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posted by on Wednesday November 16 2016, @08:08AM   Printer-friendly
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]


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  • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 16 2016, @04:37PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 16 2016, @04:37PM (#427592)

    I'm definitely interested in such a project with offline functionality. As for online? Think about the fact that individuals from the FBI to Facebook are already taping over their laptop's cameras. Yes, they obviously have far more people interested in attacking them than I do, yet they also have vastly greater resources at their disposal to preempt such attacks than I do yet ultimately still feel making something that not long would look borderline tin-foil-hatter is pragmatic. Now enter Alexa where you're giving magnitudes more information away to a company where such information can be abused by said company, hacked and abused by others, or the device itself could be remotely compromised, etc, etc, etc. And when reading the specifications of what is or is not actually done, you're basically forced to trust their promises which, according to paragraph 14, section e, subsection iiv on page 173 of their terms and conditions, do not have to be true.

    The nice thing about reinforcement learning is that while the training is computationally expensive, running the finished product is not. Allow people who want to participate in the training, that totally honestly isn't just data collection on a massive scale, to do so. Allow those that would prefer not to to operate in a purely offline mode with software/training updates available for manual installation as desired. When such thing as digital civil rights begin to exist in the US I would probably change my stance. But that's damn sure not happening under a Trump presidency, and for that matter nor would it have happened under a Clinton one.

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