Farhad Manjoo of the NYT begins his review of the Amazon Echo, a wireless speaker and artificially intelligent personal assistant, as follows :
This week, I asked a friend for help: “Alexa, can you write this review for me?”
“What’s your question?” Alexa responded.
“Can you write this review for me?”
“Review is spelled R-E-V-I-E-W.”
“Thanks,” I said. “That about sums it up.”
O.K., so Alexa isn’t perfect; far from it, in fact. If there is one glaring flaw in the Amazon Echo — the tiny wireless speaker and artificially intelligent personal assistant, a machine that one always addresses with the honorific “Alexa,” as if she’s some kind of digital monarch — it is that she is quite stupid.
If Alexa were a human assistant, you’d fire her, if not have her committed. “Sorry, I didn’t understand the question I heard” is her favorite response, though honestly she really doesn’t sound very sorry. She’ll resort to that line whether you ask her questions answered by a simple Google search (“How much does a cup of flour weigh?”) or something more complicated (“Alexa, what was that Martin Scorsese movie with Joe Pesci and Robert De Niro?”).
Other times, she is mind-numbingly literal. One night during the N.B.A. playoffs, I asked, “Alexa, what’s the score of the basketball game?” She proceeded to give me a two-minute, 18-part definition of the word “score” that included “a seduction culminating in sexual intercourse.” Not exactly what I was going for.
It's easy to make fun of AI but in point of fact Mr Manjoo goes on to give a fairly favourable review of Alexa, at least as a work in progress. However, it seems to me that he has forgotten one important thing. Supposing you yourself are called Alexa, which is entirely possible. Or supposing someone else in your household is called Alexa, which is even more possible. Or worst of all, supposing your cat or dog is called Alexa. How is the real Alexa going to deal with your commands or questions?
For example, a question like "Alexa, please pass me the peanut butter", might start a stampede, while "Alexa, where have you been, you naughty dog?" could result in both Alexas sounding sheepish.
It wouldn't be long before Alexa, the real artificial one, had a nervous breakdown.
Here's the text of one, from my feed reader. What else is missing?
ReplyDeleteA qustion that has exercised my waking hours of late runs as follows:
As we grow older does our brain slow down to accommodate our ageing limbs and hardening arteries or, on the contary, do our physical movements seize up to keep company with our declining brain?
To put it another way, as Robert Peston is wont to say, if I were to take Adderall would I stand up, sit down and walk more briskly? Or if I were to attend gym classes as something more than an obsever, would my brain speed up?
This is a question that has engaged some of the finest minds for centuries.
Thank you very much, Michael. I'm not sure whether it's worth re-posting, though... I managed to recover the other one.
ReplyDelete