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Deep learning excels at learning statistical correlations, but lacks robust ways of understanding how the meanings of sentences relate to their parts.
At TED, in early 2018, the futurist and inventor Ray Kurzweil, currently a director of engineering at Google, announced his latest project, "Google Talk to Books," which claimed to use natural language understanding to "provide an entirely new way to explore books." Quartz dutifully hyped it as "Google's astounding new search tool [that] will answer any question by reading thousands of books."
If such a tool actually existed and worked robustly, it would be amazing. But so far it doesn't. If we could give computers one capability that they don't already have, it would be the ability to genuinely understand language. In medicine, for example, several thousand papers are published every day; no doctor or researcher can possibly read them all. Drug discovery gets delayed because information is locked up in unread literature. New treatments don't get applied, because doctors don't have time to discover them. AI programs that could synthesize the medical literature–or even just reliably scan your email for things to add to your to-do list—would be a revolution.
[...] The currently popular approach to AI doesn't do any of that; instead of representing knowledge, it just represents probabilities, mainly of how often words tend to co-occur in different contexts. This means you can generate strings of words that sound humanlike, but there's no real coherence there.
[...] We don't think it is impossible for machines to do better. But mere quantitative improvement—with more data, more layers in our neural networks, and more computers in the networked clusters of powerful machines that run those networks—isn't going to cut it.
Instead, we believe it is time for an entirely new approach that is inspired by human cognitive psychology and centered around reasoning and the challenge of creating machine-interpretable versions of common sense.
Reading isn't just about statistics, it's about synthesizing knowledge: combining what you already know with what the author is trying to tell you. Kids manage that routinely; machines still haven't.
From Rebooting AI: Building Artificial Intelligence We Can Trust, by Gary Marcus and Ernest Davis.
If Computers Are So Smart, How Come They Can't Read?
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 11 2019, @12:44AM (4 children)
Same reason Muslim women can't drive... the Quran doesn't authorize it.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 11 2019, @01:23AM
This is the reason not a single muslim, either male or female, use the internet. The Quran doesn't explicitly authorise it.
This is just like the US constitution that enumerates specific powers to the federal government, with all other powers falling to states. That's why the Bill of Rights was deemed superfluous and more of a notation. And probably why Washington uses it to wipe its collective ass whenever that Bill or Rights says anything that could be considered 'inconvenient' to its power crazed ego.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 11 2019, @03:26AM (2 children)
Except Muslim women do drive. Even in Saudi Arabia-- that country has ended its prohibition on women driving (which had to nothing to do with Islam, and everything to do with being run by a bunch of misogynist ignorant morons [you obviously have more in common with them than you may realize]).
All religion is vile, especially the Abrahamic ones (Bahia, Christianity, Judaism and Islam). But, the folks that seem to pick out one of the above to direct all their vitriol at, tend to be associated with one of the others in this list.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 11 2019, @05:53PM
Bahá'í seems OK.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Wednesday September 11 2019, @06:01PM
Here's a fun game. Try and figure out which of these quotes are from a Christian Senator and which are from a fundamentalist Islamic cleric:
Richard Mourdock or Abu Hamza? [slate.com]