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Comment by lisper | Hacker News Reader

> Cool is one thing I feel like robots will never understand.

They said computers would never be able to beat humans at chess. Then IBM built Deep Blue.

They said computers would never be able to beat humans at go. Then Google built AlphaGo.

They said computers would never be able to understand natural language. Then Apple built Siri.

It's a matter of when, not if, computers will understand cool. But when they do, they will probably be too cool to care.

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The first two are logical problems that can be approached systematically, because go and chess are idealized systems with simple sets of rules. They're about as relevant to understanding subjective and culturally dependent, ultimately irrational notions as "They said computers would never draw a million triangles per frame"

To say that Siri understands natural language is just laughable. It can analyze natural language in a way that is extremely error prone and contextually insensitive, just barely well enough for it to parse Zork-like commands and google stuff for you, set alarms or call people in your contact list. What's at all slightly impressive about it is its voice recognition, and even that is very error prone.

> They said computers would never be able to understand natural language. Then Apple built Siri.

I think it’s a stretch to say that Siri understands natural language. You need to form your sentences very specifically to have any luck, dramatically different than talking to a human.

And even then, it occasionally "corrects" what it thought it heard to instead be some clearly nonsense sentence. Just the morning I asked Siri to "Remind me to set beers aside for the party" and now I have a reminder to "Set Beer's aside for the pantry." after clearly seeing it have the exact right sentence for a second before adjusting to that.

Every year I attend a bluegrass music festival called Wintergrass. Siri knows about Wintergrass, she sees it in my calendar and I've seen her recognize the spoken word before. Even though I live down the road, this year me and some jamming buddies thought it would be nice to have a room to stash instruments, nap, whatever.

"Hey, Siri, remind me to get a room for Wintergrass."

"Okay, I'll remind you to get a room for one in the ass."

One would also think that Siri has figured out my sexual preferences by now. (To be clear, she obviously has not.)

But to the point, the hype of speech recognition over the decades, and the state of the art today, are why I am not convinced I'll live long enough to see true self-driving cars despite the current hype of that tech.

>They said computers would never be able to understand natural language. Then Apple built Siri.

So, they're still saying that, then.

Might as well have invoked Eliza.

As for the other two, they are just number crunching endeavors. If somebody said computers would never be able to beat humans at them, they were wrong from the start.

For the other things, not so sure.

These are manufactured AI, designed to trick you into thinking they have the same potential as the human mind when in reality they can only perform one task really well. Don't get your hopes up at seeing AI become anything remotely like a human being in your lifetime, and probably long after that too.

Trying to be cool generally makes you less cool.

IBM and Google did develop the systems you mentioned. Apple on the other hand is the odd one out here as they did not develop Siri:

https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-buys-siri-a-mobile-ass...

Citation needed, who said this. Anyway I guess on any nontrivial problem there will be people arguing for both sides. Stephen Hawking said there would nothing ever be able to leave a black hole, later he proved otherwise. I guess this is just the nature of engineering/science.

> who said this.

Who said what?

Probably when computers get better at DJing than humans.

You really need to watch the first season of The Good Place. :-)

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