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New Watson-Style AI Called Viv Seeks To Be the First 'Global Brain'
paysonwelch sends this report from Wired on the next generation of consumer AI:
Google Now has a huge knowledge graph—you can ask questions like "Where was Abraham Lincoln born?" And it can name the city. You can also say, "What is the population?" of a city and it’ll bring up a chart and answer. But you cannot say, "What is the population of the city where Abraham Lincoln was born?" The system may have the data for both these components, but it has no ability to put them together, either to answer a query or to make a smart suggestion. Like Siri, it can’t do anything that coders haven’t explicitly programmed it to do. Viv breaks through those constraints by generating its own code on the fly, no programmers required. Take a complicated command like "Give me a flight to Dallas with a seat that Shaq could fit in." Viv will parse the sentence and then it will perform its best trick: automatically generating a quick, efficient program to link third-party sources of information together—say, Kayak, SeatGuru, and the NBA media guide—so it can identify available flights with lots of legroom.
Ask it "In the case where a woodchuck possessed the ability to throw wood, how much wood, hypothetically, could be thrown?"
I've always felt that our meatbrains have a pretty incredible capacity for taking WAGs at NP problems (i.e. traveling salesman). And I feel like an AI would just bring itself to its knees trying to find the 100% best solution to NP questions asked of it, so I wonder if there's some need for a bit of cognitive code that says "is this an NP question? IF yes, go to the WAG process"... Just a thought I had... someone probably already did that.
I do not respond to cowards. Especially anonymous ones.
This is an important new thing. We've had question-answering programs working against specific data sets since Bobrow's "Baseball" program of the 1960s. We've had a whole range of question-answering specialist systems running in tandem since Yahoo introduced vertical search around 2005. But cross-topic generality has been elusive.
If this is real, it's a major development. Is there anything better than the Tired article available?
Google has some catching up to do.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Like Siri, it can’t do anything that coders haven’t explicitly programmed it to do. Viv breaks through those constraints by generating its own code on the fly, no programmers required.
This is so misleading. No program can do anything outside what it is explicitly programmed to do. Viv is programmed to generate code only because it has been explicitly programmed to do so, and can only do so as explicitly laid out in its code. Sure, the code may go an abstraction layer higher, but the constraints these programs can't break through is the same. No one knows how to program general intelligence.
The article says: "Viv could provide all those services -- in exchange for a cut of the transactions that resulted."
We seriously need to rethink our economics for a world of abundance and AI and robotics before we get crazier and crazier AIs driven by the profit motive than the out-of-control corporate "AIs" already stomping all over the planet and the people who live there. See also my comment here in 2000:
http://www.dougengelbart.org/c...
"And, as the story "Colossus: The Forbin Project" shows, all it takes for a smart computer to run the world is control of a (nuclear) arsenal. And, as the novel "The Great Time Machine Hoax" shows, all it takes for a computer to run an industrial empire and do its own research and development is a checking account and the ability to send letters, such as: "I am prepared to transfer $200,000 dollars to your bank account if you make the following modifications to a computer at this location...". So robot manipulators are not needed for an AI to run the world to its satisfaction -- just a bank account and email. "
See also the 1950s sci-fi movie "The Invisible Boy" for a malevolent AI that provides just a few key pieces of biased advise that let it almost take over the world. Of course, we already have Fox News... Thank goodness Robby the Robot's emotions save the day in at least the movie...
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
... to a limited degree. While you can't ask the Lincoln question in a single statement, you can ask, "Where was Lincoln born?" then when it replies "Hodgenville, KY", you can then say "What is its population?", or "Show it on a map" and it will know from context that the "its" you're referring to, is Lincoln's birthplace.
So they want to make a database of all your preferences and stuff, and use it to make money. Sounds convenient!
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
In Digital, everything either is a "0" (zero) or a "1" (one), which means, everything is either true, or false
Take 32 of those bits and put them together, now you've got a floating point value that can represent "true" as 1.0, "false" as 0.0, and a few million shades of "maybe" in between those two extremes.
If that's not analog-y enough for you, make it 64 bits and now you can have trillions of shades. And if that's still not enough, add more bits until you've got the resolution you're looking for.
I don't see any significant distinction between analog and digital, since digital logic asymptotically approaches analog as you add bits, and with today's memory sizes there are plenty of bits to go around.
Our meatbrain can cope with a lot of stuffs that the digital computer can't precisely because our brain makes its decision based on imprecise feedback
Or perhaps because it's running a radically different kind of algorithm that no human has ever understood or implemented on a digital computer.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Wow! So...it's like Google?
Is it like Wolfram Alpha?
http://www.wolframalpha.com/