Rise of the super-smart flirtatious machine
Development of more sophisticated software could soon herald machines that can use common sense, talk naturally and even flirt with their owners
Computers will have developed "common sense" within a decade and we could be counting them among our friends not long afterwards, one of the world's leading AI scientists predicts.
Professor Geoff Hinton, who was hired by Google two years ago to help develop intelligent operating systems, said the company was on the brink of developing algorithms with the capacity for logic, natural conversation and even flirtation.
He said Google was working on a new algorithm designed to encode thoughts as sequences of numbers - something he described as "thought vectors".
Although work was at an early stage, he said there was a plausible path from the current software to a more sophisticated version with something approaching human-like capacity for reasoning and logic. "Basically, they'll have common sense."
The idea that thoughts can be captured and distilled down to cold sequences of digits is controversial, Hinton said. "There'll be a lot of people who argue against it, who say you can't capture a thought like that. But there's no reason why not. I think you can capture a thought by a vector."
Hinton believes the "thought vector" approach will help crack two of the central challenges in artificial intelligence: mastering natural, conversational language, and the ability to make leaps of logic.
