There's this website called Kaggle, where you can compete at data analysis and get money (lots of them, if you win). Essentially, people make a model of some data from some organization, and the models with the best score get awarded prizes (or karma).
There's recently been a competition in which the scientists were asked to come up with a solution for automatically grading essays. The company provided examples for training models: essays and their respective human grades.
The scoring metric, called "kappa" in this case, is between 0 (completely useless) to 1 (a perfect model).
One contender noticed that there is a certain discrepancy between the human grades - they only agree with a score of about 76%. They were worried that this would be a ceiling for how well a computer model could do the job (since humans are supposedly better than computers at understanding human language).
However, when the competition came to an end, the best model scored better than the professional human graders, with a score of 81.4%.
While this may have been an effect of the algorithms possessing a closer estimate of the "true" grade (they could average the human ratings), it is still suggesting that computers may now be better than humans at grading essays. That computers can perceive how correct a given text is more precisely than people. I believe this illustrates how quickly technology has been progressing in recent years, becoming almost incomprehensibly better.
The Turing Test claims that if a program can successfully deceive humans into thinking it's another human (using instant messaging), then it's safe to call it intelligent.
I wonder, if programs can understand humans better than humans themselves, what will that mean for humankind? Will all our jobs be automated? Will all of us become unemployed? Do we need another economic model?
No comments:
Post a Comment
Share your insights!