The intelligent cloud
After our discussion on Monday on automation and Svenonius’s attitude toward the expensive cost of categorization I was interested to read a recent google blog post about the future of Google’s search technology.
We discussed that current technology would not allow automation to recognize / understand things such as metaphors, fuzzy words, and multi-word terms.
Google is predicting that by 2019 their technology will be able do much more than fully automate categorization and language comprehension but also solve complex problems and learn from its research. The impact of their technology will go well beyond Google’s offerings and will generate many significant benefits for mankind.
“Thus, computer systems will have greater opportunity to learn from the collective behavior of billions of humans. They will get smarter, gleaning relationships between objects, nuances, intentions, meanings, and other deep conceptual information.”
Nick Rabinowitz Said,
September 24, 2008 @ 8:18 am
It’s pretty exciting to imagine machine learning with such an incredible large corpus. At the same time, though, I wonder – Google might be able to recognize simple metaphors, and even, as the post suggests “a story with an exciting chase scene and a happy ending,” but will it ever be able to read a work like The Old Man and the Sea, with no human reviews or assistance, and recognize even the simple symbolism “Man v. Nature”?
Michael Lissner Said,
September 24, 2008 @ 9:17 am
Yes. The answer is yes. The reason being that you just told Google what it’s about in your comment. That’s the beauty of it.
Nick Rabinowitz Said,
September 24, 2008 @ 9:54 am
Well played, sir. But what about categorization of a previously unknown work? Something for which there is no explicit metadata, to return to the section discussion?