It has a certain form of speech recognition but that's really it.

The rest is just running search algorithms on a huge database, much like chess programs or whatever years and years ago.

Actually, I don't think it has speech recognition. It gets the words printed on the screen. At one point it answers after another contestant with the same answer.

Same thing really, parsing text or voice is not at all different providing you have a "perfect speaker".

the system is "smart" in the sense that it can parse the given input and provide a usually correct output .

But it is nowhere near what we see in star trek or terminator, it's actually rather underwhelming to me when you consider current computing power

yes, but even the semantical problem seems largely to have remained unsolved because of metaphors and ambiguities. there's something in dealing with uncertainty in a natural way that at least leads me to think of something as alive.. like bigdog.

from the 70s of course there's this extreme letdown, but in a concrete way, they really seem to make progress on a problem that has been struggled with for a long time.

rant:

there's really a new timeline emerging now with the whole futurist idea. without any sweeping claims, many of the things really are coming to fruition. and given a fair timeline extending 50 years ahead, it is much more plausible that the letdown this time will concern religious ideas of human nature.

just small things - replacing a heart, replacing an eye, automated processes becoming ubiquitous, menial jobs understood to be replacable by robots, people actively enhancing themselves in various ways, cloning.. if cryogenics is shown to be possible.. the psychological impact of such things.

the androids really are set to be made practical and useful in korea by 2025, so even without human intelligence, it will still be innumerable different things that people can do that are understood differently in light of all this.

so if android is defined as "automated machine designed to look and act like a human" then the implacations are obviously to a large extent on the psychological level from apperances. uncanny valley is just a brilliant idea that will crack me up to no end in the coming years. (humor as seing the machanical in the living)

Psychological example:

Increasingly I can't help to feel the way I feel when approached by a beggar on the street when I deal with cashiers. It feels degrading to me and us, as human beings, to do such menial things.

It's like that Louis CK quote, only here the question is how quickly human dignity is elevated above something we knew a machine could do only 10 seconds ago.

On the flipside I feel kind of proud that i'm able to solve a capitcha so quickly! And how about that creativity.

watched too many repo men or blade runner ripoffs have we ;)

Youre overcomplicating your argument, when even i have trouble digesting it you know its not suited for the general esr populace.

Sure this is a step forward but it by no means implies a kind of cyberhuman just yet..

The most i'd expect of this experiment is it predicting my cancer earlier than human doctors

when even i have trouble digesting it you know its not suited for the general esr populace.

;)
and that while you more than oversimply the accomplishment of the programming in your first comment

I do not, i put it in terms esr in general would understand. Obviously it's not as black and white as i let on

im not an expert on the subject but i have read quite a bit about the topic of what makes watson special. have a look at http://www.stanford.edu/class/cs124/AIMagzine-DeepQA.pdf (yeah i know, from pages 59 to 79 is a lot to actually read, porbably not for someone like you obviously, didnt read all myself, but most of it, interesting stuff)

now i dont know where you draw the line between what you called "speech recognition" and the "search algorithms" cause there is so much in between, but i think there is a lot of stuff in watson that are a few steps ahead of what we have seen so far

While people in general act dismissively or outrageously or jokingly, there seems to be some psychological force here.

In any case, if there is a theory, it consists of these two claims:

That pathologies that pop up in rare cases, like anorexia, gives an insight into the general psychology of the times.

That new pathologies will pop up relating to the new kinds of symbols we find in notions like uncanney valley, implants, and creation of nature, i.e. playing god.

"Increasingly I can't help to feel the way I feel when approached by a beggar on the street when I deal with cashiers. It feels degrading to me and us, as human beings, to do such menial things."

Nice example and I'm increasingly in agreement. But then I struggle with the concept of just how thick some people are...

Nice to get someone who had felt the same way! It's hard to know if one feels something for personal reasons or cultural ones.

The elitist thing to say is that the cashiers would have nothing to do if they were replaced by machines. That's how both my brother and a friend reacted to this idea.

There's a funny analogy to Donald Duck working in a butter factory. Not so much a new thing, as ever more encroaching and displacing.

In this sense it mirrors in work and procedure the retreat of the soul or creationism with brainscience and rise of evolution.

dumb. it could buzz in quicker than the humans could so there was no real chance.

that's true. it would be easy to give it the same average responsetime as the two others have (in the case when one knows the answer before the clicktime)

in fact, considering the fact that it's easy, they should have done it.. maybe they have, check 4:30

might have been luck that one time. Just click when he finishes talking

http://www.cindyjackson.com/images/uploads/ci...on.com.jpg

this shit's pretty uncanny

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8WK4HHJq7uM

despexasperation

and who doesn't flashback to that dramatized narrative

it does not do any kind of speech recognition or doesnot read the screen either, all questions were supplied to the computer as a.txt file the same moment other contestants heard the question. Here the real work is parse the question and search the database (it can not use the web) for the most likely answer to the phrase. It did some weird stuff on the first day like calling a train terminus a finis, with terminus not even appearing in top 3 answers or getting overwhelmed by harry potter when real answer was voldemort. To me this shit is nothing more than a bunch of statistical machine learning algorithms running on a supercomputer..yea great feat of computer science but not an inch closer to how humans think or look for information.

xD

#22 @ 02:22

nice.

i honestly think our world is going to end up like terminator series.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pz-UgQdHYIc

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NfAebm-lWLA

cute