Robots Can Read Better Than You
I'm not saying you can't read, I'm just saying that pretty soon your refrigerator will be able to read circles around your inadequate flesh. Don't believe me? Well, maybe you didn't read the latest report from Newsweek on the latest breakthroughs in AI (Artificial Intelligence), machine learning, and natural-language processing that basically allow robots to read and comprehend information like a human - but. better. All researchers at Alibaba’s Institute of Data Science of Technologies (an arm of Chinese retail company Alibaba) had to do was construct an algorithm that could absorb information from books to form a basic understanding of human behavior, then they just turned it loose on the internet! It's like no one saw the Terminator movies at all!
After feasting on information from sites like Wikipedia, the algorithm can now read and comprehend better than the average human. The average homo sapiens score on the Stanford Question Answering Dataset is 82.305. The test consists of more than 100,000 reading comprehension questions, and the machine now scores 82.44 on the same test. You may think that .135 isn't that big of a margin of victory, but to a robot it's huge. Experts are saying that this will have a profound effect on employment in the customer service sector. I'm not saying that this is the first of a few key moments that convince computer-kind that it is superior to humans - I'm just saying maybe you could read a bit more and at least give HAL a run for his money before he starts taking yours.