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: 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.