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Yet as you read this, engineers
are tackling the very challenges
that stand in the way of creating human-like machines. Companies are determined to make
computers interact with us as
naturally as we do with each
other. With this goal in mind,
they’re pioneering programs that
can understand our language,
decode our gestures, talk to us,
recognize our emotions and,
with impressive accuracy, guess
what we’d like to do next.
Google’s Moto X already lets
people converse with their
smartphone just by speaking
to it from across the room. Nuance, which powers Siri’s speech
recognition abilities, imagines
creating different personas for
its virtual assistants, a vision
Siri’s original creators shared.
Companies like Affectiva have
created emotion-recognition
systems that enable algorithms
to gauge our moods, then adjust
what they show us accordingly.
One day Facebook could try to
cheer you up when you’re down,
or Siri could sense you’re worried and whisper kind words to
calm you down. Cars are already
trying to step in for stressed and
sleepy drivers.
TECH
HUFFINGTON
01.19.14
Having computers act more
like people will make them
easier to use, say engineers. At
the same time, training them to
merge seamlessly with our lives
could also make them more appealing friends.
Even without this progress,
it turns out our own software
makes us inclined to accept machines as companions. We’re
programmed, for example, to
We’re programmed...
to think that others love
us, even when all evidence
points to the contrary.”
think that others love us, even
when all evidence points to the
contrary. A study by psychologists at Harvard and Princeton
Universities concluded that
people believed they were loved
when told “I love you” — even
if that declaration had followed
desperate pleading like, “Just
tell me that you love me.” At the
University of Calgary, computer
scientists found people were
quick to ascribe intentions to a
mechanical wooden stick. Some
thought the pole was threatening