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Robotics IBM

IBM's Watson AI Implanted Into a Robot, Evolves, Can Now Sense Emotions (hothardware.com) 168

Posted by EditorDavid from the domo-arigato dept.
bigwophh writes that IBM's Watson cognitive computing platform "is now more capable and human-like, especially when encapsulated in a robot body." An article from Hot Hardware reports that this week at NVIDIA's GPU Technology Conference, "We saw Watson in robot form respond to queries just like a human would, using not only speech but movement. When its dancing skills were called into question, the robot responded by showing off its Gangnam Style moves." After winning Jeopardy's million-dollar championship in 2011, Watson moved on to "more practical applications" like providing data-analyzing services for doctors, lawyers, and other professionals, and "the capabilities of what IBM has created are nothing short of amazing... Just like a real person, the underlying AI can get a read on people through movement and cognitive analysis of their speech. It can determine mood, tone, inflection, and so forth."
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IBM's Watson AI Implanted Into a Robot, Evolves, Can Now Sense Emotions More

IBM's Watson AI Implanted Into a Robot, Evolves, Can Now Sense Emotions

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  • How long until I have one for carpool lanes?

  • "the capabilities of what IBM has created are nothing short of amazing... Just like a real person, the underlying AI can get a read on people through movement and cognitive analysis of their speech. It can determine mood, tone, inflection, and so forth."

    I'll believe it when I see it.

    Thus far, emotional analysis is an over-hyped category and I am getting tired of marketers beating that dead horse over and over again.

    • You must use this fear. It is your strength. together we will rule the galaxy.

  • NO (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    The software codes have no ability to sense whether it is a coffee can or a Abrams M1 Tank that hosts the code.

    This is just another example of, "My Cat Tricked Me, Therefore It is a Genus!".

    Ha ha ja ja

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Indeed. This thing can _fake_ certain simple things that humans can actually do. The deception is limited to simple standard-situations and is entirely shallow. It breaks down completely as soon as something unexpected happens. This thing is an automaton, no intelligence involved.

      Of course, some people want to make a log of money with this (and IBM desperately needs a lot of money as due to persistent mis-management almost everybody competent has left or been downsized), so this animistic nonsense about it

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by KGIII ( 973947 )

        I don't watch a whole lot of movies unless they're documentaries but I did watch one, a recent one, and it was actually pretty good. You might like it, if you've never seen it. It's called Ex Machina and I believe it was a /.er who recommended it. If you haven't seen it then I shan't spoil it. It's about an Android that is both female and is a deep AI. It's also about her interaction with humans. What I appreciated most about it was that it was real science fiction. It left me questioning, thinking, and a c

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by gweihir ( 88907 )

          Sorry, I am not into techno-fantasy pretending to be SF.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by KGIII ( 973947 )

            Nah, I think this classifies as sci-fi. Not hard sci-fi but science fiction nonetheless. It's really quite an eye opener and, like a good science fiction work, gives you lots of additional questions. However, I'm not gonna force you to watch it or even try to urge you a second time. I will add that it's not really like you described. It's feasible, certainly. But you'd not know, unless you watched and you're unwilling to watch so I guess you'll have to believe that's what it is.

      • Of course the "intelligence" displayed by AI programs is a trick. But then the "intelligence" displayed by humans is also a trick.

        For example, we believe that we make decisions with the conscious mind, but actually recent science shows that the subconcious mind makes decisions, leaving the conscious mind to make up plausible explanations for that decision, of asked. Yet the conscious mind doesn't know the real reason.

        Of course you could define intelligence as the particular set of tricks that the biological

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by Kjella ( 173770 )

        Indeed. This thing can _fake_ certain simple things that humans can actually do. The deception is limited to simple standard-situations and is entirely shallow. It breaks down completely as soon as something unexpected happens. This thing is an automaton, no intelligence involved.

        I think you underestimate how much people do that really is based in rules and training, most people aren't really doing anything groundbreaking new. And particularly in a professional context their authority to be creative is often extremely limited where they'll have to either escalate or reject things that are out of the ordinary. If you're a star chef you set your own menu, if you're a pizza chef in a chain restaurat it's all regulated right down to how many slices of pepperoni goes on a pepperoni pizza

  • When if get's to smart will it try to kill the people who it's feels are trying to trun it off.

  • but seriously, what does "Gangnam Style moves", have to do with so called AI? such physical dexterity is mainly a feat of mechanical engineering , and can be ( and are) performed by robots without "AI".

    • ... if Watson learned the Gangnam Style moves by watching videos, and independently decided when using them is appropriate, that would be extremely significant. I am assuming that is not the case. However, with advances taking place in deep learning, AIs may be doing just that in a few years.

    • More precisely, you could ask "What do Gangnam Style moves have to do with a journalist's for-profit article about AI?", and you might have a clearer answer.

      Flippancy aside, they're specifically researching emotional AI, and dancing has long been associated with emotional response in humans. Baby steps, but if machines and people are going to interact more smoothly in the future, it'd help if the software had some understanding of the causes and effects of human emotional reactions.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by KGIII ( 973947 )

        Flippancy aside, they're specifically researching emotional AI, and dancing has long been associated with emotional response in humans.

        So doesn't mass murder, so doesn't stomping of soldier's boots, so doesn't spousal abuse, so don't child rape, and so doesn't terrorism.

        Not that I'm worried about an AI causing harm, or at least more harm than humans, but it is mildly amusing to humor the thought.

        In fact, it was WWII that brought about America's "Greatest Generation." It seems really popular to say things like, "Make America Great Again!" That elicits emotional responses from a whole bunch of people. Some of them are even happy with the rhe

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Nothing at all. But many people do not understand that, so stunts like this are added to improve the deception.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Dantoo ( 176555 )

      "When its dancing skills were called into question, the robot responded by showing off its Gangnam Style moves."

      Yeah but then the crowd started to diss its ability get the upper hand in a physical contest. It said "I'll be back" and left the room.
      (Sound of truck revving up outside.)

  • "...Can Now Sense Emotions" (Score:5, Interesting)

    by SeaFox ( 739806 ) on Saturday April 09, 2016 @09:41PM (#51877351)

    Should have "in humans" as part of that, I misinterpreted that headline completely.

  • 'Skynet dances to "Gangam Style" '

  • Winning Jeopardy! was indeed an amazing achievement. Certainly more that Google searches, but much less than real intelligence. But that is quite a different type of problem from diagnosing medical issues (Think Mycin, 1980s) or making a robot dance.

    So anything vaguely intelligent that IBM does automatically seems to be labelled "Watson". And the ignorant press just naively swallows it.

    This is not helpful. There are real AI technologies, and they are different and have different abilities that go beyond

    • You seem to think that a real AI project would only use one approach to AI. But of course they don't, any more than a human brain does. Watson undoubtably pulls on data-mining techniques, neural-nets, rule-based AI, scripts and many other techniques.

      • Actually, one of the few accessible semi-technical papers on Watson claims that their main contribution to the field was in utilizing several different techniques and then selecting the best result from them. Not so much at the low level like neural-nets vs rule-based, more at the higher level of different engines.

        But Wason is what it is, and that aint everything.

  • I speak for the internet when I ask: (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Gravis Zero ( 934156 ) on Saturday April 09, 2016 @10:00PM (#51877421)

    Can you fuck it? [youtube.com]

  • And why does it sound like a woman when it's name is "Watson"

    • Most AI's emulate females, because experience shows that human beings, both male and female, relate better when the AI presents as female.

  • without getting poop on it's fingers? Because that really would be progress.

  • Financial analysts overall suggest Watson has been ho-hum as an investment. It may be worth more in PR than in actual products.

    • Yeah, I've been wondering that too. IBM tries to talk it up, but I haven't seen any numbers like, "we made X billion off Watson this quarter"

  • Lie Detector (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    One of these days Watson will be used to monitor election debates..

  • "Artificial intelligence is sort of the holy grail of computing,
    and while we may never reproduce the human brain or it's capabilities in their entirety in electronic form"

    Stopped reading at this point, as the author has assumed that the "sort of holy grail of computing" is not possible.

    The human brain is not magic. I assume the author thinks otherwise.

    • The human brain may not be magic, but we have absolutely no idea how it works, and until we figure that out, we can't replicate it other than by the traditional method of having a baby.

      • I think we're a little bit further than "absolutely no idea", at least at the low level interaction between neurons. And once you understand the basics, it's quite feasible that you can start to replicate the results, even without understanding the whole thing. Our brains evolved from rodent-sized brains in a few million generations, without any planning or understanding. We could do something similar for artificial brains.

        • You can replicate the hardware, but then you have a dead brain. We don't even know where to start in terms of replicating the "software".

          • The brain is only hardware. There is no software. And we do know where to start. Look at the Deepmind projects for instance. The trick is self learning, evolved networks and genetic algorithms. We're still behind the real brain in terms of learning efficiency and robustness, but we can improve that by studying small pieces of our brain that exhibit those behaviors, and then simply scaling up the hardware. That's how our own brain evolved. We're never going to understand the whole brain, simply because it's

  • Skynet will most likely be cute (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Z80a ( 971949 ) on Sunday April 10, 2016 @02:06AM (#51878115)

    SCI-FI generally take as a rule that an "AI will never understand human emotions" and thus write em like cold emotionless machines that crush human skulls with their metallic feet, but in reality, it's probably not that hard to manipulate humans by their emotions.
    Which means the Skynet probably will take the form of a friendly but horribly manipulative virtual creature that will make people commit suicide by just saying and showing the right things instead of wasting time and resource building robots.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Did you see Ex-Machina?

  • For everybody (Score:3)

    by nospam007 ( 722110 ) * on Sunday April 10, 2016 @04:37AM (#51878379)

    I use it every week to cook on weekends.

    https://www.ibmchefwatson.com/... [ibmchefwatson.com]

    You enter what you have in the fridge and pantry and it suggests meals to cook with fantastic combinations, that real chefs around the world are using too.

  • Been following this Watson stuff for quite a while, and I still can't say which. Probably not magic, however. Even watched people "playing" with the Japanese Pepper robot in Softbank, and can't figure out if there is anything there. The users may not be sufficiently easily amused?

  • Hah! Can't lift a foot for this demo - look at any human doing this kind of move, they clearly lift their feet alternately off the ground and their system keeps balance, they don't fall over (most of the time, unless they are drunk or stoned).

    Now, what about the size of this thing - what kind of message are they trying to send with this? Beats me.

  • This might finally explain IBM's long game as they purge the company of now unneeded human consultants. It only seemed like a complete hollowing out of all institutional knowledge and ability to create customer satisfaction while pursuing a short sighted focus on quarterly numbers.

    • ability to create customer satisfaction while pursuing a short sighted focus on quarterly numbers.

      But what if this both increases customer satisfaction, and results in an increase of quarterly numbers for the long term?

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