She just doesn't get me | Hacker News Reader

She just doesn't get me

blog.mashape.com

11 pointsculo12 comments

General artificial intelligence does not exist yet and is most likely not coming anytime soon. Perhaps it's the speech interface which raises people's expectations in this regard.

Genuine artificial intelligence and inference may be currently beyond our grasps, but hand-programmed special cased procedures (what you might consider the product of reasoning, rather than the existence of) are certainly doable. If the program behind Siri can determine that you want to know the location of your next meeting, and sift through your calendar event data for the next meeting in it, the human engineer behind this scenario should anticipate that the user is likely to want directions to their destination as well, and make the program offer them while retrieving them in the background. It's also certainly doable for the program to learn, with simple machine learning techniques, which addresses the user already knows how to get to (and thus does not want to be offered directions to), with a variety of data sources from "did they decline when offered directions?" to analyzing GPS data from previous trips to determine if they've been to that location before.

I'd wager that an assistant service like Siri can implement a great deal of the everyday "functionality" of a human personal assistant with nothing more than precise interaction design, careful data logging, and machine learning models to tailor assistance to the individual needs of the user. That's not easy, especially considering each interaction has to be designed by hand, but it's more than possible with today's technology.

Well, no, but you can always be better in what you factor into your task specific AI.

I think the task of a personal assistant is too general for that, that's why I talk about general AI. The article complains that it just doesn't "get it" and that's not something "task specific".

"Getting it" is task specific for any particular task. It's simply a matter of increasing coverage, which in any particular case is likely to be tractable. There may very well always be more to cover (if there isn't, maybe we've built an AGI).

Yeah, exactly. I think giving it a female name raised expectations too.

Really? Why would you say that?

I think that perhaps giving any name raised expectations all on its own. Anthropomorphizing what is essentially Google Voice on a stick makes it seem much closer to general AI than it is.

There might also be something to do with traditional gender roles--secretaries are usually cast as women, so perhaps that also raises expectations. However, I really don't know enough about gender issues to give any real insight. (Not that that ever stops me, but...)

Yes, what you said better than I did.

I think giving it any name raises expectations. And a female name hints at the software being as useful as a secretary. "Siri, take a memo"

(Not that all secretaries are women. I'm talking about stereotypes here. Also I'm not even sure that's a job that still exists.)

And here I thought this was going to be about how programmers can't get dates...

When is Scoble not having dinner? Dude has dinner for breakfast.

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