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Tag Archive for future

Talk Data to Me

July 1, 2015 future, Videogames, Writing Comments Off on Talk Data to Me

 

http://arxiv.org/pdf/1506.05869v2.pdf

There’s a difference, a pretty large difference, between an AI and a chatbot. It’s perhaps hard to see if you’re on the receiving end, if you don’t know what to look for, but the way they act and react are different and in the case of a chatbot, once you figure out how the logic behind it works, you can talk it in circles.  Which is a good way to kill an afternoon, if you’re bored on the intarwebz.

Not that I have ever done this.  Oh no, not me.

The point of a chatbot, usually, is to mimic conversation.  They are often not capable of *steering* a conversation themselves, they don’t, or can’t, as leading questions unless the developer has planned ahead (and even then, you can tell when the canned questions come into play, the segues are never terribly smooth).  What they can do reasonably well, however, is continue a conversation in much the same way that many humans do.  It deconstructs your sentence, pulls the appropriate verbs and subjects, and constructs a question or response of it’s own.

If you’ve ever gotten a customer service call, or contacted customer service through one of those “live chat” services offered by banks and online retailers you’ve likely encountered a few chatbots.  Depending on the sophistication, they are often used to just collect your basic information before passing you off to a real-live human, but you can hear the difference if you listen.

 

 

Food as Art with Robots

May 22, 2015 future, Writing Comments Off on Food as Art with Robots

 

http://www.industrytap.com/robot-master-chef-cooks-2000-recipes-cleans-dishes/28765

 

God, I want to love this.  I really do.  Robots in my kitchen would just be too d*amn cool.  I’d actually host parties, like TONS of parties just so I could watch this thing work.  I’d be fat as a house because I would just ask it to cook dish after meal after snack so I could watch those beautifully animated arms chop carrots and make fresh pasta.  Really, tech this sexxy could be my undoing.

But it’s not quite right.

I get the idea that freshly made food almost always tastes better, presents better.  I get that idea that the precision and handling of the food, directly mapped from the hands of a professional, can give you an extra bump in quality, can give you extra style and flair.

But this is all mechanical.  This is all engineering.

Food is is the fine split between science and art.  It’s being able to adjust on the fly because the last batch of tomatoes was a little underripe, or you ended up with baby carrots instead of full-size, slightly imperfect horse-carrots, or you have plain old sea-salt in the larder instead of rose-colored Himalayan salt.

This robot can handle the mechanics of preparation, which is definitely an important part, but that will not change the *taste* of the ingredients that go into the dish.  So while you might have something that looks super-sexxy on a plate, it still might come out tasting like something out of a one star diner if your ingredients aren’t quite up to snuff.

And the robot won’t be able to tell the difference.

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