In May 2018, Google unveiled its Duplex programme to a gobsmacked audience. This software can call a restaurant and book a table by itself, without the person on the other end realising they've been talking with artificial intelligence. Duplex is not only able to hold a conversation, but even imitate the pauses and interjections typical of human speech. Duplex's abilities may have bowled people over, but they also raised quite a few concerns. After all, how can we be sure that AI won't deceive us in the future by pretending to be human? Do we need to make software declare its artificial nature? Are we just at the beginning of an evolution that will see AI resemble human beings more and more, until it develops consciousness? These are all fascinating questions, but they are far removed from what Duplex has demonstrated so far. “But Google Duplex is not the advance toward meaningful A.I. that many people seem to think,” writes professor of neural sciences, Gary Marcus. “If you read Google’s public statement about Google Duplex, you’ll discover that the initial scope of the project is surprisingly limited.” ... “make restaurant reservations, schedule hair salon appointments.” But why such a limited range of possibilities? The reason lies in the very nature of deep learning, the algorithms on which artificial intelligence is based. To hold a conversation, AI has to be trained with hundreds of thousands of pieces of data, which teach it all the possible interactions in a chat between two human beings. Then, it can statistically assess the right answer to a given question. It's a tall order and one that can only work if the conversation is very circumscribed (as with booking a table at a restaurant). “The reason Google Duplex is so narrow in scope isn’t that it represents a small but important first step toward such goals,” Marcus continues. “The reason is that the field of A.I. doesn’t yet have a clue how to do any better.” ... “Open-ended conversation on a wide range of topics is nowhere in sight”.
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