A.I. weakness: relevance

As a friend told me and we are getting used to, an AI algorithm can match the average American on real SAT questions, and more of it is bound to come.  Should we worry?  If I had to guess I would say sometime in the future we will see SAT as a short-lived bad way to assess anything really relevant about humans.

What about human dominance on creativity?  taking Brazilian composer Chico Science “Computers make art, artists make money” insight: SATs are an easy field to yield to computers – not sure if left to opt between money and creativity which would artists yield…

If we have an option at all.  Algo trading is making money already – and Margaret A. Boden makes the point on MIT review that computers aren’t close to being ready to supplant human artists:

“Artificial intelligence has an Achilles’ heel. It can’t decide what’s relevant.

It just so happens that this is a crucial skill where creativity is concerned. Take computer-generated art. (…)

Or in the realm of music, consider the creativity of a DJ (see “The Hit Charade”). What a DJ does is purely “combinational” creativity, or putting familiar ideas together in unfamiliar ways. DJs make no new music. Rather, they combine and order familiar pieces in unfamiliar ways. The value depends not only on the novelty of the DJ’s choices but on their aptness: their capacity to remind us of musical or cultural associations that wouldn’t have occurred to us otherwise. (…)

Pandora can’t do that. AI’s natural language processing is hugely limited by ­relevance blindness, the result of a computer that lacks semantic understanding or literary knowledge. Computers have written “novels,” but the prose is horrifically bland. And computer-generated soap opera plots (which can ignore verbal and grammatical elegance) will win no Tonys.

We still need people for that.”  Read original post