“Third Thumb” Augmentation Changes the Way we Think of Prosthetics
If you ever feel like Google’s hitting on you as you have a conversation with it, don’t worry, the company’s artificial intelligence (AI) is reading a bunch of romance novels. And the reason why? Because Google believes that, by reading from romance novels, its AI engine will be able to develop better conversational skills with us humans.
Interesting enough, it’s actually working. According to Google’s software engineer when he spoke to BuzzFeed News:
“In the Google app, the responses are very factual. Hopefully with this work, and future work, it can be more conversational, or can have a more varied tone, or style, or register.”
– Andrew Dai
Google Software Engineer Leading Project
The AI engine was fed 2,865 romance novels to improve its understanding of language. By reading thousands of romance novels, the company believes it will help enhance the technology with some personality and conversational skills.
Photo Credit: Kate Haskell/FlickrCC
As a result, Google’s research team were able to teach the AI to write its own sentences which closely resembled those read in the books. When BuzzFeed News asked Dai if the engine could write its own romance novel if it wanted, his response was, “Theoretically, it could.”
The company’s next step is to use these newly developed conversational skills to help inform and humanize their products. This would also include the Google app as more people begin using it.
FUTURE IMPLICATIONS
“Hey Google, say something sexy to me.” Soon enough, Google, and every other company currently working on its own AI, will know exactly what you’re asking for and deliver as asked. They’ll have the ability to woo you and make you feel loved. It might sound lonely and strange, but an increasing number of people – especially in areas like Japan – are abandoning physical romance altogether and are instead building relationships with that of virtual characters and apps. Eventually, as the conversational skills and level of intelligence increase, the idea of “true love” between a human and AI won’t be all that far-fetched.
When BuzzFeed News asked of this possibility, Andrew Dai said:
“It could happen eventually. There’s an ancient Greek story about a guy who builds a statue of the most beautiful woman. The statue is more beautiful than any other woman, and he falls in love with the statue. If you can fall in love with a statue, I don’t see why you couldn’t fall in love with a neural network trained on romance novels.”
– Andrew Dai
About the author
B.J. Murphy is the Editor and Social Media Manager of Serious Wonder. He is a futurist, philosopher, activist, author and poet. B.J. is an Affiliate Scholar for the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies (IEET) and an Ambassador for the robotics company Humai.
You may also like
