Waze is one of my favorite apps. Last year, I was visiting Phoenix and meeting some friends at a local pub. They had given me a name, and not an address. No problem, I’ll just enter the name into Waze. The first (and only!) choice presented to me was a pub in England. Turns out, I got the name wrong. Waze had access to a number of things about me. It knew that I wasn’t near home. It knew the local time. It knew that I had gone to a hotel the night before and left there in the morning. In short, it knew that I was on a trip.
What it couldn’t figure out was that I wanted to go to a local pub rather than a pub in England.
Artificial intelligence has a way to go (sorry, couldn’t resist) before it crosses over into Skynet-like activity.
As a young girl, my mother took me to an academic conference on artificial intelligence. These were the early days of AI. We were just started to work on the definition of what AI meant. One of the presenters described an AI medical system that could analyze symptoms and present a diagnosis. After multiple demonstrations of this amazing capability, the doctor was bored. And it struck him. One working definition of a true AI would be one that could get bored.
It’s as good as any definition I’ve heard. Although I would be happy if my map could simply figure out that I wanted a beer more than a plane flight.