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It’s an interesting fact that despite Elbot’s successes in numerous artificial intelligence competitions it was never the intention that people would mistake him as a human, after all he does claim to be a robot. Behind the sarcastic chatterbot lies a variety of social psychological theories that provokes the user to act predictably, creating not just a very different chat experience, but one where the human believes that they are in control.

Psychologists nowadays are able to measure human intelligence by using various IQ tests. Nevertheless, they still don’t agree on one common definition of human intelligence. What would happen if we apply a similar approach to measuring intelligence of artificial entities, skipping never-ending discussions on AI definition? According to professor Selmer Bringsjord and Bettina Schimanski an answer is contained in Psychometric AI (PAI).

Earlier this year Gartner predicted that by 2015 “50 percent of online customer self-service search activities will be via a virtual assistant for at least 1,500 large enterprises”. Interestingly, one of the main challenges the release cited was not a customer’s willingness to interact with an automated mechanism, but the ability for it to maintain an interesting dialogue.

With this article I would like to give you a behind-the-scenes look at how a system like Elbot is enhanced with new capabilities. I’ll do this by walking through one of Elbot’s newer features: color learning. If you would like to try the feature before reading all the spoilers, please visit Elbot.com, and ask Elbot if he can learn.

Dr. Roman V. Yampolskiy from University of Louisville says that we should be aware of dangerously self-aware chatbots and he suggests to keep dangerous AI entities in virtual prison for avoiding social-engineering attacks. According to him, we should improve cybersecurity, because one day disobeying virtual agents could threaten humanity’s existence.

The robot presented on the video can chat with other humanoid robots via the Internet. Moreover, when faced with a new situation, the robot can search the World Wide Web and gather appropriate information in order to fill an identified knowledge gap. Afterwards, it incorporates new knowledge under its own power, and is ready to execute diverse new tasks.

Present chatbots have rather limited reasoning, inflexible behavior and they lack learning abilities. They perform entrusted tasks in strict accordance with programmed procedures. What if chatbot developers equipped new chatbots with an advanced online-learning mechanism applied recently in intelligent humanoid robots?

Humanoid examples from Japan and MIT, especially focussing on emotional sensing and emotional expressions

Online Virtual AssistantsVirtual Assistants increasingly becoming the first point of contact for users who need help from customer service. However, sometimes it is inevitable that a real customer service agent steps in and deals with the customer query. And here comes the twist; to whom does the service agent turn to when he or she needs help in resolving a question? To a virtual assistant of course!

In a paper called Reading Digits in Natural Images
with Unsupervised Feature Learning researchers from Google and Stanford University reveal a new method of identifying house numbers in Google Street View.

It’s just another attempt to add a bit of AI to Googles ability to understand the world.

As a result however, this algorithm is obviously very useful for Captcha hackers as well, as I’ve announced many times before. Captchas are those annoying characters you have to re-type when you leave a comment on a forum, to get access to certain information or when you register for a website, The purpose of Captchas are to separate computers from real human beings, assuming that humans are better in complex character recogntion than computers. This will soon be something of the past.

The result: computers will be able to create new accounts, register everywhere, spam everywhere. It will also retrieve password, access email boxes and send emails on behalf of real humans. It’s an unstoppable development. The only way to stop this: collaborate worldwide and define a new internet which is suitable for consumer usage. Also, we should get rid of the idea that we should protect privacy on the internet allowing people to stuff around anonymously without the chance of getting caught, and that everything should be available for free. Nothing is for free.

This will be part of a new concept for the future world, which I will refer to as

The Utopia Manifesto

Soon more!

Look carefully at the scene presented on the picture below:

If somebody asked you a question: “Where is the coffee cup?”, you could give a simple answer: “on the mat’. But you could also say “to the left of the lamp” as well as “on the table”. All those answers are correct, although they require several subjective and nuanced judgements which we - humans - do intuitively. What about chatbots?