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Why You Can’t Have a Real Conversation With Your Chatbot

Sure, we can ask Siri or Alexa to answer a question or perform an action for us.  But Siri and Alexa can only respond to pre-programmed questions and commands.  (You can find a detailed explanation of how personal assistants work here).  They do not really understand what you are saying, and you cannot have a real conversation with a personal assistant like you can with another person.

Three-year-old children understand language. We have computers that can beat chess champions. Why is building computer systems that understand natural language so difficult?  (Natural languages are the languages that people speak as opposed to computer languages).

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Don’t Fear Artificial General Intelligence

Photo: Naeblys / iStockPhoto


AI has blasted its way into the public consciousness and our everyday lives. It is powering advances in medicine, weather prediction, factory automation, and self-driving cars. Even golf club manufacturers report that AI is now designing their clubs.

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GPT-3 Does Not Understand What It Is Saying

Imagine that we sent a robot-controlled spaceship out to the far reaches of the galaxy to contact other life forms. On the ship, we placed a copy of all the text on the internet over the last three years so intelligent alien races would be able to learn something about us. After traveling twelve light-years, the ship enters the solar system around the star Luyten where it is boarded by aliens. The Luytenites retrieve the copy of the internet text and try to make sense of it.

They ask their top linguists to interpret these strange symbols but make little progress. The Luytenites were in the same position as eighteenth-century archaeologists who kept discovering stones with ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. Finally, in 1799, archaeologists discovered the Rosetta stone which had both Egyptian hieroglyphs and ancient Greek text. Because they had what turned out to be the same decree in two languages, they were finally able to figure out the meanings of the hieroglyphs.