Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by Dopefish on Monday February 24 2014, @06:00AM   Printer-friendly
from the i-for-one-welcome-our-new-computer-overlords dept.

kef writes:

"By 2029, computers will be able to understand our language, learn from experience and outsmart even the most intelligent humans, according to Google's director of engineering Ray Kurzweil.

Kurzweil says:

Computers are on the threshold of reading and understanding the semantic content of a language, but not quite at human levels. But since they can read a million times more material than humans they can make up for that with quantity. So IBM's Watson is a pretty weak reader on each page, but it read the 200m pages of Wikipedia. And basically what I'm doing at Google is to try to go beyond what Watson could do. To do it at Google scale. Which is to say to have the computer read tens of billions of pages. Watson doesn't understand the implications of what it's reading. It's doing a sort of pattern matching. It doesn't understand that if John sold his red Volvo to Mary that involves a transaction or possession and ownership being transferred. It doesn't understand that kind of information and so we are going to actually encode that, really try to teach it to understand the meaning of what these documents are saying.

Skynet anyone?"

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 1) by melikamp on Tuesday February 25 2014, @03:06AM

    by melikamp (1886) on Tuesday February 25 2014, @03:06AM (#6356) Journal

    Haha wow, Rudy Rucker, the guy who wrote Saucer Wisdom?

    The very same :) He was teaching computer science at San José[1] State till 2004, and, even though I am an avid science fiction fan, I did not find out about his writing until years later. Great class though.

    As for our disagreement, I hear what you are saying. But give it a few years, and you may find yourself returning to this simple idea :P

    [1] So, what's up with UTF support?

  • (Score: 1) by drgibbon on Tuesday February 25 2014, @04:28AM

    by drgibbon (74) on Tuesday February 25 2014, @04:28AM (#6388) Journal

    "As for our disagreement, I hear what you are saying. But give it a few years, and you may find yourself returning to this simple idea :P"

    Well, I think that simple idea grossly misrepresents the terrain and provides a pseudo-solution that does more harm than good, but hey who knows? :P

    Possibly only Rucker's aliens could zip through time and tell us ;)

    --
    Certified Soylent Fresh!
    • (Score: 2) by mhajicek on Tuesday February 25 2014, @04:56AM

      by mhajicek (51) on Tuesday February 25 2014, @04:56AM (#6404)

      I think it's a matter of semantics.

      --
      The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek