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Why Google Hired Ray Kurzweil
An anonymous reader writes "Nataly Kelly writes in the Huffington Post about Google's strategy of hiring Ray Kurzweil and how the company likely intends to use language translation to revolutionize the way we share information. From the article: 'Google Translate is not just a tool that enables people on the web to translate information. It's a strategic tool for Google itself. The implications of this are vast and go beyond mere language translation. One implication might be a technology that can translate from one generation to another. Or how about one that slows down your speech or turns up the volume for an elderly person with hearing loss? That enables a stroke victim to use the clarity of speech he had previously? That can pronounce using your favorite accent? That can convert academic jargon to local slang? It's transformative. In this system, information can walk into one checkpoint as the raucous chant of a 22-year-old American football player and walk out as the quiet whisper of a 78-year-old Albanian grandmother.'"
OK--this is probably the stupidest and worst-informed /. post I have ever seen.
The main thing he says he will be working on is artificial intelligence that can understand "context". The goal is for Google search to be able to find pages etc based on what you mean rather then on word counts of what you type.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
That can convert academic jargon to local slang? It's transformative.
That right there is going to be one hell of a translation. Presuming all statements from one language can be translated into statements in a different language assumes (or seems to assume) that languages are isomorphic.
However, there are things that cannot be communicated in the limited vocabulary available to, say, a young adult compared to the expansive vocabulary of, say, a scholar of comparative literature. The same applies for concepts that can only be delivered in medical specialized terminology (disparagingly referred to as "jargon") an that cannot be communicated in layperson language.
None of which is to say that some ideas (even very important ideas) cannot be translated across linguistic groups, but the idea that Google and Kurzweil are somehow going to produce the Internet equivalent of a Babel Fish is nothing more than a wish.
blog
Ridiculous visions and promises that are certain not to see the light of day. :-)
Google translation: Amazing insight; I would like to subscribe to your newsletter!
Did Kurzweil become some kind of expert in machine translation when I wasn't looking?
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
This is a great move for Google's AI research, since their current Director of Research,Peter Norvig, comes from a mathematical background and is a strong defender the use of statistical models that have no biological basis.[1] While these techniques have their use in specific areas, they will never lead us to a general purpose strong AI.
Lately Kurzweil has come around to see that symbolic and bayesian networks have been holding AI back for the past 50 years. He is now a proponent of using biologically inspired methods similar to Jeff Hawkins' approach of Hierarchical Temporal Memory.
Hopefully, he'll bring some fresh ideas to Google. This will be especially useful in areas like voice recognition and translation. For example, just last week, I needed to translate. "We need to meet up" to Chinese. Google translates it to (can't type Chinese in Slashdot?)
, meaning "We need to satisfy". This is where statistical translations fail, because statistics and probabilities will never teach machines to "understand" language.
Leaders in AI like Kurzweil and Hawkins are going to finally crack the AI problem. With Kurzweil's experience and Google's resources, it might happen a lot sooner than you all expect.
[1] http://www.tor.com/blogs/2011/06/norvig-vs-chomsky-and-the-fight-for-the-future-of-ai
You ever wanted to know why Google wanted to look at your email, your instant messages, transcribe your phone calls, and all for free? This is why
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
The problem with people like Kurzweil, Jeff Hawkins, the folks at the Singularity Institute and the rest of the AI community is that they have all jumped on the Bayesian bandwagon. This is not unlike the way they all jumped on the symbolic bandwagon in the last century only to be proven wrong forty years later. Do we have another half a century to waste, waiting for these guys to realize the error of their ways? Essentially there are two approaches to machine learning.
1) The Bayesian model assumes that events in the world are inherently uncertain and that the job of an intelligent system is to discover the probabilities.
2) The competing model, by contrast, assumes that events in the world are perfectly consistent and that the job of an intelligent system is to discover this perfection.
Luckily for the rest of humanity, a few people are beginning to realize the folly of the Bayesian mindset. When asked in a recent Cambridge Press interview, "What was the greatest challenge you have encountered in your research?", Judea Pearl, an Israeli computer scientist and an early champion of the Bayesian approach to AI, replied: "In retrospect, my greatest challenge was to break away from probabilistic thinking and accept, first, that people are not probability thinkers but cause-effect thinkers and, second, that causal thinking cannot be captured in the language of probability; it requires a formal language of its own."
Read The Myth of the Bayesian Brain for more, if you're interested.
The "Dialectizer".
Here's an example.
I'm sure that he'll be very happy, there. Smart, eloquent guy, but not one I especially follow. There's a number of folks like that at Google. I doubt he's someone who would cause much damage, and he does bring a lot of funky intellectual PR to the joint.
"For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong."
-H. L. Mencken
How would google translate speak with an accent? As far as I'm aware the accent is unique from the actual language, it would need to learn by listening to phrases that have define accents/dialects. Otherwise it wouldn't have that information using translation algorithms alone. If this is incorrect, please explain.
Probably the same way that speech recognition can deal with accents. Words are made up of phonemes which are much more limited than the actual number of words. I imagine that most dialects have slightly different phonemes or words that traditionally use different phonemes from other dialects. Once a known piece of speech is matches with the spoken phonemes, then it can be compared to a list of dialects and accents and the correct one chosen for translation whether converting to text or speech.
This is a late post and nobody will read it, but I will say it here anyway.
Free translation between all languages is just a nice to have compared to the real thrust and purpose of their effort: Human Intermediate Language, and the compilers / reflectors that go with it. It's a hard nut to crack, but this is a natural progression for Google. And applied at Google scale with Google resources... well that could be scary powerful.
I would guess they already have a proof of concept and some execs are shitting themselves over the possibilities. Strong A.I. or something that looks like it is not too far behind. Ask the whole goddamn internet what all of human civilization thinks the meaning of life is, and actually get brilliant results back, with citations, in the language of your choice. This is why they brought Ray on.