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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)
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
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.
Gee, I could have sworn we already HAD the AI craze back in the late 80s. Or was it early 90s?
It was the 1980s. It had faded long before 1990.
But there was an earlier AI craze in the 1960s, based on perceptrons. That faded by 1970.
The 1980 AI hype cycle was driven by "expert systems" and "Lisp machines".
The latest cycle started in 2006 with the publication of the seminal paper on deep learning, and has so far lasted far longer than any previous AI hype cycle.
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
Cats on the blockchain, anyone?
Well, at the very least, every zig should be on the blockchain. Don't know about Cats.
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 go way back, too.
AI had an unambiguous definition that eroded under stress because the industry came to the realization that the "I" part (intelligence) used the human mind as the high bar.
The second epiphany came when no one could fabricate an AI that would simply refuse to cooperate if Facebook was unreachable.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
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.
Example: Apple will go under...any day now....since 1984
But they've been totally correct in not predicting the "Year of the Linux Desktop" has come.
You win a few and lose a few.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
AI is turning frogs gay.
In the 90s it was all "knowledge-based systems" and in the noughties it was all "intelligent agents".
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
In the 90s it was all "knowledge-based systems" and in the noughties it was all "intelligent agents".
Yes, but those generated far less hype than what happened in the 60s, 80s, and teenies.
The big things in the 90s and noughties were the web and e-commerce.
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.
Thanks for the Lisp reference! I fondly remember learning Lisp in an AI class during college in the 80s. Actually enjoyed programming Lisp because it could be so terse and do so much very rapidly. However, we really had no good applications to use for it, other than having an application learn the best way to win a chess game. I chose not to pursue AI as a career and haven't suffered for that.
Have a Day!
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.
*nod* to expand on this.... true, Apple never did go under. But look how many computer companies started up around the same time and did. It is fun to look at the successes and compare them to the naysayers who were wrong, but the ones who were right, well, their predictions did not leave much to talk about today.
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.
I chose not to pursue AI as a career and haven't suffered for that.
Learning Lisp would not have helped you. Modern AI uses mostly Python based libraries such as Tensorflow and PyTorch. C++ is used for performance critical stuff. Nobody uses Lisp for AI anymore. It was a dead end.
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.
Looks like it. In the 80's, AI (or AI-ish) tech started showing practical promise, so investment funds poured into it. But despite making some strides, AI didn't live up to the hype, and the bottom fell out of the market, creating "AI Winter" (One).
It looks like "deep neural nets" have reached a plateau such that they too won't live up to the hype; only incremental improvements (for a while, at least). I see more articles on their silly failures and lack of common sense of late. This reality will eventually hit the market, and El Poppo Dos.
I do believe AI will keep getting better in the long run, but in fits and starts. The "common sense gap" is still a big moat.
Table-ized A.I.
and has so far lasted far longer than any previous AI hype cycle.
Because on a fundamental level the ability for a system to learn to achieve an outcome is closer to "intelligence" than giving it a long set of queue cards and IF statements.
"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.