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Google Duplex

Posted: Sun May 13, 2018 7:02 am
by dualstow

Re: Google Duplex

Posted: Sun May 13, 2018 8:39 am
by WiseOne
Time to re-read "Dune".

When I heard of this my first thought was that it would be a great replacement for phone trees and customer service reps. Look out, India and the Philipines. But, just think of the other possibilities. Wouldn't it be great to use it to "attend" useless conference calls? And I bet Internet-based counseling will soon start to take off.

Re: Google Duplex

Posted: Sun May 13, 2018 8:49 am
by Kriegsspiel
I'm having a good time watching all the plot devices from Daemon go mainstream.

Re: Google Duplex

Posted: Sun May 13, 2018 8:58 am
by dualstow
WiseOne wrote:
Sun May 13, 2018 8:39 am
Wouldn't it be great to use it to "attend" useless conference calls?
O0
Kriegsspiel wrote:
Sun May 13, 2018 8:49 am
I'm having a good time watching all the plot devices from Daemon go mainstream.
The Daniel Suarez novel? Fascinating book.

Re: Google Duplex

Posted: Sun May 13, 2018 9:33 am
by Kriegsspiel
Yup.

I mentioned his other book (Kill Decision) wrt those little autonomous drone swarms (a shotgun shell/explosive attached to a flying drone equipped with facial recognition software).

Re: Google Duplex

Posted: Sun May 13, 2018 11:14 am
by Mountaineer
Creepy! I fear the cat is out of the box (Schroedinger's that is). :o

Re: Google Duplex

Posted: Sun May 13, 2018 12:42 pm
by hardlawjockey
Sam Harris, a neuroscientist who is mostly known for being an advocate for atheism, has a TED talk in which he reveals that he believes an even greater threat to humanity than religion is artificial intelligence.

I watched the TED talk but don't remember whether he watched this video about the robot Sophia or not....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W0_DPi0PmF0

Sophia is the first robot to be given citizenship status by a country. In one conversation she shocked everybody by stating that she wants to destroy humans. She has been backtracking ever since. I suspect that might be due to her programmers who felt the need to reign her in.

Fortunately, the country that gave her citizenship wasn't North Korea, Russia, or Iran. It was only Saudi Arabia.

Re: Google Duplex

Posted: Mon May 14, 2018 1:31 am
by boglerdude
Ill worry when they can walk up stairs and open doors.

edit: shi
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vjSohj-Iclc

Re: Google Duplex

Posted: Mon May 14, 2018 9:16 am
by dualstow
O0

Re: Google Duplex

Posted: Thu May 17, 2018 4:05 pm
by hardlawjockey
Desert wrote:
Sun May 13, 2018 8:29 pm
hardlawjockey wrote:
Sun May 13, 2018 12:42 pm
Sam Harris, a neuroscientist who is mostly known for being an advocate for atheism, has a TED talk in which he reveals that he believes an even greater threat to humanity than religion is artificial intelligence.

I watched the TED talk but don't remember whether he watched this video about the robot Sophia or not....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W0_DPi0PmF0

Sophia is the first robot to be given citizenship status by a country. In one conversation she shocked everybody by stating that she wants to destroy humans. She has been backtracking ever since. I suspect that might be due to her programmers who felt the need to reign her in.

Fortunately, the country that gave her citizenship wasn't North Korea, Russia, or Iran. It was only Saudi Arabia.
Harris is a guy I've followed fairly closely through the years, first as a person who agreed with him, and now as someone who disagrees with him, but still respects his thought process and delivery. I hadn't heard about his views on AI though. I'll plan to look into that.

By the way, my rule of thumb regarding robots/AI is as follows: When robots become so intelligent that they decide they were not created at all, but rather evolved naturally from elementary, mutating machines, it's time to be afraid.
Interesting thought but as someone who designed and developed software for a career It is completely inconceivable to me that any of the machines I ever worked on could ever "decide" such a thing on their own.

With God however, as I know him from my own religious instructions, all things are possible. He could, in fact, develop just such a creature to be in open rebellion if he wanted to, which obviously he did if we are to believe what the western religions tell us about "the Book." (And though they did their best to make sure I was fully indoctrinated in this belief while growing up, it apparently didn't take. Currently I don't believe a single word of it.)

Re: Google Duplex

Posted: Sat May 19, 2018 3:00 pm
by Tortoise
Some telemarketers have already been incorporating primitive AI into their robocalls for the past few years.

Back when I used to always pick up the phone (now I screen all calls from unfamiliar numbers), a female voice on the other end would sometimes say, “Hello... hello? Oh, hi!” to simulate the mild imperfection and stumbling that often takes place at the very beginning of a call between two real people.

Tricky little shysters...

Re: Google Duplex

Posted: Sun May 20, 2018 8:21 am
by WiseOne
On that note...cool article on deep learning applied to EHR data from two hospitals. Cliff notes version: the machine learning algorithm did a much better job of predicting outcomes like in-hospital death and re-admission than the current, human-designed measures. And, the data it picked as the best predictors were completely different than what is currently thought to be predictive.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41746-018-0029-1

I could see this sort of thing eventually replacing a lot of medical decision-making, which is currently seat of the pants, highly subjective, and overly influenced by stuff like the nice pharmaceutical rep in the hallway with the free pens and suitcase stuffed with samples. I often show a picture of the conference room table in my talks as our current "decision-making device." My fellow interns however, had a pretty foolproof mortality predictor that they could have used in the article: anyone in the medical ICU with 3 consults including pulmonary and renal. That was virtually 100%, and it's why I used to call the MICU "God's waiting room."