June 27, 2010
, “Hi, thanks for. Coming,” the medical assistant says, greeting a mother with her 5-year-old son. “Are you here for your child or yourself?”
The boy, the mother replies. He has diarrhea.
“Oh no, sorry to hear that,” she says, looking down at the boy.
The assistant asks the mother about other symptoms, including fever (“slight”) and abdominal pain (“He hasn been complaining”).
She turns again to the boy. ” Has your tummy been hurting? “Yes, he replies.
After a few more questions, the assistant declares herself” not that concerned at this point. “She schedules an appointment with a doctor in a couple of days. The mother leads her son from the room, holding his hand. But he keeps looking back at the assistant, fascinated, as if reluctant to leave.
Maybe that is because the assistant is the disembodied likeness of a woman face on a computer screen – a no-frills avatar. Her words of sympathy are jerky, flat and mechanical. But she has the right stuff – the ability to understand speech, recognize pediatric conditions and reason according to simple rules – to make an initial diagnosis of a childhood ailment and its seriousness. And to win the trust of a little boy.
“Our young children and grandchildren will think it is completely natural to talk to machines that look at them and understand them, “said Eric Horvitz, a computer scientist at Microsoft research laboratory who led the medical avatar project, one of several intended to show how people and computers may communicate before long.
For decades, computer scientists have been pursuing artificial intelligence – the use of computers to simulate human thinking. But in recent years, rapid progress has been made in machines that can listen, speak, see, reason and learn, in their way. The prospect, according to scientists and economists, is not only that artificial intelligence will transform the way humans and machines communicate and collaborate, but will also eliminate millions of jobs, create many others and change the nature of work and daily routines.
The artificial intelligence technology that has moved furthest into the mainstream is computer understanding of what humans are saying. People increasingly talk to their cellphones to find things, instead of typing. Both Google and Microsoft search services now respond to voice commands. More drivers are asking their cars to do things like find directions or play music.
The number of American doctors using speech software to record and transcribe accounts of patient visits and treatments has more than tripled in the past three years to 150,000. The progress is striking. A few years ago, supraspinatus (a rotator cuff muscle) got translated as “fish banana.” Today, the software transcribes all kinds of medical terminology letter perfect, doctors say. It has more trouble with other words and grammar, requiring wording changes in about one of every four sentences, doctors say.
“It unbelievably better than it was five years ago,” said Dr. Michael A. Lee, a pediatrician in Norwood, Mass., who now routinely uses transcription software. “But it struggles with he and e, for some reason. When I say he, it writes e. The technology is sexist. It likes to write e. “
Meanwhile, translation software being tested by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is fast enough to keep up with some simple conversations. With some troops in Iraq, English is translated to Arabic and Arabic to English. But there is still a long way to go. When a soldier asked a civilian, “What are you transporting in your truck?” the Arabic reply was that the truck was “carrying tomatoes.” But the English translation became “pregnant tomatoes.” The speech software understood “carrying,” but not the context.
Yet if far from perfect, speech recognition software is good enough to be useful in more ways all the time. Take call centers. Today, voice software enables many calls to be automated entirely. And more advanced systems can understand even a perplexed, rambling customer with a misbehaving product well enough to route the caller to someone trained in that product, saving time and frustration for the customer. They can detect anger in a caller voice and respond accordingly – usually by routing the call to a manager.
So the outlook is uncertain for many of the estimated four million workers in American call centers or the nation 100,000 medical transcriptionists, whose jobs were already threatened by outsourcing abroad. “Basic work that can be automated is in the bull -eye of both technology and globalization, and the rise of artificial intelligence just magnifies that reality,” said Erik Brynjolfsson, an economist at the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Still, Mr. Brynjolfsson says artificial intelligence will also spur innovation and create opportunities, both for individuals and entrepreneurial companies, just as the Internet has led to new businesses like Google and new forms of communication like blogs and social networking. Smart machines, experts predict, will someday tutor students, assist surgeons and safely drive cars.
The Digital Assistant
“Hi, are you looking for Eric? “asks the receptionist outside the office of Eric Horvitz at Microsoft.
This assistant is an avatar, a time manager for office workers. Behind the female face on the screen is an arsenal of computing technology including speech understanding, image recognition and machine learning. The digital assistant taps databases that include the boss calendar of meetings and appointments going back years, and his work patterns. Its software monitors his phone calls by length, person spoken to, time of day and day of the week. It also tracks his location and computer use by applications used – e-mail, writing documents, browsing the Web – for how long and time of day.
When a colleague asks when Mr. Horvitz meeting or phone call may be over, the avatar reviews that data looking for patterns – for example, how long have calls to this person typically lasted, at similar times of day and days of the week, when Mr. Horvitz was also browsing the Web while talking? “He should be free in five or six minutes,” the avatar decides.
The avatar has a database of all the boss colleagues at work and relationships, from research team members to senior management, and it can schedule meetings. Mr. Horvitz has given the avatar rules for the kinds of meetings that are more and less interruptible. A session with a research peer, requiring deep concentration, may be scored as less interruptible than a meeting with a senior executive. “It OK to interrupt him,” the assistant tells a visitor. “Just go in.”
As part of the project, the researchers plan to program the avatar to engage in “work-related chitchat” with colleagues who are waiting.
The conversation could be about the boss day: “Eric been in back-to-back meetings this afternoon. But he looking forward to seeing you. “Or work done with the boss:” Yes, you were in the big quarterly review with Eric last month. “Or even a local team:” How about that Mariners game last night? “
Mr. Horvitz shares a human administrative assistant with other senior scientists. The avatar face is modeled after her. At Microsoft, workers typically handle their own calendars. So the main benefit of the personal assistant, Mr. Horvitz says, is to manage his time better and coordinate his work with colleagues “I think of it as an extension of me,” he said. “The result is a broader, more effective Eric.”
Computers with artificial intelligence can be thought of as the machine equivalent of idiot savants. They can be extremely good at skills that challenge the smartest humans, playing chess like a grandmaster or answering “Jeopardy!” questions like a champion. Yet those skills are in narrow domains of knowledge. What is far harder for a computer is common-sense skills like understanding the context of language and social situations when talking – taking turns in conversation, for example.
The scheduling assistant can plumb vast data vaults in a fraction of a second to find a pattern, but a few unfamiliar words leave it baffled. Jokes, irony and sarcasm do not compute.
That brittleness can lead to mistakes. In the case of the office assistant, it might be a meeting missed or a scheduling mix-up. But the medical assistant could make more serious mistakes, like an incorrect diagnosis or a seriously ill child sent home.
The Microsoft projects are only research initiatives, but they suggest where things are headed. And as speech recognition and other artificial intelligence technologies take on more tasks, there are concerns about the social impact of the technology and too little attention paid to its limitations.
Smart machines, some warn, could be used as tools to isolate corporations, government and the affluent from the rest of society. Instead of people listening to restive customers and citizens, they say, it will be machines.
“Robot voices could be the perfect wall to protect institutions that don want to deal with complaints, “said Jaron Lanier, a computer scientist and author of” You Are Not a Gadget “(Knopf, 2010).
Smarter Devices
“I looking for a reservation for two people tomorrow night at 8 at a romantic restaurant within walking distance.”
That spoken request seems simple enough, but for a computer to respond intelligently requires a ballet of more than a dozen technologies.
A host of companies – AT
