A New Google Project Sets Out to Solve Artificial Stupidity
By now most of us have learned first-hand that human-AI relations need some work. Amazon’s Alexa personal assistant is plugged into one of the world’s largest online stores and can pull information from Wikipedia. But can it help you when you yell out what in the moment feels like a simple request to play that summer banger you just heard, starting at the catchy chorus? “I'm sorry, I don't understand the question.”
All supposedly smart helpers including Apple’s Siri and Google’s prosaically named Google Assistant are capable of frustrating feats of what can feel like artificial stupidity. It’s one reason that Google is starting a new research push to understand and improve the relations between humans and AI. PAIR, for People + AI Research initiative, was announced today and will be led by two experts in data visualization, Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg. One thing they hope to do is create a toolkit of techniques and ideas about how to design AI systems less prone to disappointing or surprising us humans.
