The Fine Brothers pull out the confusing stuff for kids again, this time exposing them to obsolete computers, the kind we used just a few years years ago. Oh, it’s an Apple II from the ‘80s. With floppy drives, no mouse, and it’s text-based on a black background. And no internet! When I had one of those, I thought it was the neatest thing ever, even though you practically had to know how to program just to use the thing. -Thanks, Benny!
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Comments (3)
"This big, clunky thing is a phone? Why did they call it an eye-phone? It's way too big to be implanted in your eye when you're born!"
"How many US-RMB's did this thing used to cost?"
IBM's Watson Memorized the Entire 'Urban Dictionary,' Then His Overlords Had to Delete It
Humans talk funny. We invent words. We smash words together, tear them apart, abbreviate them one way, then another. Which is great and fun, if you're a human. Not so great if you are a machine or the kind of human who programs machines to understand language.
And so, when IBM's famous artificial intelligence, Watson, he/she/it of Jeopardy-winning fame, was in development, its head researcher had a great idea. Humans created this repository of slang,
The Urban Dictionary. For example, today on the site, we learn that 'healthy gas' is "the gas (fart) produced from a person who has eaten healthy foods like cabbage, beans, broccolli, grains, or other high fiber, high carbohydrate foods."
Brown realized that this formalization of informal language might be a great way for Watson to understand the way real people communicate. So, he and his team, fed the whole thing into their AI.
But one problem. Informal language has a tendency to be dirty, nasty language. Its insults and cuss words, new names for gross old things, old names for gross new things, etc. And so, we learn from Fortune's Michal Lev-Ram, they had to delete all that human messiness from Watson's memory
Watson couldn't distinguish between polite language and profanity -- which the Urban Dictionary is full of. Watson picked up some bad habits from reading Wikipedia as well. In tests it even used the word "bull" in an answer to a researcher's query.
Ultimately, Brown's 35-person team developed a filter to keep Watson from swearing and scraped the Urban Dictionary from its memory.
Thirty years from now, kids will laugh at smart phones. Yesterday I was at an auction where a Sony multi-disc CD player went for $1. Technology ages damn fast.
Then again, I actually did try to take the exam for the postal service once. It took the administrators of the test 45 minutes to explain to everyone there how to fill out the name portion of the test. No joke. The entire test was supposed to take less than an hour, and I ended up not taking the exam because I was an instructor and had to get to my next class. Gave me a whole new perspective on the level of intelligence the government seemed to be looking for.