Bland Turing

I keep hearing talk about how Artificial Intelligence is going to revolutionize everything. We're all going to be out of work, even you folks who think for a living. And yet, I keep seeing artificial stupidity everywhere. I've mentioned how Google Now keeps acting in seemingly random ways. The calendar app is similarly unpredictable: I schedule an appointment and it gives me suggestions as to where the appointment will be, and with whom. But the suggestions are bizarre. It thinks I'm going to have a doctor's appointment at my bank, and that I'm going to invite distant relatives. And Facebook just suggested I'd be interested in attending a favourite musician's latest tour, oblivious that all the dates are in England.

Speaking of Facebook, recently there was the big story about Facebook avoiding conservative stories in their "trending" box. That was, if the claims are true, disturbing in a political way. But it also revealed something technologically embarrassing: the "trending" feature isn't really automated, at least, not totally. That's pretty surprising; finding trending stories isn't exactly a no-brainer, but compared to self-driving cars, understanding natural language, or inventing things, it's pretty easy.

Really, I'm sure they could make a fully-automated trend system, but for some reason, they don't. It could be that an automated version would have unfortunate quirks (say, it can't tell trending news from trending porn.) Or it might not make much financial sense. Maybe it's just cheaper to have a team of people do the work rather than a bunch of computers. Or maybe they just can't teach the computers to have a liberal bias.

Meanwhile, I just saw a story about a translation device that fits in your ear. Yes, fellow geeks, it's an artificial version of the Babel Fish from The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy. The story even had a note about the fictional fish, confident that the reference wouldn't hurt the concept's credibility. Given how notoriously awkward current translation is, I find it hard to believe we're ready to make the jump to the Universal Translator anytime soon.

So maybe AI is going to make a big, fast push, quickly becoming a big part of our lives. Or maybe this is another case of reporters falling for technology hype, or AI's weird ability to fool people into seeming smarter than it is.