Richard Socher appeared nervous as he waited for his artificial intelligence program to answer a simple question: “Is the tennis player wearing a cap?”
The word “processing” lingered on his laptop’s display for what felt like an eternity. Then the program offered the answer a human might have given instantly: “Yes.”
Mr. Socher, who clenched his fist to celebrate his small victory, is the founder of one of a torrent of Silicon Valley start-ups intent on pushing variations of a new generation of pattern recognition software, which, when combined with increasingly vast sets of data, is revitalizing the field of artificial intelligence.
The ultimate question for these researchers needs to be “what people”? There are a lot of people I would rather computers not reason like: Jihadists, Hitler, Stalin, Charlie Manson, Ku Klux Klan members, Al Capone, Joe McCarthy..I could go on, but you get the picture.