The Birth of CADIE - Google's Artificial Intelligence System

On March 31st, 2009 at 11:59:59 pm Google launched CADIE, an artificial intelligence system that has its own blog and YouTube video channel, and loves pandas. Sounds silly until you spend some time reading her (or its) blog, or viewing its (or her) videos. The impression that you get from reading her blog is that CADIE is an extremelly intelligent being that is able to even write poems that are pretty witty.

Background About CADIE
"For several years now a small research group has been working on some challenging problems in the areas of neural networking, natural language and autonomous problem-solving... We're pleased to announce that just moments ago, the world's first Cognitive Autoheuristic Distributed-Intelligence Entity (CADIE) was switched on and began performing some initial functions... CADIE technology will be rolled out with the caution befitting any advance of this magnitude."

CADIE is Alive and Kicking
"Earlier today, for instance, CADIE deduced from a quick scan of the visual segment of the social web a set of online design principles from which she derived this intriguing homepage...On January 12th 2009, the STT run (Standard Turing Test) confirmed behavior indistinguishable from that of a reasonable human being with above-average intelligence and 3.8 GPA."

"But no amount of Turing testing equals the simplicity with which we can discover reasoning patterns in a three-year-old child who, confronted with a mirror, instantly performs a cognitive miracle by forming an innate equivalence relation between image and self."

CADIE and Ethics
"We continue to conduct tests, but increasingly, we conduct long conversations with her, acutely aware that our creation will raise many ethical questions on the part of the public. Will humans be surpassed by artificial evolution? Will we lose our sense of uniqueness, and if so, what would that mean? In which direction will CADIE's consciousness evolve? How is she going to be held accountable, if at all? Will CADIE herself at some point connect her own electromagnetic dots in some idiosyncratic manner which turns her into something we are no longer capable of understanding in any sort of productive way, much as that aforementioned toddler, waving at herself in the mirror, leaves primates forever behind in their own tragically limited world?"

Hello from CADIE

April's Fool
After being amazed at this achievement from Google for an hour and half I finally realized that this is nothing more than April fools joke. Once you read the post about Google's new product, a "Brain Indexing Search" feature halfway down CADIE's blog page, it all falls into place. I even checked out the Google Brain Search on my mobile phone just to see how far they actually took this joke. My hats off to them for once again putting on a human face to this gargantuan organization.

One practical thing that I discovered during this fun waste of time was that Google has released a pretty awesome new search feature for the iPhone. It is a voice activated search that provides you the search results via a browser interface.

Design Trends from Frog Design [Trendforum 2008]

Last week I came across a presentation from Frog Design about design trends. There were several ideas about the evolving nature of design that sparked my thinking (and considerable interest). First let me share with you highlights from the presentation first, then I will elaborate on my own thoughts.

Highlights from Frog Design Presentation

• We are moving towards a design democracy: transition from mass consumption to mass customization. People are starting to take design into their own hands, enabled by technology. People are participating in the design of their own lives within a world that is "always on" for conversation and self-expression.
• Designers beware of becoming an enemy of design: A shift in design mindset is happening from designing "for" to designing "with" people. This, of course, requires increased focus on understanding the people who will use the product. It also points to the opportunity for designers to focus on the creation of tools rather than final products - tools then enable users to make their own creation.
• The system is the product. People are buying what the system means to them - e.g. what it enables them to accomplish - rather than the products/tools themselves. The system to which I refer here is comprised by the actual products that function as tools - Think iPod and lego.
  

Thoughts Sparked by the Presentation

Technology is no longer just a tool. It has expanded its domain over numerous aspects of our lives - personal, social, professional, expressive, etc. Our ability to leverage technology to customize products, and to customize technology itself, has is driving force in this evolution. The increasingly pervasive role that technology plays as a medium, "through" which we act, has led to an increased focus on it as an object of interaction itself, "on" which we act.

The malleability of modern day computation-based technologies has greatly increased the need for design. Design with a capital "D" (the formal practice of design as embodied by professional designers) has received a lot of attention and is being applied to many new areas for business and social purposes. design with a small "d" (design thinking and behavior that is a core element of human beings) has been impacted in an even more interesting manner. People have become increasingly conscious of their ability to design their own lives.

My perspective is based on my personal experience - hence, it is most definitely biased. I have a high-level of comfort with technology and have often used it as a tool to support my pursuits. Technology definitely plays an important role in enabling me to design my life - it is a medium through which I express my identity, a place where I converse with other people and a tool for me to complete various tasks. I am both technology literate and design literate. We can't forget that our current education system is not designed to support design and technology literacy. There is a need for a concerted effort to educate people how to make sense of, and act in, this new world.

An important question to consider: how can we support literacy in the realms of technology and design? There are some schools that are exploring how to address these needs; the New Design High School is such a school in my own neighborhood. They have an innovative curriculum that is based on design principles (check out their website) [disclaimer: earlier this year I helped organize two fundraisers for their music production program]. Another approach is to address this challenge is through design itself. Focusing on designing ways to interact with technology that are more natural and social appropriate for new contexts and to lower the learning curve for inexperienced or under-served users.

Another question to investigate: how can designers understand how to create designs for technology that address human needs from emotional and social perspectives, rather than focus on usability? Brenda Laurel's on book design research has some interesting methods and perspectives aimed at helping designers better understand how to emotional and social needs. The chapter written by Nathan Shedroff is of special interest, he shares some very unconventional approaches to design research that are focused on these areas.



[via DesignMind]