Artificial Intelligence Scary? Nah. Think Clouds Not Swarms.
May 26, 2015
I don’t think too much about artificial intelligence, smart software, and predictive methods that tell me what I want. I do my own thing, working hard to get around weird stuff like Microsoft’s grammar checker and Google’s filtering of search results based on my “history.”
Robots were interesting when I was a young sprout. Now I am a withered ginko. I fear yard crews more than intelligent machines.
The New York Times published “A Reality Check for A.I.” The short version is, “Stuff doesn’t work as well as hoped.” You can find the write up in the dead tree edition Science Section, page D 2 or online if you are lucky. Cross your fingers that the New York Times online site includes “science” as a section and indexes that content.
I don’t want to spend much time on the write up. I do want to highlight the use of “cloud robotics” instead of the more accurate “swarm robotics”. Swarms are alive and well. The cloud stuff is diaphonous to me.
The other interesting item is the backhand across Google’s futuristic lingo. Here’s the passage:
Ken Goldberg, a University of Californina Berkeley, roboticist, has called on the computing word to drop its obsession with singularity, the much ballyhooed time when computers are predicted to surpass their human designers. Rather, he has proposed a concept he calls “multiplicity” with diverse groups of humans and machines solving problems through collaboration.
Poor Google. Singularity is just not a term that captures what is happening, dudes.
Reality check. More like a collection of anecdotes which do little to make clear the pervasiveness of smart software. Maybe the makers of smart software prefer the messages to be fuzzy or “cloudy.”
Stephen E Arnold, May 27, 2015
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