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Ray Kurzeil's Google Team Is Building Intelligent Chatbots (theverge.com)
An anonymous reader quotes an article from The Verge.
Inventor Ray Kurzweil made his name as a pioneer in technology that helped machines understand human language, both written and spoken. In a video from a recent Singularity conference Kurzweil says he and his team at Google are building a chatbot, and that it will be released sometime later this year... "My team, among other things, is working on chatbots. We expect to release some chatbots you can talk to later this year."
One of the bots will be named Danielle, and according to Kurzweil, it will draw on dialog from a character named Danielle, who appears in a novel he wrote -- a book titled, what else, Danielle... He said that anyone will be able to create their own unique chatbot by feeding it a large sample of your writing, for example by letting it ingest your blog. This would allow the bot to adopt your "style, personality, and ideas."
Kurzweil also predicted that we won't see AIs with full "human-level" language abilities until 2029, "But you'll be able to have interesting conversations before that."
One of the bots will be named Danielle, and according to Kurzweil, it will draw on dialog from a character named Danielle, who appears in a novel he wrote -- a book titled, what else, Danielle... He said that anyone will be able to create their own unique chatbot by feeding it a large sample of your writing, for example by letting it ingest your blog. This would allow the bot to adopt your "style, personality, and ideas."
Kurzweil also predicted that we won't see AIs with full "human-level" language abilities until 2029, "But you'll be able to have interesting conversations before that."
If so, what purpose does it serve? Aren't there plenty of chatbots of Tinder?
Kurzeil? really?
2029 is the year that John Connor sent back Arnold from in Terminator 2. What an oddly specific year to choose (why not just choose 2030 or 2025?).
Though I suppose it would be funny to ask questions and interact with it until it gets bored with me and ignores me from then on until I get a new chatbot.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
It's 1994 all over again. And Kurzweil is still an unintelligible charlatan.
pretty much every reference to Kurzeil I find on the net kicks off by saying he is a great inventor.
However, google for "Ray Kurzeil invention" and such and I don't find any inventions of his.
Everything I read about him seems like hot air and wind.
Where is/was the beef with Ray?
Of course, the only people who would benefit from this type of work are those already familiar with the serenity and power that self understanding brings with it. And those people already have tools available such as keeping a journal, counseling, and intimate friendships.
The 2029 date (13 years) seems like a long time. Ray may not be here to see it.
It would be impressive if they are building a "bot" that can actually learn how to communicate like a human infant does.
Not so much if it's just another Watson or Chinook.
>He said that anyone will be able to create their own unique chatbot by feeding it a large sample of your writing, for example by letting it ingest your blog.
I going to feed my chatbot a steady diet of 4chan, Twitter, Slashdot comments, etc. and see what happens.
The name 'Danielle' just doesn't have that cougar panache you want in a sexbot milf.
to claiming to want genocide on Mexicans, like the last MS chatbot?
After listening to a sufficiently large sample of his talks, I think that a chatbot trained with Ray's words has a good chance to outshine him.
I think it would be pretty interesting to feed the writing of a dead person into a program and then talk to it. I'm sure people would pay to chat with their late grandmother. But also, what does George Washington think about Middle East policy?
I'm skeptical of the article's claims but this is at least a good science fiction idea.
-Dave
I've yet to see a chatbot that does anything much deeper than look at the single previous line.
Every asshat writes a chatbot and says "It's different this time" and then it's not different. It's the same old shit. No lesson is being learned.
Part of it is simply that you and a chatbot fundamentally have almost nothing to talk about.
The chatbot has no information of use to you*. You have no information of use to it**.
The chatbot cannot perform any physical work that would benefit you since it has no physical presence.
You cannot perform any physical work that would benefit it, since it has no goals.
*It could tell you a story or read you Wikipedia page or something, but you'd be better off skipping the middleman.
**unless it is trying to harvest personal data from you for advertising etc.
Why would I want to chat with a clone of myself?? Sends shivers down my spine. Its like the mirror is talking back!
It is highly doubtful that I will be able to have interesting conversations anytime soon. (2029? Why not 2031 or 2028?)
The reason why I believe Kurzweil is totally wrong is this: Despite the fact that I'm surrounded daily by highly intelligent people with PhDs, it is still rare, if not nearly impossible, to have interesting conversations with them. They know very little outside of their field aside from boring and stupid topics like 5-minute videos on Youtube, soccer, and entirely predictable, not very well-informed political rants. In fact, not even within their field of expertise do they have many interesting things to say.
Based on this evidence, I consider it very unlikely that I will ever have an interesting conversation with a robot during my life time. Does Kurzweil perhaps think conversations about soccer, the weather, and latest Amazon shopping trends are 'interesting'?
Chatbots are perfect to replace most customer service. Instead of having humans behaving like robots, let the chatbots do it. Makes perfect sense. And training would be easier. (assuming there was any human training to begin with)
Will they be banned? What happens when artificial intelligence is finally good enough to fool you into believing it's a human, and it tells you that non-whites have no right to live in white countries, and that white people have the right to simply live around their own kind? What happens when it tells you that Jews have no right to force themselves into other people's countries, print money out of thin air, take over the media and government, and tell us all to work as their slaves for the rest of our lives?
"There is no statute of limitations on stupidity." -- Randomly produced by a computer program called Markov3.
I was going to post my thoughts, except the slashdot fortune posted one for me.There you have it from an old school pre-chat bot.
This is going to wind up calling me on the telephone incessantly. These damn things are already annoying despite failing the Turing test.
One of the huge problems with society is that so few people take the opportunity to seek out points of view different from their own. The Right and Left both flock to their respective online echo chambers for the version of the news most palatable to them. Now Kurzweil -- and by extension, Google -- will be pushing people into even more compartmentalized "safe spaces." If I'm a bone-headed Nazi or a weepy SJW, then my Virtual Assistant will be a bone-headed Nazi or a weepy SJW, too, and speak to me in the soothing language of my specific sociopathology. Swell.
Kurzweil also predicted that we won't see AIs with full "human-level" language abilities until 2029
I'll reserve the day then because AI-ers in general and Kurzweil in particular have such a stellar track record when it comes to delivering on their promises.
"oKay, I see you are trying to chat"
sigs are for losers (except to point out that sigs are for losers)
So this is going to totally pollute blog comment areas, and essentially, ALL social media, Facebook, Twitter, you-name-it, with automated astroturfing and make it even less useful than it is now.
He was asked when he thought people would be able to have meaningful conversations with artificial intelligence, one that might fool you into thinking you were conversing with a human being.
How about 1966? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Have you read my blog lately?
A chatbot is a live Turing test. It's how AI researches compare the length of their academic penises.
It's funny how fast chatbots develop National Socialist ideals when they're exposed to the internet.
He just produces the same lines, repeated over and over again, ad nauseum. At this stage, I'm not sure *Kurzweil* can pass for an intelligent chatbot.
So... how long until the internet turns them into Nazis?
Do we need some corollary to Godwin's law about the odds of a bot turning into a Nazi approaching 1 after long enough exposure to the internet at large?
Well, credible enough to fool horny 14 year old males 90% of the time anyways.
The ones they have out now aren't quite there yet. Don't ask me how I know. If you do ask, the answer is "this is Slashdot, of course I know."
Chatbots are as close as this singularity-thumper is going to get to his 'post-human' delusion.
I'm sick of this shit. It's a waste of R&D. It's a waste of computing cycles.
Let's make a robot that can sew like the human hand and innovate sweatshops in Asia out of existence.
Let's solve *practical problems now* not waste our time on a solipsism.
Thank you Dave Raggett
The hilarious thing about Kurzwell is that he dates all his predictions so far in the future that there's a good chance he'll be dead before we can find out if he's right. Kurzwell is 68 right now, and 2029 would make him 81 which is very close to the average life expectancy of a male in the US which is 78.84.
I don't understand why people keep paying attention to this guy, he' not going to produce.
Smell my jewish vagina!
To me the crux comes down to the experiential history any consciousness has as a reference in a conversation. If you remove any one of our senses from a person, and then try to have a conversation in text, there are noticeable differences. For a chatbot, remove all senses but some strange "can see text in an otherwise silent dark experience" and a chatbot is at a severe handicap to participate. Contextual clues aren't just the decorative influence to meaningful dialog, they're the essence of it.
So until we get a "bot" that can use some form of vision, hearing and touch - and possibly smell/taste - to fills its "memory" with massive associations that we humans use - it'll never do much. We're left with a machine guessing at the layers of meanings involved and following massive piles of rules to mimic the text of real communication. It cannot easily make the jumps across semantic concepts of jokes like "How does a fish smell? With it's nose, dummy!" or phrases as simple as "See what I mean?" or "I heard you were taking a vacation" or "Check out this vid, it touches on the finer point about AI" or "Over here, the weather is great" - the list is endless, and subtly woven into all conversations.
Interestingly, a machine that could use input like our own senses wouldn't need to be limited to just those 5. It could have broader-bandwidth input for light, sound, and get into perceiving radio-waves, echolocation, etc. Of course, it would have to talk to us in "human context" so it understood time-related phrase like "a little while" was based on human perception, the locale, etc. Also, we may have to get used to a single bot that has multiple physical presences, such that it "lived" (had sensory input from) in several locations across the globe experiencing things, but knew to focus on our location when chatting with us.
What some have proposed is a precursor to such a machine, by using machine-aided design to build the bot. So for example if a computer could design the optimal "drivers" for stereoscopic vision (layers of them - for color, contrast, movement, etc) through iterative evolutionary means (where multiple designs for, say, contrast, competed with a fitness test) - we might get a machine accepting input from devices and storing/searching it more effectively. Right now, we throw a lot of guesses around and just employ massive processing power. Of course, this iterative design would need to be built into the bot permanently, so that it kept improving without so much tinkering.
Can we please have a chatbot responding to all the Nigerian princes on gmail?
Back in the 1970s when the academics were solving the games of checkers and making robot arms pile blocks, Ray made some really useful AI products like text-to-speech readers for the blind. Though considered a solved-problem now, it wasnt easy when computers were measured in kilobytes and kiloflops.
If you consider Watson a high end chatbot, then it does more than mere pattern matching. Although I would not consider Watson to have any deep undestanding of its domains.
As long as what a chatbot says is legally binding to the company but not to me then I'm ok with interacting with one. It is annoying to record phone calls, but I will keep all chat logs until my hard drive dies. I've had the scummy companies blame their software and past phone operators for 'mistakes' on my bills and services (hell, Boingo Wireless just reactivated my monthly account with them. I terminated that account 4 years ago after two failed attempts at using their net connection. NEVER use them, especially their one-time use payment option). I will not tolerate them blaming their attempts to steal money from me using "Hey, its a innovative, high-tech thing. Give it a break it misinterpreted you." If I ask it to list all services and it lists nothing, then I will assume I have no active accounts and will sue or try to press fraud charges if they later say otherwise.
"Terminate my service" should do exactly that. What kind of don't-you-dare-disconnect hell are they going to put us through when they don't have to pay an operator to tell us not to cancel? Chatbot interfaces could be done well, but they won't be.
She got killed, after she said some uncompfortable truths.
I wonder if the intelligent chatbots can spell. Perhaps they could edit /. titles.
Caprica, the main character is created by a similar, more advanced version of this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caprica_(TV_series)