Slashdot Mirror
'This Isn't AI' (shkspr.mobi)
The Amazon Echo, a 'smart' speaker developed by Amazon.com, gets many things right. You can ask it to for weather updates, check news, and to play music, and Alexa, the AI powering the device, won't disappoint. But how smart is Alexa? Programmer Terence Eden put it to a simple test to find out. From a blog post: I can now query my solar panels via my Alexa Amazon Dot Echo. I flatter myself as a reasonably competent techie and programmer, but fuck me AWS Lambdas and Alexa skills are a right pile of shite! I wanted something simple. When I say "Solar Panels", call this API, then say this phrase. That's the kind of thing which should take 5 minutes in something like IFTTT . Instead, it took around two hours of following out-of-date official tutorials, and whinging on Twitter, before I got my basic service up and running. [...] It's not so bad, but it does reveal Amazon's contempt for developers. Several of the steps contained errors, it involves multiple logins, random clicks, and a bunch of copy & pasting. Dull and complex. A frustrating and ultimately unsatisfying experience. I ended up using StackOverflow to correct errors in my code because the documentation was so woefully lacking. I kinda thought that Amazon would hear "solar panels" and work out the rest of the query using fancy neural network magic. Nothing could be further from the truth. The developer has to manually code every single possible permutation of the phrase that they expect to hear. This isn't AI. Voice interfaces are the command line. But you don't get tab-to-complete. Amazon allows you to test your code by typing rather than speaking. I spent a frustrating 10 minutes trying to work out why my example code didn't work. Want to know why? I was typing "favourite" rather than the American spelling. Big Data my shiny metal arse.
It is not a revolutionary neural simulation. Its basically just a 80's-era chess machine.
I built and submitted an app. It met all available guidelines. It was a few weeks after the dev program hit general.
>Your skill does not meet our authentication standards.
This of course was 3 weeks after I submitted, and 1 day after they'd published an update. Submitted again.
>Your skill violates our content policy
Finding fuck all on even their own dev forums for what that meant, I submitted again with 0 changes
>Your skill does not have enough utterances to support....
This went on for months (literally). Why I kept going I have no idea. Finally, after I assume I had exhausted every excuse in their playbook
>This skill has been denied. Some skills may never be approved, blah de blah blah blah
A few weeks later what my skill did became part of core functionality. Taking to those dev forums again, a handful of others were all in the same boat.
Seriously, fuck those guys and fuck the process. Don't string developers along like that when you never have any intention of approving. All they did was make me vow to never develop anything for an amazon platform ever again. Which kinda sucks since we use aws for a lot at work...
No, he didn't miss AlphGo. He has been on that "there is no AI" crusade since he joined slashdot.
It's just a matter of semantics. He thinks AI means "indistinguishable from human intelligence" when it clearly does not (dictionary definition says "mimics human intelligence", which is much more vague).
This is one you can add to the old slashdot comment predictor. Every article about AI will include a bunch of deniers and a bunch of apologists. It's pretty much a given, at this point.