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"Hillis envisioned his machine eventually becoming a sort of public-intelligence utility into which people would tap their home PCs, thereby bringing artificial

by skorgu 13y ago

"Hillis envisioned his machine eventually becoming a sort of public-intelligence utility into which people would tap their home PCs, thereby bringing artificial intelligence to the world." Jesus can you imagine AT&T as an AI? Shudder.

IvyMike 13y ago
Isn't that a description of Google?
- greenyoda 13y ago
  Not really, since Google doesn't do anything related to AI (OK, maybe self-driving cars, but that's not part of their public internet services). IBM's Watson might turn into a public AI utility, however.
  - IvyMike 13y ago
    I once typed "That thing where a boat is replaced one part at a time" and Google came back with the right answer. If that's not AI I have no idea what is. (And if you don't think that Hillis envisioned his AI doing things like "answers random questions" and "translating between human languages", what do you think he had in mind?)
    - greenyoda 13y ago
      My guess is that Google's search algorithm has no idea what a "boat" is, and that it just has some clever algorithm that matched your query against some words in one of its indexed documents. That doesn't sound like it would qualify as AI. An AI program would have some kind of knowledge representation[1] and inference engine that would allow it to reason about boats. If your query was "that thing where a boat gives birth to a tree", it could tell you your query didn't make sense, as opposed to just returning nothing relevant. By the way, when I tried my nonsensical query on Google, the first result was about a Syrian woman giving birth on a boat. So Google doesn't even understand the basics of grammar, let alone that a boat is an inanimate object that can't give birth to anything. That doesn't sound like "intelligence" to me. There were AI programs in the 1980s that could do better than that. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_intelligence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_intelligence
      - tensor 13y ago
        Given that we don't know how google search currently works, that's some serious speculation on your part. We've made quite some progress since the 80s. For example, neural word embeddings learn which words are synonyms without any input (and google recently release a faster algorithm for doing this called word2vec). There are algorithms for parsing sentences, and numerous databases and ontologies representing manually curated 'concepts'. Google could well be using some of these within it's search. That it doesn't come back and say "that doesn't make sense" might only be because the search is designed to always try to find something, even if it's the wrong thing. That's because it's posed as a ranking problem. In any case, what is intelligence? One of my favourite sayings on this topic is this (and I forget who to attribute this to, but it's not mine): "We will never have artificial intelligent. Every so often we come up with a problem to test for intelligence. When a computer finally beats a human at this problem, detractors are quick to backtrack and claim 'well that's not really intelligence' and proceed to come up with a new test for intelligence." I suspect that this will likely go on for a very long time. In the meantime, we've been using intelligent algorithms for decades already.
    - hcarvalhoalves 13y ago
      "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Data" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvDCzhbjYWs http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvDCzhbjYWs
  - Houshalter 13y ago
    Google uses a lot of AI for their search engine, their ad targeting, their automated translation service, voice recognition, reverse image search, Google Now, and probably a 100 other things that I don't know about. They are almost a machine learning company.

by skorgu 13y ago

IvyMike 13y ago

Isn't that a description of Google?

greenyoda 13y ago
Not really, since Google doesn't do anything related to AI (OK, maybe self-driving cars, but that's not part of their public internet services). IBM's Watson might turn into a public AI utility, however.
- IvyMike 13y ago
  I once typed "That thing where a boat is replaced one part at a time" and Google came back with the right answer. If that's not AI I have no idea what is. (And if you don't think that Hillis envisioned his AI doing things like "answers random questions" and "translating between human languages", what do you think he had in mind?)
  - greenyoda 13y ago
    My guess is that Google's search algorithm has no idea what a "boat" is, and that it just has some clever algorithm that matched your query against some words in one of its indexed documents. That doesn't sound like it would qualify as AI. An AI program would have some kind of knowledge representation[1] and inference engine that would allow it to reason about boats. If your query was "that thing where a boat gives birth to a tree", it could tell you your query didn't make sense, as opposed to just returning nothing relevant. By the way, when I tried my nonsensical query on Google, the first result was about a Syrian woman giving birth on a boat. So Google doesn't even understand the basics of grammar, let alone that a boat is an inanimate object that can't give birth to anything. That doesn't sound like "intelligence" to me. There were AI programs in the 1980s that could do better than that. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_intelligence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_intelligence
    - tensor 13y ago
      Given that we don't know how google search currently works, that's some serious speculation on your part. We've made quite some progress since the 80s. For example, neural word embeddings learn which words are synonyms without any input (and google recently release a faster algorithm for doing this called word2vec). There are algorithms for parsing sentences, and numerous databases and ontologies representing manually curated 'concepts'. Google could well be using some of these within it's search. That it doesn't come back and say "that doesn't make sense" might only be because the search is designed to always try to find something, even if it's the wrong thing. That's because it's posed as a ranking problem. In any case, what is intelligence? One of my favourite sayings on this topic is this (and I forget who to attribute this to, but it's not mine): "We will never have artificial intelligent. Every so often we come up with a problem to test for intelligence. When a computer finally beats a human at this problem, detractors are quick to backtrack and claim 'well that's not really intelligence' and proceed to come up with a new test for intelligence." I suspect that this will likely go on for a very long time. In the meantime, we've been using intelligent algorithms for decades already.
  - hcarvalhoalves 13y ago
    "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Data" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvDCzhbjYWs http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvDCzhbjYWs
- Houshalter 13y ago
  Google uses a lot of AI for their search engine, their ad targeting, their automated translation service, voice recognition, reverse image search, Google Now, and probably a 100 other things that I don't know about. They are almost a machine learning company.