I think I may need a reality check on this. Anyone?
Wired mag, 2/00 "The Quest for Meaning": This article pretty much
convinced me that a piece of software I've never heard of is going to end
up running the world 5 years from now, which, when I take a step back,
seems unlikely.
Did anyone else read this, or has anybody used this Autonomy Systems
software? The gist of the story is that the real currency of the Internet
and the Internet Age is so-called "unstructured data", which just means
text in various formats on various topics. But the problem is that even
though this text is what humans want and need from the Internet,
computers don't really know what to do with it, and we have to tell them,
which defeats the purpose of the whole thing. Computers are good with
numbers and formalized programming languages, but they don't know how to
read a magazine article and know whether you'll like it.
And so now according to the article the company Autonomy has changed all
that, by using a hundreds of years old algorithm to give the skills of,
quote "comprehending context, generalizing from words to an idea, even
understanding the unspoken by grasping the root concepts beneath the play
of syntax." And so supposedly the software can read anything in any
language (without actually knowing what the words mean) and link
paragraphs in one document with most closely related documents from its
source (which could The Web, or The Company's Complete Knowledge Record).
And the implication is that this all works well enough that it can take
the place of human beans doing the same work.
The article suggest that these people are the only ones with a product
that can do this and it quotes the CEO saying they're on the way to
becoming "the Oracle of unstructured information." Meaning, they'll be
everywhere.
If somebody could point out the flaws, catches, and exaggerations so that
I can go back to my normal life, that'd be great.
Edward