Reminds me of Daniel Dennett's example of the coffee machine that both makes the coffee and drinks it for you.
that thinking is joyful, fun, glorious
Couldn't agree more. Thinking is the only place where we can be truly free.
not laborious or error prone.
No, mistakes are inevitable. This is actually not such a bad thing because if we weren't capable of committing errors then no progress would be possible.
[0] automatic driving "being almost there" is the new "year of Linux on the desktop"
"Das heißt: wenn zwischen Sprache A und Sprache B unbedingt etwas übersetzt werden muss, wird 2017 ein Zweisprachiger den Boden _absolut mit maschineller Übersetzung wischen."
Not quite there yet, but pretty good in my opinion. (German native speaker)
Your point that the AI doesn't "understand" the text still stands though.
It should be noted that we don't know what "understanding" entails, so we don't even know if it's a coherent concept, or even a property humans have.
We have a bad habit of over-estimating our abilities, so I wouldn't bet too much money on that proposition.
You're assuming the only form is the last kind. As a human, I most prefer the electric cycle but I expect most will tend towards some kind of car. For the foreseeable future, only cars and cycles will exist because we don't yet know how to achieve deep understanding.
The algorithms understand in the sense of a set of rules to follow, transforming inputs to desired outputs. The rulebook doesn't merely consist of a look up table of all sentence pairs therefore at least some kind of understanding must be present. The algorithms can't turn words into stories with actors and predictions about their internal state, so I agree the understanding is shallow and far from human like.
Humans can often, even if not all choose to, step outside the system by integrating various modalities, propagating errors, to realize they're being forced to learn garbage. The machines can't reason outside the system. Compare with an animal of pure instinct (which are less common than many have supposed) whose behavior displays an implicit understanding of its environment's statistics.
DeepL translate: Das heißt: wenn zwischen Sprache A und Sprache B unbedingt etwas übersetzt werden muss, wird 2017 ein Zweisprachiger den Boden _absolut mit maschineller Übersetzung wischen.
At first I accidentally left in the underscore with Bing Translate I got:
Zum Witz: Wenn etwas absolut übersetzt werden muss zwischen Sprache a und Sprache B, in 2017 wird eine zweisprachige Person noch _absolutely MOP die floor_ mit der maschinellen Übersetzung.
Removing them, Bing Translate: Zum Witz: Wenn etwas absolut übersetzt werden muss zwischen Sprache a und Sprache B, in 2017 eine zweisprachige Person wird immer noch absolut wischen den Fußboden mit der maschinellen Übersetzung.
I don't speak German but mixing and matching between the three, I'm guessing the ranking for this example is Bing, DeepL, Google.
It is not a good idea to rank translations that you do not understand. That's part of the problem I am trying to point out here. "Zum Witz" is not correct--at all. "_absolutely MOP die floor_" makes no sense; it's painful Danglish. And, again, the literal translation of the metaphor "mop the floor" is not a good translation.
For what it's worth, I consequently ran this by a native german speaker. It's perfectly reasonable to rank them, understanding is not a binary proposition.
This shows exactly why machine translation is bad. It doesn't actually understand anything. It does really well translating very commonly occurring phrases and grammar because it is based on parallel texts. It does absolutely terrible when one wanders outside this "mainstream".
This is why you need a human; they understand metaphors. In fact, the "mop the floor with" metaphor has a literal translation but few Germans would use that as their first choice. Instead, it requires a choice of a different metaphor that expresses the same intent.
Machine translators don't even use a dictionary. FFS "mop the floor with" can be defined to a first approximation as "trounce" and that does have some reasonable German translations.
Stupid machine. (and it doesn't even understand mockery either).
The article was pretty good overall, but this one's a pet peeve of mine. We're offloading our thinking to computers and this magical "AI" in hopes that all that hard work (and possibility for error!) is going to be avoided. But we're going to find out--or perhaps not, as we slip below the dumbness horizon, no longer able to formulate self-reflective thoughts ourselves--that thinking is joyful, fun, glorious, not laborious or error prone.
And as "soft" AI advances, we just can't admit to ourselves that this, too, will fail to deliver. To wit: if something absolutely must be translated between language A and language B, in 2017 a bilingual person will still _absolutely mop the floor_ with machine translation.
Google translate: "Zum Witz: Wenn irgend etwas absolut zwischen Sprache A und Sprache B übersetzt werden soll, wird im Jahr 2017 eine zweisprachige Person den Boden mit der maschinellen Übersetzung noch niemals stoßen."
Bahaha.