Thursday, February 8, 2018

My Private Space Oddity


Yesterday Elon Musk sent a car towards Mars. See more details and pictures here:
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/feb/07/space-oddity-elon-musk-spacex-car-mars-falcon-heavy
One of the funny things planted in the car was David Bowie's song "Space Oddity" that's playing in loops (look and listen: Space Oddity nice clip). The original song was released several days before the first man landed on the moon. The song's lyrics were inspired by the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey and its melody by the same movie's song Also Sprach Zarathustra (πŸ“³πŸŽΆπŸŽ΅πŸŽΆ my ringtone πŸ’™πŸ’™πŸ’™)

Speaking of 2001: A Space Odyssey - besides envisioning what space travel would look like, it has many elements from Artificial Intelligence. More than 50 years ago, when computers could barely solve basic math, it envisioned a super computer (called HAL) speaking in natural language, playing chess with humans, reading lips, taking responsibility for unexpected missions and more...
See the next video, a scene where HAL is working up a psychology report:

Transcript from the video above - HAL (the sentient computer) in action, working on a psychology report

Deep Blue, IBM's chess-playing computer winning world champion on 1996
We are not there yet but we are definitely on track. Artificial Intelligence is competing against humans in the most complicated games (see also how AlphaGo won Lee Sedol). No one exactly programmed its moves. IT LEARNS.
In some sense, computers have basic "understanding". When we search for something in a search engine, we get good results.
The question is not whether but, WHEN will computers have a DEEP UNDERSTANDING of human beings and HOW we humans will give them that skill. WHAT will be the technology that will allow us to do that?
I see it as a real challenge that the whole world was waiting for, for many years.
Because I love challenges, I'm concentrating now on researching the Natural Language Processing domain and in particulate with Psychology data, wishing to teach computer to "read" people.
As in all research, no one knows what it will lead to, and for me that future is an intriguing oddity.


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