The limits of intelligent personal assistants

In almost every science fiction movie you’ll see people conversing with machines. Of course, the rise of intelligent personal assistants means you probably do this yourself already. This posting asks: what’s the difference? Also, recent news on Facebook acquisitions, spoken language translation, and sentiment analysis. Science fiction fascinates us because it paints a picture of a world that is different from our own. Different but not too different: we need to recognise the world of the future as belonging to the realm of the maybe-possible rather than the realm of the actual. It has to be just the other side of what you might call ‘the reality horizon’. Stray too far on the other side of the horizon and you end up with science fantasy. Good science fiction is just at the boundaries of the believable. The onward march of technology keeps science fiction writers in business. As technological capabilities move forward, the reality horizon, or what counts as believable, moves too. And so the science fiction writer has to dream up ever more ingenious devices – forms of transport, types of weapons, and ways of manipulating and extending our brains and bodies – that continue to stretch our imaginations. But as future technologies go, portrayals of Artificial Intelligence are a bit different, because the reality horizon doesn’t move. Human intelligence today is what it was 100 years ago. So, as time goes on, cinematic portrayals of machine intelligence, and particularly those that are manifested via the use of language, seem less and less like fiction. If you screw up your eyes a bit, and stop watching before the AI actually gets out of hand (I’m trying to avoid a spoiler here), the machine version of Johnny Depp in the 2014 movie Transcendence does seem just a wee bit like IBM’s Watson on steroids. Ok, maybe you have to screw up your eyes quite a lot, but there’s at least a family resemblance in there. Alternatively, consider Samantha, ‘the first artificially intelligent operating system’ in the 2013 romantic comedy Her. Samantha has some amazing capabilities, a bit like a version of 2001’s HAL that has lightened up a 1 http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2209764/ 2 http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1798709/ 3 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HAL 9000