Chocolate Cubed » artificial intelligence

The Road to Recovery

Jordan Salvit — Sat, 27 Dec 2008 20:41:31 +0000

Bob Herbert wrote an interesting op-ed piece this morning in the NY Times titled “Stop Being Stupid“. Bob credits Madoff for saying that he paid investors with “money that wasn’t there”. The piece ends by saying that we need to go into serious debt to jump start our economy and that we need to start investing in world-class infrastructure.

I completely agree that the U.S. and the American people need to start watching the dollars they spend and stop spending money that isn’t there. I agree that we all need to tighten our belts and stop “the limitless consumption of trashy consumer goods”, but where is the incentive for innovation? Not only do we need to educate, feed and provide health care for the country, but we need something to aspire to. Kennedy put us on the Moon without knowing the science. What is the next frontier? Artificially Intelligent robots in every home? Mars? Flying Cars? What is America’s dream? Once we figure that out, we will be on the road to recovery.

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A Disappointing Truth

Jordan Salvit — Sun, 20 Jul 2008 20:50:52 +0000

This morning’s Editorial Notebook in the NY Times had a piece by Lawrence Downes titled A Disappointing Truth. It seems I am not the only one thinking about the effects of marketing on worldly matters. In my post last, I referred to Al Gore’s work and marketing efforts as positive and helpful to the cause. Downes takes a more critical look and says that they are doing a poor job at marketing the cause. Downes makes a good point, saying that we need new ideas and need to bring more of the best faces and thinkers together in a room to help. He even made reference to the Axe body spray marketers, hoping they would run the campaign.

For the climate issues, I think we should have the people who created the Truth campaigns do it. They have been successfully riding a very fine line with their campaigns. They are all witty, educational and make people aware of the hazards of smoking cigarettes, marijuana and doing drugs.

On the other hand, for AI I would love the Axe or even the Mac marketers working on our cause. They could make it sexy and cool and then all the kids would want to be working on it!

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We can solve the AI problem!

Jordan Salvit — Sun, 20 Jul 2008 05:58:54 +0000

This post is kind of a followup to my last post on marketing AI. I have been thinking of other causes that have been expedited or have benefited from good marketing and global warming came to mind.

I think Al Gore’s work to make people aware of global warming has been a fantastic marketing campaign. His movie, ‘An Inconvenient Truth‘, started to raise awareness and the public conversation about global warming and climate change. In the last few months, he helped launch an organization called We Can Solve It, whose motto is “we can solve the climate crisis”. This organization is marketing heavily and has not only made people aware of the issues, but is also instructing people how to help. This means, they are trying to rally a grass roots following to solve the problem. I think they have the right idea.

Imagine marketing AI as a problem that we haven’t solved yet, but can be solved! Imagine a marketing effort that not only educated the people, but also wanted to activate the masses. I think that in this day and age, one where web 2.0 and collaborative spaces have proven successful and extremely useful, we should be able to do it! Now all I need are a few people to help me get the ball rolling.

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We Need to Market AI Like Any Other Product

Jordan Salvit — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 01:52:50 +0000

In this month’s AI Magazine there is an article titled “The voice of the Turtle: Whatever Happened to AI?” by Doug Lenat. Doug lists what he calls the top 12 reasons why AI hasn’t taken off to its fullest potential and where many already expected it to be by now. I am not going to address all his 12 points, I am going to focus on one: The Media and the Arts.

I agree with him that the media has taken some fantastic accomplishments and focused on the wrong or easiest aspects, but how could they have known which was the hardest or easiest task? In the article he refers to a picture of the Sony Aibo dancing after having played a successful game of robot soccer autonomously. Doug points out that the dancing was the easiest part of the entire task to do, which he is right about. Does that matter to most people? I don’t think most people realize that making a robot dance is less complicated than making it find a ball and kick it. If you were to think of it in human terms, most people would classify both tasks as similarly complex. Dancing involves moving with some sort of coordination and so does kicking a ball.

I don’t think the media is to blame, I think it is the AI communities fault for not marketing their accomplishments properly. We try to get each other’s respect and recognition, but never look to the rest of the world. Most people don’t know how hard it is to accomplish true AI, they only know what they see in the movies and in the papers. I work as a consultant and when I mention that I used to work with Elizabeth Sklar, PhD developing educational robots, most people start talking about the Roomba. This is their association with robotics. The AI community has already done bigger and better things, like the DARPA challenge, but hasn’t marketed it enough. We see AI and Machine Learning in use in our everyday lives, like on recommendation engines on Amazon.com and Netflix.com, but since they aren’t highlighted and marketed as AI tools, no one notices them or refers to them when AI is discussed.

I think that if we market our AI accomplishments and make them easy for everyone to use or contribute to, the community will gain tremendously. I think a marketing effort could take a generation of web-savvy children and make them into AI researchers or developers.

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