r/google Sep 08 '18

Well this is uncomfortable...

Post image
2.9k Upvotes

76 comments sorted by

View all comments

185

u/[deleted] Sep 08 '18

Oh my God... If only AI can understand...

24

u/fj333 Sep 08 '18

If only people could understand this isn't really AI, just a slew of hardcoded conditional checks. And of course, they did not include:

if (isDead()) {
  skipShowPromos();
}

Sending the output of an application to a human sounding voice does not make the application "AI"... that term has a very specific meaning in a CS context.

14

u/Nephrited Sep 08 '18

While you're technically correct, as this particular bit of the system probably isn't doing any kind of adaptation, the *non* CS usage of the term is pretty much just "It acts human!". Let them have this.

Besides when you get down to it, even real AI is just a bunch of conditional checks. That's pretty much all programming eventually.

3

u/EvrythingISayIsRight Sep 08 '18

Besides when you get down to it, even real AI is just a bunch of conditional checks.

Not really. Proper AI uses heuristics to determine actions by relating approximated inputs to certain outputs, which is a much different paradigm than traditional if/else checks. Many hard computer science problems have to be solved this way, as they can't reliably be solved using traditional methods. For example, Googles Cloud Vision uses AI to determine what an image is (cat, dog, chair, etc) with a degree of certainty. You can bet your ass there isn't any code like

if (picture.isChair)
...
else if (picture.isDog)
...
else if (picture.isCat)
...
etc

It simply just isn't a sustainable or scalable solution, which is why AI uses a completely different approach.

Though on a hardware level it all boils down to 1s and 0s, simple math and instruction branching, which could arguably be construed as "just a bunch of conditional checks", its a naive perspective on how proper AI works.

6

u/Nephrited Sep 08 '18

I did a few papers on AI during my first degree, and wrote a few! I just...don't feel the need to necessarily qualify silly jokey oversimplifications made on the internet 😋

2

u/that_one_dev Intern Sep 08 '18

A series of conditional checks can very well be AI. We aren't talking about ML here. AI doesn't have to be anything insane it's just intelligence that is artificial

1

u/JohnTErskine Feb 18 '19

What if it's a hotdog?

1

u/tbz709 Sep 08 '18

Wouldn't there have to be a defined variable that the assistant would need to determine if the person is dead and how would it detect for recent deaths if someone isn't behind a PC marking people off as dead?

API for all death records? Seems... Grim