- Communication cuts to the very heart
of who we are as human beings.
It's the language that we share that helps us
understand larger concepts such as community,
law, and justice.
As human beings we're always trying
to do a better job communicating.
So it's not much of a surprise
that we want our machines to do the same thing.
In many ways, machines do a much better job
communicating with each other than us as human beings.
It's pretty easy to have two machines communicate.
There might be an occasional packet loss here and there,
but when you send an email it usually arrives
in its original form.
Human beings, on the other hand,
are always struggling to reach greater understanding.
If you can deliver 5 or 10% of what you're intending,
then you're a great communicator.
The main challenge is that we can't communicate
with machines in the same way
that they communicate with each other.
We're not like Neo in The Matrix.
We don't have an uplink port
that will allow us to connect directly to the network.
That means that the machines have to do
a better job existing in our world.
To do this, AI programs try to do something called
natural language processing.
This is when you can interact with the machine
using your own natural language.
We're all familiar with how to communicate
with a search engine like Google.
There's a little box, and then
you type in different questions or phrases.
You can type something like, "recipe for Belgian waffles."
Then the search engine will match your phrase
to popular results.
It will look through common recipe sites
for the term "Belgian waffles and recipe."
Natural language processing makes this interaction
much more human.
Imagine if you could say something like,
"I'm cooking breakfast.
"Can you give me a good recipe for those
"big fluffy waffles?"
even with this simple request,
you have a lot of natural language processing.
The machine has to understand that good is relative,
so in this case the person
is probably looking for the top recipes.
The machine also has to figure out
what's a big fluffy waffle.
It's pretty common for human beings to describe
thing by their attributes.
It would be almost impossible to come up
with an AI program using symbolic reasoning
to do this level of natural language processing.
How could you come up with an expert
that could record all the relationships
between different words and phrases?
You wouldn't want an expert in a room
hand coding different ways to describe Belgian waffles.
Again, a lot of the work in this area
has been using machine learning
and artificial neural networks.
Any time you send a text or an email,
it potentially goes through servers
that can process parts of your conversations.
They don't usually do this because
they're interested in what you're saying.
Instead they do this because they're interested
in how you're saying it.
It makes sense that organizations that are interested
in artificial intelligence also offer
many free communication services.
Google has access to anonymized versions
of your email and voicemail
to pick up how you have conversations.
Apple offers iMessage and Microsoft has Skype.
These services give their AI programs
a treasure trove of different types
of human communications.
They can use machine learning to see patterns
in how humans use their natural language.
But natural language processing isn't just
about understanding the words.
It's also about understanding the context and meaning.
A few years ago one of the top Google searches
was "What is love?"
At the time, when you put that search into Google,
you would get all long list of results.
Most of them were about biological pairing rituals
and the importance of feeling connected.
This was the kind of response
you'd except from a network
that's just matching keywords.
Natural language processing gives machines
the ability to better understand the larger world.
If you're typing in "What is love?" into a search engine,
then you're probably much more interested
in romantic notions of love,
perhaps even some poetry or insights
into what it's like to be in love.
You might just want to hear a hit song by Haddaway.
Human beings have written on love
from the beginning of language,
so there's sure to be plenty to see on the topic.