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Tag Archive for Sci-Fi

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.

 

 

Little Nibbles

June 28, 2015 future, Writing Comments Off on Little Nibbles

http://spectrum.ieee.org/video/robotics/medical-robots/video-miniature-robots-perform-surgery

Progress is being made on all fronts with regards to microscopic medical devices.  It’s not taking the form we might have imagined once upon a time, no self-replicating nano-bots, no magic chemical elixirs to restore youth and vigor.  But you know, the future never does.  You can see the roots of many technologies in the kids of things futurists and science friction writers come up with, but the ultimate result, the practical application is often very different.

Most of the time, IMHO, it’s somehow even cooler, these future technologies come to life.  When you read about them, when you try to envision them, your ideas are almost always incomplete.  You’re working with the gestalt, the overall concept, rather than the specifics.  But when you see those specifics operating IRL, when you see the bits turn and bend, when you see the shadows they cast and the way they hang in solution, they suddenly become the kind of real that your imagination can’t quite compare to.

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