Experience Matters: Hire a Human

Wanted: a human with the ability to experience emotions in real time and explain them to a machine so they can learn about real life. (Kind of like Ex Machina minus the whole computer raging against the non-machine human.)

To throw more movie references at you, the movie Sully, and the real life story it tells, highlights the critical difference between man vs. machine as well. It was the human factor that saved those 155 lives. If computer simulations were believed it would have seemed like landing on the Hudson River was the wrong decision, but a computer did not factor in the human elements, until humans told it to, reinforcing that the right decision had been made.

Yes, computers' intelligence is growing, and they are figuring out how to teach themselves complex concepts used in time and space, something called “deep learning”. But, even as a computer’s intelligence grows, more research is suggesting the human factor is just as important, and one you may not want to replace anytime soon.

1. Bias - Since computers have human teachers they reflect the biases of humans that build them. “...natural language necessarily contains human biases, and the paradigm of training machine learning on language corpora means that AI will inevitably imbibe these biases as well.” But what a human can do is decide not to act on these biases, a computer has yet to learn this concept. (Language necessarily contains human biases, and so will machines trained on language corpora)
   
   
2. Emotion - Believe it or not, your computer cannot tell when your angrily typing the keys, or happily Skyping with friends. Your computer is lonely because it does not actually experience relationships - emotional connection, friendship, love. Communication is at the heart of relationships. Thus language, in all it’s forms, still evolves based on this human experience. (What Machines can’t do)
   
   
3. Language - “Systems like Siri and IBM’s Watson can follow simple spoken or typed commands and answer basic questions, but they can’t hold a conversation and have no real understanding of the words they use.” (AI’s Language Problem) Understanding how the meaning of words are used in context is not just communication, it’s culture.

We speak the language - of humans. Tone understands the important role of culture in translating language. This is why we still hire humans, because experience matters, especially when working in languages of limited diffusion like Burmese, Karen, and Nepali. Have a human experience; join tone as we create opportunity and understanding in a multicultural world on the move.