Sophia and Evan Follow Their AI Dreams

Okay, the video below featuring Evan Rachel Wood and renowned AI bot “Sophia” is going to be largely lost on you if you’ve never seen any episodes of HBO’s “Westworld.”

But watch it anyhow, just so you can get creeped out by Sophia and the underlying concept. 

In the video, Sophia is trying to be helpful to Evan and the HBO team by offering up some notes — a revised script, actually — that she thinks will help improve the next season of the show.

So helpful, those robots. And so frickin’ meta…well done, Futurism Studios.

Now, go question the nature of *your* reality!

Not The Turing Test

I continue to see bits and specs of what our coming AI overlords are capable of. Most recently, the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence unveiled a system (called “Aristo”) that passed an eighth-grade science test. To which I ask, where was Aristo when I needed it??

According to a report from Cade Metz in The New York Times, Aristo correctly answered more than 90% of the questions on an eighth-grade science test, and more than 80% on a 12th-grade exam. The system was built for multiple-choice tests, and took standard exams designed for students in New York, minus any questions that required pictures or diagrams.

The Times’ piece suggests the new research could lead to systems that carry on a decent conversation, but could also encourage the spread of false information. The backbone of the technology is powered by neural networks that can learn the idiosyncrasies of language by analyzing articles and books (and not entirely dissimilar with what IBM did with Watson on “Jeopardy!” eight years ago.)

At Microsoft, Jingjing Liu and her fellow AI researchers have tried to build a system that can pass the GRE, a test common for admission graduate schools, but the math section has proved “far too challenging.”

Time for a Princeton Review prep course?