ai.bythebay.io: Michael Ludden Interview
Recording: ai.bythebay.io: Michael Ludden Interview
you [Music] you well what is my definition to AI it's the same for both general and my work in the sense that i define artificial intelligence as kind of like a pseudonym at this point for hub machine learning algorithms now of course the meeting was much more broad but I use it in the context of hey you know we've we've built a machine learning algorithm that does X or does why what I think no I guess I guess I'm defining it differently what I think broadly artificial intelligence should be is general AI but people refer to narrow AI as artificial intelligence and that's fine but that's essentially machine learning algorithms so that that's my take on it where AI is successful now is in a lot of use cases where a system needs to auto correct for or understand insights about something that it receives via a corpus of data with really a little other context and I think that that has already led to a bunch of automation and seed changes and improvement in you know big data analytics and things like that predictive analytics obviously we've seen a lot of work with chat BOTS I don't think chat bots are there I think that's like a like i was saying during my talk really the next step is to have chat bots become useful we've got sort of the natural language interaction thing and obviously Watson has lots of conversation so that you can train chat BOTS using our service with a nice UI so you can string together the dialogue trees with some value added benefits like analytics and whatnot but i think that the back end work is the stuff that needs to be done i mean i think i'm the same as everybody else and i want a chat bot that does stuff that i don't want to do for me and does it better and faster than i would those two pieces i think aren't really there yet right now chat bots are kind of cute Kitchie they might give you a funny answer if we're talking about you know Alexa or Google home or Siri or Cortana or anything but when it comes time to like you know really trusting it to schedule things for me or actually ordering me the exact piece I want knowing my preferences anticipating my needs contextually being aware of what I might be saying what it might mean those are next level things that I hope developers start to tackle this year and next year I think we'll see a lot more actually useful chat BOTS that are available in flac and facebook Messenger in other platforms and hopefully Watson is a part of power knows what keeps me up at night is a very esoteric thing that I'm just kind of obsessed with I'm a bit of a futurist and I'm very interested in seeing where artificial intelligence goes i'm interested in unbounding it from human mind architecture and seeing what truly artificial artificial intelligence that we create emergent intelligence becomes of course that's also very scary in America we have a lot of dystopian movies where the machines have taken over etc throughout the rest of the world a lot of the futurist movies are more blended or hopeful or a little a little more subtle about how technology is used I mean it's not always a wasteland and I think I'm worried about our current at least in the United States national discussion about artificial intelligence is it seems to reinforce ideas that I don't like and as we know well whatever you put in science fiction we end up making reality I mean let's talk about the things in Star Trek I mean what is this aside from a tricorder right and we're already working on the holodeck lyst with room scale virtual reality and stuff like that so I would like to see more of a culturally aspirational take on what a I can do for Humanity and not just a and and and really to help us and kind of optimized I like really we have an opportunity to be incredibly efficient and to create an overabundance of everything any person on earth would ever need and I can help with that and I would like to see us lean more into that and lesson to the killer robots and Skynet going to destroy everybody kind of thing that's what keeps me up at night and it's fascinating frankly the nature of reality you know all these things are are up for debates and it's a really interesting time and we have the opportunity to essentially become you know the makers of a new new sentient species now I think you know the singularity as such could could happen now it could happen after everybody that's watching this is dead including myself we just don't know but it's still an exciting to be a life a lot of possibilities and we're making that future you know all of us so yeah so yeah I'm AI by the bay is a really well organized conference and it's always great to get together with some industry thought leaders hear what other people are saying about artificial intelligence how other companies are going about it what the next big themes are and then of course share our own perspective on it which is why IBM's one of the big supporters of this conference and and it doesn't hurt that it's incredibly close to where I live anyway so it's very convenient and I'll sure be back next year [Music] you