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Ray Kurzeil's Google Team Is Building Intelligent Chatbots (theverge.com) 98

An anonymous reader quotes an article from The Verge. Inventor Ray Kurzweil made his name as a pioneer in technology that helped machines understand human language, both written and spoken. In a video from a recent Singularity conference Kurzweil says he and his team at Google are building a chatbot, and that it will be released sometime later this year... "My team, among other things, is working on chatbots. We expect to release some chatbots you can talk to later this year."

One of the bots will be named Danielle, and according to Kurzweil, it will draw on dialog from a character named Danielle, who appears in a novel he wrote -- a book titled, what else, Danielle... He said that anyone will be able to create their own unique chatbot by feeding it a large sample of your writing, for example by letting it ingest your blog. This would allow the bot to adopt your "style, personality, and ideas."

Kurzweil also predicted that we won't see AIs with full "human-level" language abilities until 2029, "But you'll be able to have interesting conversations before that."

Comment Re:We have already figured most of this out. (Score 2) 365

In other words: do not look for a technical solution for a social problem.

Too true. Technology is not 100% of the solution to the problem. It can be used for good, evil, or anything in between.

That being said: modern technology has allowed us to dramatically increase life expectancy and quality through modern medicine. We have transitioned from a civilization where the vast majority of people have to be involved in agriculture or other basic survival tasks in order for the society to survive, to a civilization where a negligible fraction of people are involved in those tasks. I think that that progress certainly qualifies a technical solution to some of humanity's biggest (former) problems.

Imagine a world where a single moderately wealthy person's means can feed and house millions in comfort. Imagine a world where food and shelter are as cheap as fresh air. Even barring some kind of dramatic "technological acceleration," we might be closer to that goal than most of us imagine. Could this lead to dystopia? Certainly. It might also lead to paradise on Earth: It depends on us and what we do with the power that those technologies gives us.

A lot of social problems in Africa, Eastern Europe, and Asia are caused by poverty. Like you said

Technically we are able to give everybody enough food. Technically we are able to distribute wealth better. Technically we are able not to kill each other.

That does not mean that we do that.

Just because we are technically able to does not mean that it would be easy. Even in the US, one can scarcely support oneself, much less a family, while working hard on minimum wage. If, through technological advances, we reduce the cost of the basic necessities even more, that change will filter out to the less privileged parts of the world. If food and shelter are free (or almost free), it will be much more difficult for warlords to keep food from the starving. It will be much more difficult for groups like ISIS to gain traction surrounded by a healthy comfortable populace that has basic luxuries and does not fear starvation.

We need more than just technology to make the world a better place, but don't underestimate the amazing potential for extreme social change (whether positive or negative is up to us) that is inherent in certain advances!

Comment Re:This /. headline is sensationalist drivel (Score 4, Informative) 248

4 NM / 140 knots = about 1.7 mins (Like the summary says). Not more than 3 minutes. Just a little nitpick; your overall point is still correct: 2 minutes is a LONG time in this kind of situation. Possibly embarrassing for 777 pilots to be doing while in VMC (Visual Meteorological Conditions). Definitely NOT newsworthy. (I fly for a living, missed approaches happen).

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