> Computer, earl grey, hot.
I think we're getting closer to something like this, out of Star Trek. Even in Star Trek, AI did not take over critical functions - but rather assisted the crew in manning the starship.
I think we're getting closer to something like this, out of Star Trek. Even in Star Trek, AI did not take over critical functions - but rather assisted the crew in manning the starship.
And “Computer, execute program alpha beta seven” would be the power user version of it
We should already be at “computer, earl gray, hot” today
Meanwhile when I tried Android's voice-based text input it was a catastrophe as my accent completely threw it off. Felt like it was exclusively trained on English native speakers. Not to mention the difficulty such systems have when you mix languages, as it tends to happen.
Limiting the options rather than making the system super generic would help in so many cases.
Because the UI affordances (in this case the control language) wouldn’t be discoverable or memorable across a large range of devices or apps. Moreover, speaking is an activity that allows for an arbitrary range of symbol patterns, and a feedback loop between two who are in dialog are able to resolve complex matters even though they start from different positions.
I’d argue that if the current state is at all acceptable, then a consistent, teachable and specific language format would be an improvement in every way — and you can have an “actual” feedback loop because there’s a much more limited set of valid inputs, so your errors can be much more precise (and made human-friendly, without, I think, made merely programmer-friendly).
As it stands, I’ve never managed a dialogue with Siri/Alexa; it either ingests my input correctly, rejects it as an invalid action, does something completely wrong, or produces a “could not understand.. did you mean <gibberish>?”.
Having the smart-ai dialogue would be great if I could have it, but for the last decade that simply isn’t a thing that occurs. Perhaps with GPT and it’s peers, but afaik GPT doesn’t have a response->object model that could be actioned on, so the conversation would sound smoother but be just as incompetent at actually understanding whatever you’re looking to do. I think this is basically the “sufficiently smart compiler” problem, that never comes to fruition in practice
The transfer between my language and what I can type is great. It starts becoming more complex once you need to add countless flags, but again, a structured approach can fix this.
It's just that there is no consumer application and I think the reception of voice commands from the public was fairly cold.
I don't want to do stuff with my voice for once. I'd rather click or press a button
It’s just like the image recognition ML issue, where it can correctly predict a cat, but change a specific three pixels and it has 99% confidence it’s an ostrich.
Or JavaScript equality. If you do it right, it’s right, but otherwise anything goes.
Or Perl, in its entirety
Finally, their nemesis was the Borg, a race that explored the question of what happens if a society fully embraces AI and cybernetics instead of keeping it at a distance like the Federation does. The Borg are depicted as more powerful than the Federation exactly because they allowed AI to take over critical functions.
Data was created by technology not available to the Federation. As far as the order of society is concerned, he's magic and not technology. An immediate implication is that his ship was the only one in the Federation with an android crew member.
> And although the ship was manned by people, it couldn't function properly without its computer. Several episodes revolve around computer malfunctions.
This is true, though. The computer did take over many critical functions.
But the Star Trek computer was just a fairly normal computer with an AI-ish voice UI. And there have been present-day ships which couldn't function properly without their computer... I distinctly remember a story about a new (~20 years ago) US Navy warship not being able to go on its maiden voyage because Windows blue-screened.
Data was an android, but one that is meant to mimic an individual being. He may have been a form of AI, but he is no more than just an advanced human.
And yes, the ship couldn't function without computers - but they were traditional (but futuristic) computers manned by people, with AI guided by people - not AI that controlled every aspect of their lives.
I think when people think of AI, and the fear that comes with it - they imagine the type of AI that takes over human function and renders them unimportant.
Also, the Borg didn't fully embrace AI. They were a collective, linked together by technology. You can view them as more or less a singular entity with many moving parts that communicated over subspace, striving to achieve perfection (in their own eyes). As a consequence, they seek to assimilate (thus parasitizing their technological advancements for their own) or eradicate other species in an attempt to improve the Hive.
https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/The_Nth_Degree_(episode...
Having an AI to pilot the ship, target the weapons and control away teams robots/holograms would take away from the core purpose of the show which is to tell a gripping story. It's not meant as an exploration on how to use AI in space exploration.
They had a whole episode about the legal and moral aspect of AI human rights.
EDIT: There was also the episode where a holodeck character gains true sentience, but then the crew proceeds to imprison it forever into a virtual world and this is treated by the show as the ethical thing to do. Trapping any human in a simulation is (correctly IMO) treated as a horrible thing, but doing it to an evidently sentient AI is apparently no problem.
> He had found a Nutri-Matic machine which had provided him with a plastic cup filled with a liquid that was almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea.
Getting LLMs to give you an answer is easy. Getting them to give you the answer you're actually looking for is much harder.
LLMs are a very useful search tool but they can't be relied on as a source of truth ...yet. There in lies their main problem.