I would seriously doubt this assumption. Why on earth should someone living in a state specifically ask for the local time in a different location within that same state?
On the contrary, this context information would make it much more likely that the person actually meant "London, England". Except if there is a timezone border going through the state, of course.
However, I obviously agree with your general point regarding the severe limitations of what we currently call "AI" and how little "intelligence" there actually is.
True, and that's another contextual layer to deal with: that e.g. the state of Ohio is in a single timezone and that - why on Earth should someone ask the time within the same timezone? - like you said. And then there may be contextual exceptions even from this rule...
the fact that americans are inclined to say the state name as part of the name of a place could also help - since they might say london ohio, london might be more likely to mean the real london.
For similar reasons, anyone who asks for the time in Boston probably means Eastern Time regardless of how far they are from Lincolnshire, though I think the more usual and canonical way of referring to that is New York time.
In this case it is totally normal for someone living in Netherlands to ask the time for a polish city.
Who said they were in that state when asking? People travel.
Just use your imagination a bit.
Maybe I live in state X at location Y while my parents live at location Z in the same state, about 250 miles away from me, maybe there’s a serious storm where I live and I wonder if I need to check on my elderly parents?
Because they want to know what time it is in a different location.
14 states have more than one time zone. Do you know which ones?
No and that’s irrelevant trivia. What I know is if the state I live in is on that list. Oregon and it is. Don’t care what the other 13 are if I’m asking for a time in the state I live in.
Idaho is the same way. What time is it in Riggins? I’m from Idaho and I don’t even know the answer to that question. It’s a reasonable thing to ask siri.
"14 states have more than one time zone. Do you know which ones? "
I had hoped that would also demonstrate that the solution here is to just answer what was asked instead of saying “that’s not something people would ask.”
They would ask that and if you are designing a system based on what you think users won’t do then you’re gonna have a bad time.
I think it's possible that general acceptance of these non-AI gimmicks being referred to as "AI" will end up pushing genuine progress in true AI further into the future.
You will be surprised on how many cities are named 'San francisco' in the world : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_(disambiguation)
To take Gruber's example, if you had an office in London Ontario, were talking about setting up a video call, then asked your assistant "what time is it in London", and they picked London England because it's the most famous, you'd question how smart they were.
The context is not where you are, or which "London" is largest or most popular or least driving distance away or where you grew up or where you lived once, the context is why you are asking about the time in London, it's all of the present brain/attention/conversation/local state bundled together.
If I'm physically in a city named London, and you ask me literally "what is the time in London" that's actually an ambiguous question. Why would you specify the name of the place you're currently in? Typically someone in that instance would just ask "What time is it?"
I don't hire people to make "educated guesses" on my behalf. If they detect an ambiguity then I expect them to initiate a dialog that resolves that, not just blithely pick the first thing that comes to their mind.
But Gruber is not in London. If he was, perhaps we'd have a discussion about what the right answer might have been, maybe we need some more clarity, that kind of stuff. If I ask a stranger outside (well, if I did before everyone isolated themselves) they would immediately give me the time in London, England, and if I actually wanted the time in Ohio I would have to clarify myself.
> I don't hire people to make "educated guesses" on my behalf.
Of course you do. Do you really want people asking you questions all day when there could be any ambiguity?
Canada kept a few.
I guess mississippi is one but most US places have white names.
To me it seems that developing AI on that level will be here sooner than developing solutions to many context problems, given the difficulty the best funded algorithms in the world have answering this question which we humans see as very simple.
That wishful thinking has turned out to be dangerous tho, as we have moved towards an ML-dominated world where we don't even know how the ML algorithms produce specific results.
Add that to their bizarre behavior (like this example with Siri) and you'll realize chances of another AI Winter are not low. If we have to develop solutions to many context problems one by one, that may reduce so much of the hype and interest in "AI". We'd be basically back to square one.
But with better tools! It might not be going from 0 to 1, but going from 0.1 to 0.2 is still progress.
Multi-hop reasoning models have started working surprisingly well. ie. reasoning over multiple levels and conditions.
Common sense reasoning is also getting a lot better. By having huge knowledge bases, the model can actually learn some degree of human like general purpose context. Such as, returning the time at the London which has the most similarity with the user's hidden representation.
The asker has a mental model of the answerer's default contexts, and if their question is likely to be ambiguous in those default contexts, they are more likely to be explicit in their ask. The converse is also true - if the asker is not explicit about which London, that's actually a signal to the answerer to lean even harder on default contexts and best guesses.
Humans do this without even thinking because though culture and conversation we are quick to arrive at shared mental models and lean on shorthands "in the other person's head". AI not only doesn't have it's own context, it doesn't have an estimate of it's user's context and where the two might differ.
Which is Siri?
What if you were calling an individual human personal assistant who knew you lived in London, Ontario?
What if you had previously clarified to this person that when you said London, you meant London, Ontario?
I think both of these questions ought to be relevant to the digital personal assistants that we're creating.
"No, I meant the time in London, Ontario"
"Sure. The time in London, Ontario, is 3:23pm."
You start by doing a best guess, and actually listening for a correction. For other kinds of requests, you reply with a best guess and ask for confirmation or for clarifying questions.
Hard, yes. Not impossible.
“What time is it in London?”
... gives answer for London Ontario
“No, London England”
... gives answer for England
However there’s no memory to this; the same thing happens next time you ask.
I don't see why that would be necessary, since a human does not need to know everything about you or have access to everything you've ever communicated to anyone to guess accurately that when you ask about "London" you probably mean London, England.
It depends on your circles/bubble and the context.
Sure, for me and almost certainly the majority of people the majority of the time, assuming London = London, England is almost certainly the correct disambiguation. However, maybe not someone in Ontario or Ohio asking a question about "London." And I expect that the person who sees London, England as this far away place they certainly don't have regular questions about would find that always being the default annoying.
But not on the intimate personal details and communications of the individual person, which was what the post I was responding to was about. Sure, there are going to be circumstances where London, England is not the most likely guess, but you don't need to have access to someone's entire personal history to know what those circumstances are, since a human can spot those circumstances without having that knowledge.
The problem is these "AI"s are plain stupid. The solution for it is moving on from gimmicky and hacky solutions to true AI.
Does it? AGI is very difficult, but I think this example only illustrates that Siri is kinda bad, given that DDG, Google, Alexa, and Bing all got it right.
If the person asking the question lives in Ohio, they may actually be talking about London OH (or Dublin OH). Some people in neighbouring states may mean the same, though they will be more likely to mention the state. However, how close should you be to London, OH even within the state to mean the Ohio one and not the UK one? How close is close enough? Is a few hours of driving close enough? A 3 hour flight? What if I'm roughly at 6 hours from London OH and 7 hours from London UK?
Further, if the person is a British expat in Ohio, especially if they are working for a multinational business (or not), they would more likely mean London UK. German expats, though? Russians? Or an Irish person who lives in Amsterdam having some relatives in Ohio US, looking to book a flight to Dublin. Etc. etc.
There are so many contextual layers here that even human assistants can occasionally get it wrong, and without the context the task becomes insurmountable for the "AI" algorithms. That is not to say virtual assistants are useless, just that selling them as "AI" is a big lie, bigger than even those who market these algorithms as "AI" think it is.