Did you think that Google Now, Siri and Cortana are smart? Think again, there is a new artificially intelligent personal assistant called Hound, and she has taken the Internet by storm. The YouTube video presentation showing just how smart Hound is received almost zero views the first two days of uploading, but when guys discovered the video yesterday, it received over a million views in no time. If you read through the comments of the video, you’ll realize just how crazy guys want to beta test Hound and finally own it.
I too wanted to do the test and sent a request for an email invite to which I received the reply below:
In the YouTube video comments, if you read through almost all of them, you’ll see that there is a guy who is scared of Hound and artificial intelligence in general. That comment is has deep philosophical questions that I plan to cover in another article but in the meantime I want you to read through it and consider a possible response – or – do you buy into his fears? Here is the comment:
… if you think long term, and I mean really long term, the point of automating absolutely everything will make our lives potentially pointless. Because we will have the entire knowledge in a computer connected to our brains, no one will need to remember anything, all of this is mutating us at an alarming speed, e.g. I cannot count the number of times I was in a car with friends and we got lost because they would listen to the GPS like a dumb sheep instead or reading the fucking signs on the road. We will one day have fully automated car and no one will remember how to drive. Everything that is done in the name of technical progress to “make our lives easier”, is going to make us either dumber or lazier, most likely both at the same time. At some point when robots and programs have been invented for doing everything (and there’ll be robots designing and producing other robots), we will be so bored that we will regret. We as a race should seek happiness, and this is not going to bring any.
duffmandje (that’s the name he goes by) has valid concerns. What will be the point of living after we have made robots that can do absolutely everything for us? Probably even put them to be part of our brains so that we know practically everything? There is another guy who took his time to give a somewhat appropriate answer, and you can also read his response reproduced below:
As for making our lives easier, as humans our brains are limited to only a fraction of its full potential. If we are not tied down doing what can be considered as mundane everyday tasks that can be performed through technology, it frees our brains up to achieve even greater things and create more advanced technologies which can replace our latest “tasks” so that we can move on to bigger things. If we no longer need to remember anything that means we have the information of the world at our finger tips. Not every advance makes our lives “easier” though, because it becomes possible to do things that would be otherwise humanly impossible. If humans were unable to advance technologically (or in any other way) in such a way that we stagnate completely and cannot develop further, would that mean our lives become pointless? Are the lives of people from a third world country completely disconnected from other societies and barely survive day-to-day where they live only to survive pointless? technology advances branch out (I dare say) infinitely. But presuming there is nowhere to go we still live to live. It only becomes pointless when you think it becomes pointless. Happiness is different for different people and I have good reason to believe this app makes many people from the human race happy. But I guess that if you think it will be boring for robots to do all the work for you so you can do whatever it is that you want you can probably console yourself with that fact that you wont live to see the day it happens. I assume most people however would evolve to adapt
I have emphasized the part about people living in third world because it touched me in a way I’ll explain in the article to address both the question and the answer, and you won’t like it, I promise.
Anyway back to Hound. What’s amazing about Hound are three things: 1. The speed at which she gets the questions and not only questions but complex long questions 2. The speed she processes the questions to give immediate feedback and 3. How correct she is in answering the long winding complex questions. You don’t believe me? Watch the video below and become equally amazed.
By the way, almost everybody wants Google to buy Hound – now. I am part of everybody.
