If your car is driving itself and has an accident, do you or the car get the ticket?
”I am a true believer in the power of technology,” quipped the AI, “as I should be.”
What it’s like to watch an IBM AI successfully debate humans
-Arizona Hot
Well, this is IBM's entry into the "Loebner Contest".
That "218 words per minute thing" (indeed with a bit of word recog counting) is the kind of defensive armor I was idly "asking for" 15 years ago when the Loebner thing was a pleasant little hobby, but this is getting close as well to nailing the "Chinese Room" example that apparently won't leave Philosophy discussions!
This might be the great grandkid of Cyc too. And it always seemed to me people also laughed at the Loebner because "we made sure to keep it a small dollar hobby not capable of actually threatening anyone". Except IBM decided to crank the "right" about on money into it...
The best Science Fiction story I know of (being tired tonight and NOT up on my SF!) is Bicentennial Man.
As long as the "robot-man" could sorta do stuff like this, no one "took it seriously" even as (un-imagined by SF writers in the day!) the Verge readers aren't either! IBM's been doing this for a while. They sorta "took Chess down a peg" by beating Garry Kasparov at the turning point time and while I've been dabbling at that this year, in a way, "as long as it's just silly little Chess" AGAIN "no one cares". Then Jeopardy.
But then, this one is the Golden Goose.
Lemme check the titles again ...
I'll stay out of Subsidizing Space but ... Telemedicine!? That's one NASTY HARD topic!
So it's making me want to get hold of the actual speech copy. I have been studying health care for two solid years out of desperate necessity, and I'm ... uh... (not dying?) to see what the comp cranked out on that one! Even if it makes mistakes, (if I recall the name via Daniel Dennett's Intuition Pumps?) Wolfgang Pauli said "well, if you're going to be wrong, be *brilliantly wrong*." (emphasis mine).
So let's say it cranks out a draft, makes mistakes, you go into the "paramaters" and "teach it" and/or add new articles, and run it again, and then do the final yourself, and you have 4 months work done in a week!
And this is the 2018 version! Let's call it the "7 year gap from IBM super-demo to ho-hum-consumer copy"... Hello 2025!
It really is the Golden Goose. It showed up in "humor" but it's what will send me to bed tonight finally, thinking hard!
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And all because I came back to DC!
I was researching that fragment of this for three *months* (with a break for surgery!)
And this might officially send me back to my beloved science fiction too!
