Read the entire article here: https://www.therobotreport.com/jibo-social-robot-analyzing-what-went-wrong/
It's so sad for me to read an article like that, especially this excerpt:
Unfortunately, the technology Jibo requires to be compelling at an affordable price isn’t ready. The company underestimated the its competition and what it would take to get the product off the ground.
I wonder what the *unaffordable* price would be, especially whether they could make the thing function as advertised at *any* price. The whole situation reminds me of the failure of self-driving cars, chatbots, or Windows' speech recognition system (WSR) (
http://www.knowbrainer.com/forums/forum/messageview.cfm?catid=4&STARTPAGE=1&threadid=33462):
Windows Speech Recognition (WSR) is now considered to be a circa 2006 speech recognition failure. Microsoft gave up on WSR even before Windows Vista was released.
Come on, folks, let me say it again:
The technology is not there yet. Such problems in vision, speech, and natural language understanding are called "AI-hard" (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI-complete) because nobody knows how to solve them. Such problems rely on fundamentals that we simply haven't discovered yet, or as the Wikipedia page says:
In the field of artificial intelligence, the most difficult problems are informally known as AI-complete or AI-hard, implying that the difficulty of these computational problems, assuming intelligence is computational, is equivalent to that of solving the central artificial intelligence problem—making computers as intelligent as people, or strong AI.
There you have it: Either we figure out strong AI, or else we'll just be spinning our wheels, ripping off naive investors with new buzzwords every few years, for another 60 years. The field is mostly going nowhere nowadays; a fundamental breakthrough is badly needed. It's painful for me to see startup companies being born just to capitalize on some tiny tweak in software that some unenlightened employee dreamed up: people are so focused on money, or maybe just so lazy or so badly educated, that they won't seriously tackle the fundamental problem of AI. Does nobody have the creativity to solve the basic problem, which may equate to a single insight? I'm so dismayed by it all. I blame the situation mostly on people's personal values + a horrible educational system that promotes regurgitation of what has already been learned rather than questioning fundamental assumptions and being creative.
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Michio Kaku Warning on the Decline of Science in America and Western Civilization
Muon Ray
Published on Oct 11, 2014
(p. 163)
But again, perhaps the fear of boosting intelligence has been exagger-
ated. The average person has absolutely no interest in being able to solve the
complex tensor equations for a black hole. The average person sees noth-
ing to gain my mastering the mathematics of hyperspatial dimensions or the
physics of the quantum theory. On the contrary, the average person may
find such activities rather boring and useless. So most of us are not going to
become mathematical geniuses if given the opportunity, because it is not in
our character, and we see nothing to gain from it.
Keep in mind that
society already has a class of accomplished mathema-
ticians and physicists, and they are paid significantly less than ordinary busi-
nessmen and wield much less power than average politicians. Being super
smart does not guarantee financial success in life. In fact,
being super smart
may actually pigeonhole you in the lower rungs of a society that values ath-
letes, movie stars, comedians, and entertainers more. No one ever got rich doing relativity.
Kaku, Michio. 2014.
The Future of the Mind: The Scientific Quest to Understand, Enhance, and Empower the Mind. New York: Doubleday.
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The Reason Education Sucks
iStateOfMind3
Published on Jan 28, 2013