Calling the Bluff on IBM Watson and Other Tales of Artificial Intelligence

Artificial intelligence may not be so intelligent, after all. Or is it?

Let me give you an example from my own experience recently. I wanted to check out Amazon’s new Bluetooth-speaker-cum-virtual-assistant Echo and typed “Amazon Echo” on Google, which turned up close to 19 million results. I clicked the first, “official Amazon” one, taking me straight to product description on Amazon.com (the US site).

The IP intelligence of the Amazon site figured out that I’m from India and offered to take me to the Indian site, Amazon.in. Never the one to fully trust websites, however exalted they may be, I chose to open the proffered link in a new tab, which duly took me to the Amazon India site.

But hey, what do I see? Where’s the Echo that I intended to check out? Why is Amazon showing me a banner of yoga and pictures of a few books? (See image below.)

The above could be a (minor or major) flaw in how Amazon has built its search-based geographical reference links or may have something to do with integration issues with its famed recommendation engine. But if such problems are persisting with other people’s online experiences, Amazon may have a problem on its hands.

It is not just Amazon (or Google for that matter, which continues to struggle with AI in its search algorithm, self-driving cars and other bleeding-edge projects).

In fact, I was really taken aback when I came across a stunning headline of an article someone had shared on social media. It boldly read: “The Fraudulent Claims Made by IBM about Watson and AI.”

What? Whhh…Watson? My mouth was still agape when my eye caught the next line and compelled both my heart and mind to read on (now trying running AI algos on this line :)

“They are not doing ‘cognitive computing’ no matter how many times they say they are,” writes Roger Schank in this no-holds-barred piece.

I could have dismissed it as crank but no, it was Schank—a fellow of the AAAI, the founder of the Cognitive Science Society, and co-founder of the Journal of Cognitive Science. A Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Texas, he is one of the world's leading AI researchers and the author of more than 30 books. (Must be an intelligent fellow, is what I could conclude with my LI, or limited intelligence.)

But then, I digress. So let’s return to Watson, AI and what Dr. Schank reveals in the article. The following passage is directly quoted from it.

“What I am concerned about are the exaggerated claims being made by IBM about their Watson program. Recently they ran an ad featuring Bob Dylan which made [me] laugh, or would have, if [it] had made not me so angry. I will say it clearly: Watson is a fraud. I am not saying that it can’t crunch words, and there may well be value in that to some people. But the ads are fraudulent.”

Dr. Schank quotes Ann Rubin, VP of branded content and global creative, IBM, from her interaction with Ad Week. According to the Ad Week write-up, the computer [Watson] brags it can read 800 million pages per second, identifying key themes in Dylan's work, like "time passes" and "love fades."

Unfortunately for Ann Rubin and IBM, Dr. Schank turned out to be a big fan of Dylan’s who knew his work more intimately and with human intelligence that no Watson can probably boast of in another couple of decades at least. (That’s entirely my opinion, based on LI, as I told you before :)

Another one straight from Dr. Schank:

“Really? I am a child of the 60s and I remember Dylan’s songs well enough. Ask anyone from that era about Bob Dylan and no one will tell you his main theme was "love fades". He was a protest singer, and a singer about the hard knocks of life. He was part of the anti-war movement. Love fades? That would be a dumb computer counting words. How would Watson see that many of Dylan’s songs were part of the anti-war movement? Does he say anti-war a lot? He probably never said it in a song.”

So that’s it, folks. You know what, when I read about somewhere that computers, with the help of AI, would soon be writing books and novels (one has already been written somewhere I think), or a blog post on AI like the one you are reading, I was a little scared (both about my job and about the experience of reading that AI-written book).

But thanks to Dr. Schank’s brilliant critique, I now know what makes us humans unique.

This is not to say that the great work scientists around the world are doing with AI is a waste or all of it is braggadocio (that’s the first time I’ve ever used that word, I swear. But I cannot promise you not to use it again, okay!) In fact, there’s a great future for artificial intelligence; only that one shouldn’t be overconfident about the present of machines that don’t yet know whether they are intelligent or not.

I would strongly urge you to read the complete article and make your own articulate or artificial conclusions, as the case may be.

Perhaps it’s not so elementary, Watson.

(Image courtesy: Pixabay.com. This post first appeared on dynamicCIO.com.)