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Alexa's chief scientist thinks the assistant needs a robot body to understand the world
Amazon's Rohit Prasad, head scientist and an instrumental member of the Alexa division, says the company's personal software assistant would be far smarter if it had a robot body and cameras to move around in the real world. Prasad, speaking at MIT Technology Review's EmTech Digital AI conference in San Francisco yesterday, said, "The only way to make smart assistants really smart is to give it eyes and let it explore the world."
Some Alexa-enabled smart devices already have cameras. But a robot body would be new. Prasad's comments suggest that work could be in service of one day giving Alexa a body — although he wouldn't confirm this directly. Prasad works on natural language processing and other machine learning capabilities for Alexa, so it's likely if he wanted to test these features out, he'd be one of the few Amazon employees who could easily go ahead and try it.
Someday, we can truly have sex with Alexa.
Related: Amazon Plans to Add Alexa Voice Support to Microwaves, Amplifiers, Subwoofers, and "In-Car Gadgets"
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Thursday March 28 2019, @04:05PM (3 children)
The world the AI lives in will be shaped not only by its sensoria, but also by its effectors. Eyes lead to a different model of the world than touch does. Etc.
OTOH: Different motivations equally produce a different map of the world. This is one reason people often have difficulty understanding each other. AIs will enhance this problem tremendously, though if they are super-humanly intelligent they may be able to guess as what kind of world model anyone it knows well is living in. Sub-humanly intelligent AIs will have problems here. They may be totally deferential, and yet so misunderstand any complex order that they are unusable (outside of a narrow specialty, such as driving a car).
We'll just have to wait and see. But don't expect them to think the way we do, because they won't. And compatible just means that there are contexts within which we can work together.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 28 2019, @04:40PM
Dogs definitely have less intelligence than humans, and also a quite different way to sense their world (with smells that we cannot even perceive being a big part of their world). And yet, communication between humans and dogs works sufficiently well.
And let me add, we are still far from creating an AI with dog-level intelligence. Maybe we should figure that out first, before aiming at human-level intelligence?
(Score: 2) by fyngyrz on Thursday March 28 2019, @09:11PM
Yes, fine, but that doesn't even get into the realm of "incompatibility." I have a deaf and blind cat. Get along with her famously. She was born that way. She's also pretty much like any other cat. Deaf, blind and other sensorially different people are all over the place. They manage to compatibly get along with the rest of us as well. At least, as far as we let them... which if anything is a hint about the average politician's and employer's expectations, rather than those of the differently-abled.
Another thing: People work with birds, and they are obviously intelligent, but really different — their brains are actually not the same in structure, yet we get along with them pretty well when we try. We hunt with them, take them into our homes and establish human-pet relationships, make friends with them, etc.
==> Interesting starter reading about bird brains. [uchicagomedicine.org]
Odds are that I would have have gotten along with Helen Keller, too. The example that the biological mind demonstrates is not, in any way, one of "has to have X or ends up incompatible. The presumption that this is so, or going to be so, for an intelligence that has yet to be encountered is bankrupt. The only examples we have — which number quite a few — suggest exactly the opposite.
FTFY
Yes, of course. Because we don't know yet, so making absolute pronouncements like "will be incompatible if no body" or "will have problems" is absurd. It's as if a scientist said "I have invented something here, I'm hiding it behind my back" and some wag said in reply, "oh, well, that can't work."
.
FTFY, too.
So.. it's so vague as to essentially mean that any intelligence at all will be able to work with us, presuming only it isn't outright intent on our wholesale destruction, or utterly uninterested in any communication whatsoever.
Take a deep breath, relax, and admit to yourself that you don't know how this is going to go. No one does. Assuming these absolutes is absurd. Particularly given the examples that nature has already provided.
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Junk - stuff we throw away. Stuff - junk we keep.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Friday March 29 2019, @01:26AM
This is why I said "compatible sensorial input is required by it may not be sufficient".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford