Spring Comes to AI Winter

That’s the title of a recent article in ComputerWorld magazine. My colleague Martha Burtis’s work on bots in education has helped me think about cognition and AI in some new ways, and this piece reinforces my sense that a breakthrough in these areas may arrive sooner than we think.

Favorite pull quote:

In any case, we probably wouldn’t want to make machines that are too much like humans, he [Robert Hecht-Nielsen] says, or we might end up with systems that are influenced by personal biases, just like many people are.

Instead, AI systems will handle tasks that humans aren’t particularly good at today, like dependably answering tedious customer questions with an endless supply of patience.

“AI will mean ennoblement for the customer,” says Hecht-Nielsen. “Someone will answer calls in a call center and spend as much time as the customer needs, and they will be polite and fun. It just won’t be a person.”

“Ennoblement”: a new concept in customer service. What’s not to like about that?

2 thoughts on “Spring Comes to AI Winter

  1. The article you mention in Computer World resonates with my reading of http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.02/brain.html?pg=2&topic=brain&topic_set=

    Revenge of the Right Brain Logical and precise, left-brain thinking
    gave us the Information Age. Now comes the Conceptual Age – ruled by
    artistry, empathy, and emotion.By Daniel H. Pink
    That is, leaving the model of the brain as a purely computational device.

    I’d like to see an AI search device, maybe named Googler, that would give me, via voice, display, print, or suggestive thoughts, the facts, trivia, or other answers to queries that I and others often cone up with and then go to some search tool to find the answers. It would be neat to carry one of these around, maybe wear it. A device that could be used in the same way that Mr. Spock was used in Star Trek, but something that wasn’t trying to convince me to follow its instructions. A kinder, gentler Spock. With one of these things, I’d never have to remember anything – except for the stuff that wasn’t in tis database, which brings up the interesting question of how do we get to train one of these. Search engines release spiders/bots that crawl through existing resources. These would have to not only crawl cyberspace, but real space (real conversations even) as well.

  2. Just read the article–good stuff, and thanks for the link. I like your notion of an idea-focused intelligent agent that supplied rich context for any topic your curiosity brought into your mind at any given moment, context that would first include–be based on?–your own knowledge, then branch off from there. Something like the cabinet in Clifford D. Simak’s short story “Immigrant.”

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