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from the find-me-some-coconuts-to-buy-and-play-horsey-with dept.
I would love to have a house/AI to keep me organized: to tell me when an important date is coming/arrived; remind me of things i have to do (like the laundry) or of really important things like "you have a family.... go pay attention to them".
But at what cost will that come.
Amazon's Alexa AI (as well as all the other personal assistants being developed) is, seemingly, probably moving from a speaker to the room/house you are standing in. This will eventually help you in life, but will also feed the 'machine' of the corporation developing it.
What would it take to create an open source AI to help me/you with daily life? Would you like to have it come from an RMS point of view, or would a less 'commercial', almost open source alternative be acceptable?
Could you really be accepting of something that coordinates your life and helps you out with occasional advertisements and up-stream collection of 'some' data?
From the referenced article:
While some predict mass unemployment or all-out war between humans and artificial intelligence, others foresee a less bleak future. Professor Manuela Veloso, head of the machine learning department at Carnegie Mellon University, envisions a future in which humans and intelligent systems are inseparable, bound together in a continual exchange of information and goals that she calls "symbiotic autonomy." In Veloso's future, it will be hard to distinguish human agency from automated assistance — but neither people nor software will be much use without the other.
[Ed: TFA also includes an interview with Professor Veloso, which provides more detail and discussion]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by darkfeline on Wednesday November 16 2016, @08:20AM
Alas, that's the way the cookie crumbles. You can't have your cake and eat it too.
Want to take advantage of machine learning? You're going to need a shit ton of data to feed it. What, you say? You aren't willing to give your data to someone else, but you want lots of other people to contribute their data to train an AI for you? Tough luck.
If you want AI, you need data to feed it. There must be an entity vacuuming all that data. Whether that be the NSA, Amazon, Google, or the FSF, you will have to trust them. Or you can make do without an assistive AI.
By shit ton, I'm talking about petabytes (plus or minus a few orders of magnitude, e.g. text messages vs videos). Also, this data has to be annotated, which will likely require some manual labor. Better go find a few thousand trustworthy volunteers.
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 2) by dltaylor on Wednesday November 16 2016, @08:29AM
I would not mind a purely personal assistant, which needs only public data, such as traffic info, and whatever personal data I need it to manage. Should I choose, I could allow it to access my physicians' web interfaces to handle prescription refills, appointments and test results. A parent could use the same style of personal login, and per-class RSS/twitter/... feeds to handle childrens' homework assignments, appointments for P/T conferences, ...
There is no reason for me to share data outside my home or phone (yeah, I know about phone spyware, but a true PDA needn't be so vulnerable) to the functionality I would find useful.
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Wednesday November 16 2016, @08:36AM
The only way to make that personal assistant with our current technology is machine learning. I'll ask again, where do you plan on getting the petabytes of personal information that will be used to train the personal assistant to know what to do with *your* personal data?
Or you could settle for a dumb personal information manager, of which there are many options, maybe with a few rules and scripts it's smart enough for you.
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 16 2016, @12:35PM
You don't need anywhere near that amount of data to make a useful personal assistant. Are you smoking crack? You don't even need an AI for it.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by JNCF on Wednesday November 16 2016, @03:53PM
... for some values of "useful personal assistant," sure, but you're talking about different things now. Topic: AI.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Wednesday November 16 2016, @02:44PM
I'm in no hurry. Get it trained on those early adopters willing to let world+dog snoop into every corner of their lives, and let me know when you can deliver a stand-alone AI that only goes online to get information I request. Until then, don't waste your time trying to market it to me.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Hyperturtle on Wednesday November 16 2016, @03:52PM
I want an AI that can help, too.
I don't want it it storing my data in some "cloud" operated by entities that share it for free to some parties, and sell it repeatedly to others.
Maybe that is a cost of having the AI provided by commercial interests/private enterprise. It used to be that I could program scripts for my home automation, and did not require an internet connection. Now, the best control hardware won't even let me connect to it without the host and clients all talking to the internet first -- even being on the same local subnet is not enough.
I will accept the use of an AI like Alexa in my life when I am able to host a server with terabytes of data on it that it needs, and if and when necessary, it can go online and search for map results or prices or whatnot when I give it permission based on whatever the perceived needs are. ANd it can save its findings locally and suggest to me, based on what it has locally saved on me after learning about me and my teaching it about what I want it to know. That data is not what I want to have freely provided to marketing departments (assuming it is limited to that), and further to be used however which way that I don't control.
I am not interested in my AI feeding back to be suggestions a vendor had about what the vendor wants to sell me, I want the AI to actually pick out realistic options that don't consider that the vendor wants to move a sponsored item. This is unlikely to provide results consistently in my best interests when the vendor doing the sales also provides the AI telling you what to buy.