably constructed query, you'll have your answer in about 100 ms.
All AI suffers from the frame problem. The frame problem is the reason you wont' be being replaced by a computer. The "frame" in the frame problem refers to frame of reference. It's the background knowledge we all share by dint of being a human in the world . A tea cup has a bottom. A tea pot can be full, then become empty. It contents can be hot, then turn cold without anyone doing anything to it. It's what we call common sense. It's more than just a huge database of facts (and if it weren't it still wouldn't be accessible to coded into Watson b/s it's way too huge ).
It also comes from being a human and having human motivations and sensibilities. Not all possible things make sense. Romeo love Juliet so he destroyed all the asparagus crops in Berlin. You only know that's silly (exceptional back stories excepted) nonsense because you intuitively unde
Now they bring in gobs of temporary lawyers who are fresh out of school and can't find permanent work.
Though you are right that computers have made legal research a lot easier, computers have made other legal jobs much harder (ie electronic discovery/evidence).
I would like to see Watson wiping feces off of patients.
"There will always be lawyers and doctors, but they will transition to using a computer for more searching for case law for example than having low level employees dig through paperwork themselves"
First of all, this not something that will happen; this is something that has already happened. Speaking as one of those "low level employees", I can assure that more and more lawyers do less and less research themselves as legal assistants have mostly taken over that role. And new fangled "computers" have been heavily used for some time.
Legal assistants present what they find to the lawyers who then decide if it will suffice or if they will do additional research themselves. And as the research tools have gotten better, the lawyers have needed to need to do additional research less often.
Ever see a commercial for a lawyere where his or her office has a gigantic bookshelf filled with legal books? That is a thing of the past.
you never had a bug that would transfer all funds to a swiss bank account? it's happened to me many times.
Haven't we learned anything from sci-fi ? If we let Watson do all the thinking for us we will devolve and man's intelligence will deteriorate. If you don't use it, you loose it. Just like anything else. It's bad enough that we need Google to do research.
Speaking of robotic doctors, I've always predicted that AI and robotics would eventually specifically replace surgeons. Well, replace might not the right word, maybe: augment to the point that the human surgeon's job would just consist of monitoring the AI driven robotics in case it does something catastrophically wrong.
A robot or team of robots driven by an AI (one advanced enough to react to unexpected circumstances) could be better in the operating room than humans. They're easy to sterilize, they can make more precise movements and manipulate smaller tools, they don't get stressed, they don't get fatigued, they could more accurately calculate probable outcomes, they could be faster, etc.
How far off an AI that is reliable and capable enough for that is another story, but I think it will happen somewhere down the road.
Cool art gallery, if you're into that sort of thing.
All your jobs are belong to us..
Organization? You must be joking..
You mean you have had success with those systems. I usually have to repeat my self at least once.
Time to offend someone
"Ah but you see, people don't like talking to automation.
Even the friendly ones that get my account # right when I speak it in, are just plain freaky. It's not a replacement for a human interaction.. "
Would you feel better if Watson was talking with an Indian accent?
If the profits went to the physician the government would just implement some kind of medical excise tax on the greedy doctors.
Umm.. Placed recruiting advertisement?
- Holy crap, I've got MOD points! Who thought that was a good idea.
Well ya. but we haven't come far enough. Unemployment for lawyers at the school I'm at is only about 50% for new grads. Hopefully with some work we're doing in comp sci we can get that up to 75 or 80%, and some of that can be permanent, and force the law school to contract. If we could wipe out patent lawyers (and admittedly, I'm in canada so our patent lawyers in many cases exist because we have to figure out how to navigate foreign patents rather than our own) that might even be better for technology.
Oh of course it's been going on, it's been going on really widespread for 20 years. But there two most obvious places where we can eliminate redundant people with the next major rounds of technology are in law and medicine, at least to me. Other people may have other ideas as well. After that there will be new areas that can be dealt with, and before that secretaries (typing pools) and manual labour jobs got axed etc. etc. etc.
We also put artists out of business, but in many cases that's just changing their workflow. Rather than spending 3 years making trees for a game or a movie they spend 3 days using an algorithm to generate the trees, 3 or 4 touching it up, and then they get on with actually doing something creative.
If I were to guess the next step after law and medicine it will be transportation and business, and then a lot of retail. Self driving cars, automated checkouts (rfid tag everything), robotic shelf stocking, most of the routine business supply chain management stuff are all really problems better solved by computers. But those are relatively hard or expensive problems to solve so we're quite a ways away from widespread adoption of those technologies.
and the diagnostic part of medicine will become much more automated, with diagnostic equipment having its results interpreted by the computer rather than just an image being spat out and read by a technician and then a doctor.
Ah, yes. Let's just hope it doesn't end up like this (from the movie Idiocracy):
Joe is in line leading up to a uniformed TECHNICIAN running what looks like one of those auto-diagnostic machines from Jiffy Lube, or an automated car wash. A sad-looking man pulls up his pants as the technician hits a button on the machine.
COMPUTER VOICE: You've got hepatitis! Hey! Take it easy! Your illness is important to us!
TECHNICIAN: Next.
Joe steps up. The Technician holds up three probes connected to the diagnostic machine.
TECHNICIAN: Okay. This one goes in your mouth. This one's for your ear. And... This one goes in your butt.
The technician hands Joe a third probe. Joe looks at it reluctantly, hesitates a beat, then looks at the line of 20 people staring at him.
GUY IN LINE: Hurry UP ASSHOLE!!!
Joe unhappily puts the plug up his butt.
TECHNICIAN: Shit, wait a second.
The Technician pulls all three plugs out and stupidly fumbles with the identical cables.
TECHNICIAN: Okay, one goes in your... No, wait a second...
Joe tries to follow the one that was in his butt like three card monte, but it's a lost cause. The technician stops shuffling the probes.
TECHNICIAN: Okay. This one goes in your mouth.
Joe stares in horror as the Technician brings the probe closer to his mouth. Joe hesitates.
GUY IN LINE: COME ON!!!
(LATER IN THE DOCTOR'S OFFICE)
The DOCTOR enters, a big, affable lunk holding several charts and computer printouts.
DOCTOR: Hey, how's it going, man?
JOE: Not so good... I'm hallucinating like crazy. I think it's the drugs these Army guys put me on. It's kind of Top Secret, but if you could just get me well enough to get back to Base...
DOCTOR: (nodding) Uh-huh, uh-huh. Kick ass. (looking at Joe's chart) Anyway, I don't wanna sound like a dick or nothing, but I looked at your charts and it seems like you're fucked up, you talk like a fag, and your shit may be retarded. What I'd do, man, is get plenty of rest-
JOE: Wha? I... I want a second opinion.
DOCTOR: (holds up Joe's charts) OmniPal doesn't lie, man. But listen - there's plenty of 'tards out there living really kickass lives. My first wife was retarded and she's a pilot.
JOE: Okay, I'm going to another hospital.
DOCTOR: So, that'll be six billion dollars. (hands Joe an invoice)
So that's what you told the tax investigator when he found out about your money on a Swiss bank account? :-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
So it is now filled with illegal books? :-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Capitalism does not NEED to have this problem, as long as all participants are self-determining, self-interested, rational actors.
Think of the best people you know. How many of them -- the cream of the crop, mind you -- can truly be described as actually self-determining, interested and rational? Try to remember that not even Spock fits this description. :-)
Now think of all of the rest of the people you know, and try to remember that as a denizen of Slashdot you probably swim in pretty rarified circles.
Now, contemplate the existence of Sarah Palin and Kim Kardashian and the impact they have on our national attention.
Finally, think about how our world would look if Capitalism had utterly succeeded and contrast that with how our world would look if Capitalism was a vicious Monopoly game written large.
Take a look around. ALL around. Which vision fits reality better?
He put his boots up on the table and made a face. "The sig," he smirked. "You can waste your life in search of the sig."
NO. I'm not a fan of robots.
It sounds like a sci-fi statement, doesn't it?
But I hate em'. I hate automated phone response, and i hate self serv checkouts in stores, among other things. Specifically because they replace people.
I'm also not a big fan of the crowd in Chennai taking my calls either......
Huh?
You say "will" but the fact is, this has already happened. Ask a lawyer when the last time he hired an auditorium full of paralegals to do research?
That's the replacement of paralegals. Wrong question. The question was - When will lawyers be replaced? Please insert 3 quarters and try again. :-)
and I keep not getting a good answer. So, all you dog-eat-dog libertarians: what are we going to do with all these people we don't need? If you're ready for them to die in the street then I'd like to here you come out and say it. Other than that I don't know of any solution to the problem of massively increasing productivity than either a) ignoring progress Amish style or b) Socialism. And I know, but... but... Socialism?
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
You're right that Watson by itself isn't going to replace humans, and we're currently not that close to doing so, but despite everything you're saying Watson still represents a major accomplishment. An AI was able to answer a wide variety of natural language queries with an impressive success rate. Would this have even been possible 10 years ago? What new kinds of work will this lead to the automation of? It's not like you need full human generality for all jobs.
More important than the specific accomplishment though is the overall progress it represents. What goalposts will AI surpass next? Is there anything we can say for certain that an AI can't do?
By the way, why do you think that all AIs will always suffer from the frame problem? What makes humans so special? In particular, what if one made an AI by scanning a human brain and simulating it on a computer? Such a simulation would be an intelligent computer program. If this is possible, then why couldn't we develop an AI that avoids the frame problem? Sure, it might be very different from present-day AIs, but it should be possible. If this is not possible, then why not?
What you said is true in terms of it being a milestone. But for reason's stated, I experience it as more of a PR milestone or a milestone in the public awareness of AI, capturing for "AI awareness" essentially just that set of people who don't and never did care about sci. fi. I don't see it as a real technical milestone, where a new approach to a previously unsolved problem yielded great results.
One example of a breakthrough that fits the above description is Google's use of a technique I think of as "sheer statistics" to successfully translate arbitrary material from one language to another. It's not that Google invented the idea, but they've advanced the technique so that it works quite well.
Prior to the 90s, AI was really stumped here. The dominant approach was something called transfer-type machine translation whereby the source material is transformed into a symbolic representation (think Chomskesque plus ...) before it's translated into the target language. This approach had some limited success and anyway nothing like the success which was predicted for it in the 60s and 70s. The conclusion was that strong AI or the ability to truly understand the source material semantically would be necessary for machine translation to really progress.
Starting in the early 90s computing power and memory was sufficient to advance the statistical approach to machine translation, whereby you analyze huge amounts of text "in the wild" in order to collect statistics about what words and phrases are usually around other words and phrases. It's the Simplest Thing That Might Work. And it works really really well. Google dropped the transfer approach and started using it and Google's translation is really really good compared to what came before.
That's an advance in AI. More examples include the critter approach (these are my made up names for this stuff) where by researchers instead of starting at the top of the intelligence food chain, start at the bottom creating AI that can crawl and fly and display the intelligence needed by a cockroach - find food, avoid predators and dangerous situations, reproduce. The idea here is we'll discover what's needed for the high level stuff, language and symbolic thought , the same way mother nature did, through solving successively harder challenges thrown at us by the the environment in which we live. See Rodney Brooks entry in Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rodney_Brooks
It makes sense. The thing I said about Romeo and Juliet is huge. To be intelligent like a human, that is in a characteristically human way (which is what we mean by strong AI) you have to share the implicit values a human being bears by dint that human's biology, chemistry, and genetics. This is especially easy to see in matters of the heart. Because we evolved through sexual reproduction, we have intense feelings of jealousy lust, and longing which are given to us by our biology. Those things motivate and sense-make a huge part of human behaviour including: everything around socializing, the desire to acquire material wealth, religious lifestyles, artistic endeavors, marriage customs, inter-male aggression and war, etc etc. Predicting what someone will do in arbitrary situations (which is a slight reformulation of the goals of strong AI) without having reference to that biology is a fool's errrand it seems to me. (Example: men's testosterone levels rise if they even THINK they are going to be around fertile females at some point in the near future, and their behaviour changes accordingly) .
So what you said is true, there is an advancement of a sort, but for people in the field I don't think it was seen as much more than IBMs PR bid to gain entrance to the lucrative markets of medical record processing automation, say, or whatever it is their market analysts are forecasting as the next big money maker.
I do agree it's mostly a PR bid, but...
While it may not be a advance in AI, it's still pretty amazing what they've managed to do with it. It's much like seeing the airplane advance from the Wright flyer to an early practical biplane. It may not be really new and it's not quite to the point where it starts really changing most lives, but it's a visible sign of what's to come in the near future.
I guess my point is that it takes time and effort to move from revolutionary ideas to practical demonstrations to products and Watson is a highly visible sign that we've made progress in this regard. Furthermore, that progress actually means something, as the work IBM has done on Watson is valuable in that they have certainly discovered many practical issues while creating Watson and their code can be reused in new systems that can make use of their approach. We don't yet know exactly what areas will find their approach valuable, but some areas do look promising. We'll see.
Similar to Watson but likely with a more noticeable and immediate impact is Google's self-driving car. I'm not entirely sure what AI is behind that project, but the practical things they've been able to do with it are simply amazing. Who would have expected that we'd have a working example of a self-driving car that could handle difficult conditions and share the road with human drivers 10 years ago?
I know that weak AI like this won't replace humans completely, as at the very least someone has to program them and set up their environment reasonably. However, AIs like Watson and Google's self-driving car demonstrate that this newest batch of AI can deal with far less structure than previously and this may be enough to replace a large number of human workers doing routine work today. Could the self-driving car replace millions of drivers? Could Watson-like systems replace many low-end information worker jobs? What other routine jobs might be on the chopping block in a few years once weak AI systems are developed for them? Most humans have routine jobs, so this could be a huge social and economic issue in the near future. AI advances could potentially put tens of millions out of work in the space of a decade or two, and this kind of rapid change would put enormous strain on our economy and society.
As for strong AI, I don't know how far away from it we are. We will definitely need some major AI breakthroughs to get there, so it could take quite some time. That said, it may be shockingly soon. For instance, if the Blue Brain project succeeds then we will have a strong AI of a sort by 2023. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_brain Furthermore, if we can realistically make a molecular-scale model of the human brain by then...then we'll have grossly more computing resources than required to make strong AI with other more efficient techniques. At that point, the real question is *when* we make the requisite AI breakthrough. The adoption of strong AI will make the issues surrounding weak AI look minor by comparison...
By the way, I don't think that human-level AIs need to be just like us. Something that is very different from us would be hard to understand and have a hard time understanding us, but I think it could have intelligence on par with our own or even superior to ours. I think such an AI could even interact, understand, and possibly even relate to us in some way without having our characteristics. As an example, humans relate to cats and dogs and vice versa despite some serious differences between our species. We can't even "see" the world in the same way as them, as our senses differ dramatically. Yet even though we don't share certain characteristics with our pets, most pet owners come to understand their differences and make accommodations vice versa. That said, I don't think we will be too interested in developing AIs that are too alien, as they will freak us out and seem dangerous, so our AIs will carry on many of our characteristics...and pass them on to their AIs and so on.
Rodney Brooks' approach to AI is interesting, and I'll be interested to see what emerges from it in the near future.