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'I've Seen the Future of Consumer AI, and it Doesn't Have One' (theregister.co.uk)
Andrew Orlowski of The Register recounts all the gadgets supercharged with AI that he came across at IFA tradeshow last week -- and wonders what value AI brought to the table. He writes: I didn't see a blockchain toothbrush at IFA in Berlin last week, but I'm sure there was one lurking about somewhere. With 30 vast halls to cover, I didn't look too hard for it. But I did see many things almost as tragic that no one could miss -- AI being squeezed into almost every conceivable bit of consumer electronics. But none were convincing. If ever there was a solution looking for a problem, it's ramming AI into gadgets to show of a company's machine learning prowess. For the consumer it adds unreliability, cost and complexity, and the annoyance of being prompted.
[...] Back to LG, which takes 2018's prize for sticking AI into a superfluous gadget. The centrepiece of its AI efforts this year is a robot, ClOi. Put Google Assistant or Alexa on wheels, and you have ClOi. I asked the booth person what exactly ClOi could do to be told "it can take notes for your shopping list." Why wasn't this miracle of the Fourth Industrial Revolution let loose on the LG floor? I wondered -- a question answered by this account of ClOi's debut at CES in January. Clearly things haven't improved much -- this robot buddy was kept indoors.
[...] Back to LG, which takes 2018's prize for sticking AI into a superfluous gadget. The centrepiece of its AI efforts this year is a robot, ClOi. Put Google Assistant or Alexa on wheels, and you have ClOi. I asked the booth person what exactly ClOi could do to be told "it can take notes for your shopping list." Why wasn't this miracle of the Fourth Industrial Revolution let loose on the LG floor? I wondered -- a question answered by this account of ClOi's debut at CES in January. Clearly things haven't improved much -- this robot buddy was kept indoors.
3D printer in every home will fundamentally change human society
IoT internet connected belt buckles and toothbrushes will take over the world
AI will revolutionize consumer electronics
Net PC from Sun will dominate the computer industry (this one is really old)
Example: Apple will go under...any day now....since 1984
Gee, I could have sworn we already HAD the AI craze back in the late 80s. Or was it early 90s? It was the Next Big Thing, anyway.
Well, it was supposed to be. Then the web came along instead.
Cats on the blockchain, anyone?
Andrew Orlowski of The Register is basically a professional dickhead. His main goal seems to be to be as obnoxious and ignorant as possible presumably with the goal of trolling the readership. He's pretty much the reason I stopped reading the Register because of the constant streem of utter bullshit from that guy.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Red Dwarf has already shown why this is a BAD Idea.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhnN4eUiei4
Just you wait until you get a 3d tv with smellovision and ai.
The future is now!
I have no interest in pretty much any product which has so-called 'AI' in it.
It's utterly pointless tech, which is very gimmicky but serves no actual purpose.
I don't want to have my fridge ordering milk, or my oven deciding that now is the time to turn on, or my thermostat to greet me as I come in the door. I don't want to access it from my phone, or have it run in the cloud
I don't want any of this connected crap, because it's just annoying technology for the sake of being technology.
This shit is all just marketing lunacy so people can tell their friends about how they surfed the web on their fridge, and I want no part of it.
It's just useless garbage, creates another failure point in the product, introduces security holes to your network, and at the end of the day probably does very little of what they promise it does.
No thanks, not interested.
As much as I do talk to my Roomba, I'm under no illusion it's listening to me, or that it is in any way intelligent. Sure, it can clean the floors, but at the end of the day, it's just a vacuum cleaner.
If Sony's Aibo lives up to the demos I have seen - that would be one big application. AI as a pet.
I also use AI (maybe more ML) all the time with photo sorting, image recognition, etc. It is already in the home.
... because consumer AI is *ALREADY* ubiquitous and all around us.
From the face detection in your phone, to the fuzzy logic controllers in washing machines, to the ant colony algorithms being used to route network traffic, to finding directions with google maps, to Netflix and Amazon's recommendation algorithms, to OCR for cheques and mail, to NEST thermostats, to robot vacuum cleaners and lawn mowers, to expert systems in medical diagnosis... (I could keep going)
AI in consumer products is literally *already* ALL around us.
Saying that consumer AI "has no future" is like looking around at the world today and saying "personal cars have no future" - it's completely idiotic because to anyone with half an ounce of perception that future is ALREADY here.
It's like looking at a forest and claiming there are no trees
"Your jacket is now dry!"
AI (i.e. machine learning/neural networks) is really good at optimizing stuff, so its natural strength shows when you have hundreds of thousands of entities in a system. Examples are the electricity grid, playing Go, and a department store's inventory.
In our individual lives, AI seems more like another drop in the bucket of too much technology, and I think one day we'll realize that less is more when it comes to the stuff in our homes.
"What lies behind us, and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us." Ralph Waldo Emerson
I was looking at new fridges recently as a friend was asking for a recommendation, and it's alarming how trying to find a fridge without a screen is getting to be like trying to find a cell phone without a camera... it really limits your options.
The only way they could make fridges any worse is the if screens also played CNN constantly when not in use, like in an airport... you can absolutely see subsidized ad-fridges coming down the pipeline.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
My uncle was a computer scientist for a National Lab. He retired 15 or so years ago. I remember just after my grandmother first got internet, he didn't have it at his home yet because he didn't believe it was safe -this was probably 1997 or 98, and I remember him talking to me about how disappointed he was with the internet. "It was supposed to be this great thing. It's useless. It'll never amount to anything."
Yeah, he was wrong.
AI is turning frogs gay.
What could go wrong?
(Demon Seed, etc.)
That title is not not a double negative.
I did not see any example where someone says: "I did not buy that product because it lacked AI".
I did not hear from anyone that they need AI so they are going out of their way to buy it. In its current form AI is good for pattern recognition in some cases, for example, face identification in photos.
The only customers are corporations with massive collections of personal data to analyze, but not individual consumers.
I believe AI has been over-hyped and pushed in areas where it is not usable in its current form (like self-driving cars) and we start to see the backlash.
I've already seen stories saying that the medical diagnoses made by IBM's Watson are just plain wrong. More examples will follow.
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.
Mahatma Gandhi
This field is moving so fast compared to the 90s.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
So-called 'AI' is over-hyped and under-performing.
The AI bubble seems to be starting to deflate. It may not pop, but it will likely carry on shrinking. Most people already know that Alex and co. are little more than gimmicks, good for party games, grins and giggles, and little more. The AI community seems to be making the same mistakes they made in the late 60s and 70s. The second AI winter is nigh.
Now we've degraded to reposting the crap that Andrew Orlowski writes? Seriously Slashdot editors, know what the hell you're posting.
Voice-controlled copy machines?
"A4; from book to duplex", instead of navigating touchscreen graphic menu tabs, only to find in the end that you have misinterpreted some option or missed the red key you needed, under the third level of the dungeon...
CYA
If Consumer AI doesn't have a future, how can that non-existent future be seen ?
In an alternative interpretation, the author has seen the future of Consumer AI and so of course it exists. But the future of the future of Consumer AI doesn't exist. I.e. Future of Consumer AI doesn't have one - where "one" stands for future.
Any other interpretations ?
Bingo Dictionary - Pragmatist, n. A myopic idealist.
Fueling the hype in the 1980s AI cycle was the Japanese Fifth Generation project, for which a stated goal was to leapfrog the West's computer technology and skills. People like Edward Feigenbaum and Pamela McCorduck used the FUD generated around this project to call for increased funding, claiming in their 1983 book 'The Fifth Generation: Japan’s Computer Challenge to the World' that "America needs a national plan of action, a kind of space shuttle program for the knowledge systems of the future." As you know, the Fifth Generation project was bypassed by other computing technologies, and the kinds of knowledge systems being pushed back then gave way to other machine learning technologies without (afaik) ever having a large impact.
But I have remembered the hype, and particularly the calls for funding in reaction to the hype. Some scientists and engineers will use projections of disaster as a way of increasing funding for themselves and their field, and ride the wave until it fizzles out. (Know anyone like that today?)
Since the consumer is not control of it.
It's Anti-Consumer AI if anything
GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
A.I. could spur global growth as much as the steam engine did, study shows
I agree... The recommendations Amazon provides are a joke... The standard is still that I buy item X from them and then get recommendations for more X.
I would expect a real AI to extrapolate from what I bought from them and suggest things that I might need. So far that doesn't happen.
"AI" right now is a trendy buzzword, like "cloud". But the truth is that modern machine learning is very useful and is showing up in many new places.
Electric carving knife ... and matching electric fork.