alt Hacker NewsYou would be surprised, however, at how much detail humans also need to understand each other. We often want AI to just "understand" us in ways many people may not initially have understood us without extra communication.
Replies
This is why we fed it the whole internet and every library as training data...
By now it should know this stuff.
Right. But, unlike AI, we are usually aware when we're lacking context and inquire before giving an answer.
> You would be surprised, however, at how much detail humans also need to understand each other.
But in this given case, the context can be inferred. Why would I ask whether I should walk or drive to the car wash if my car is already at the car wash?
Given that an estimated 70% of human communication is non-verbal, it's not so surprising though.
I regularly tell new people at work to be extremely careful when making requests through the service desk — manned entirely by humans — because the experience is akin to making a wish from an evil genie.
You will get exactly what you asked for, not what you wanted… probably. (Random occurrences are always a possibility.)
E.g.: I may ask someone to submit a ticket to “extend my account expiry”.
They’ll submit: “Unlock Jiggawatts’ account”
The service desk will reset my password (and neglect to tell me), leaving my expired account locked out in multiple orthogonal ways.
That’s on a good day.
Last week they created Jiggawatts2.
The AIs have got to be better than this, surely!
I suspect they already are.
People are testing them with trick questions while the human examiner is on edge, aware of and looking for the twist.
Meanwhile ordinary people struggle with concepts like “forward my email verbatim instead of creatively rephrasing it to what you incorrectly though it must have really meant.”
People poorly specifying problems and having bad models of what the other party can know (and then being surprised by the outcome) is certainly a more general albeit mostly separate issue.