Desde el blog de Nicholas Carr: "A post on the occasion of Facebook’s billionth member" [or "Machine learning happening"]

Aquí la entrada completa, desde el blog de Nicholas Carr

Extracto genial:

"The company [Google] has begun applying its neural nets to speech-recognition and image-recognition tasks. And, according to Google engineer Jeff Dean, the technology can already outperform people at some jobs:

“We are seeing better than human-level performance in some visual tasks,” he says, giving the example of labeling, where house numbers appear in photos taken by Google’s Street View car, a job that used to be farmed out to many humans. ”They’re starting to use neural nets to decide whether a patch [in an image] is a house number or not,” says Dean, and they turn out to perform better than humans.

But the real advantage of a neural net in such work, Dean goes on to say, probably has less to do with any real “intelligence” than with the machine’s utter inability to experience boredom. “It’s probably that [the task is] not very exciting, and a computer never gets tired,” he says. Comments Simonite, sagely: “It takes real intelligence to get bored.”

Forget the Turing Test. We’ll know that computers are really smart when computers start getting bored. If you assign a computer a profoundly tedious task like spotting house numbers in video images, and then you come back a couple of hours later and find that the computer is checking its Facebook feed or surfing porn, then you’ll know that artificial intelligence has truly arrived."


***

Para entender la profundidad de la intuición de Nicholas Carr y Tom Simonite (a quien Carr está comentando) hay que leer a Martin Heidegger :-) "Los conceptos fundamentales de la metafísica: mundo, finitud, soledad" ¡En serio!