#it's like neural net generated voices right? I wonder if that's part of why it sets me off so much | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

gyromitra-esculenta · 5 years ago

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Even If the Waters Rise 1/3

Talked myself into Mermay. But it’s Shadowrun based mermay with (something that resembles) plot. Mermaids are now metahuman, and, boy, do I have the issues with Sea Dragon’s design. It got 6k words on the first chapter.

Also, warnings for the whole planned thing: blood, gore, and violence; cannibalism (human on metahuman); questionable jokes and questionable totem choices; ambiguous relationships; referenced limb loss/cybernetics/etc; mating cycles.

(...)

Later, the deep throbbing bites on his back, shoulders, and neck almost manage to take his mind off the itching under the sleeves, the kind anything but scratching the skin off whole does nothing for. The bites, they should bother him more but feel only right, as does the thumb following the line of his spine, up and down each bump, ceaseless, building the pressure up and then letting go. Jack has to wonder as he drifts off if it's one of those times Gabriel will stay until he wakes.

He does. Looking with the usual neutral expression when Jack gulps for the air, the lingering vague memory of drowning but not sinking while something gorges itself on his flesh with little bites tearing him apart fading slowly.

(...)

Coming off the sedation after being cut was always a mixed bag. This time, though, the bustle of the street outside filters in slowly, rising like a wave over the ocean of static and breaking when the stims start doing their job.

The first breath is always the hardest, some kink in the lungs that kicks them into filtration mode each time the loss of consciousness occurs and demands focus from Jack to consciously switch back into the atmospheric intake.

"With us again?"

"You tell me, you're in my brain."

"Being obstinate will net you no points," Sombra mentally scoffs. "The pain?"

"No worse than usual."

"Arms up. Good, neural's working with no lag. And thank you very much for that kick, the legs are doing fine too."

"All?" Jack looks over the utilitarian metal surfaces of his limbs, the make and the model different from anything else he has seen on the market.

"Now, yeah," Sombra winces, pulling the plug out. She doesn’t need it but had told him once there were times she felt safer working with one. "For final calibrations, I need more data, so let's slap synthskin on those."

"What are they, anyway?"

"Scrubbed milspec, last year's model, or so I'd been told."

Sombra directs the assistant. Each applied sheet of layered synthskin gives Jack a lurch of unpleasant sensations before settling into annoyance, tension, and oversensitivity. A dance he's familiar with - a day or two before the brain puts a dampener on the sensory input when it integrates properly.

"I know why you're doing this for free, but why is he spending so much on this?"

Sombra flinches.

"The last batch you got rid of was worth more than those."

"It won't stop the demand, only the price of the meat went up."

"And the ability to process it for consumption went down. You know what's my take on it," she signs something on her pad. "Anyway, have fun tonight. I'll get in touch with you tomorrow to finish the calibrations."

"Not seeing much of a difference now," Jack pulls on his clothes, mindful of the temporary sleeves making sure the skin stays in place. "Tell me I won’t control and crush anyone."

"Implemented mental blocks. No limiters, so they can over-perform and get bricked, too."

"Taking bets on when I brick them?"

"Honestly!" Sombra throws the pad at him and Jack deflects it into the wall - looking back to her with a sheepish grin as it falls to the ground. "Too slow. Also, I don't want to see you in the professional capacity for at least half a year, but I'm giving you a month."

"Not very generous, and you're making me think you don't like it in my head."

"I don't, it's a jumble there since..." She stops herself, glaring daggers at the assistant who, granted with the rare ability to read the room, makes himself scarce - finding something urgent to do in the back.

"Since the glorified accident at work I don't even remember, seriously, five years, it's enough to stop treating me like I'm going to break about it." Jack pulls up the hood. Sombra's thinking about something, her brows drawn together in a worried frown.

"Aren't you curious?"

"Not really. Nightmares are a clue enough that something took out a lot of bites, and really, can't blame them, can I?"

"That's enough." She sends him a slightly nauseated look. "Scram now, have fun."

"Do you think he will tell me where he got milspec from?"

"He didn't tell me, so he's not going to tell you."

"But you've got an inkling how he got it."

"Maybe." She waves him off and Jack rolls his eyes, shrugging. Needling her for information has never worked before, anyway, and probably never will.

"See you when I wreck those."

"Fuck off!"

In less than an hour, there will be no trace left of her inside - and of Jack himself - the room is already being stripped down as he makes his way out of the basement up the concrete stairs with walls covered with dangerous amounts of mildew. Pushing past a corner stall encroaching on the doorway, he picks up a wrapped piece of barely seared meat waiting for him and waves his bracelet at the chit reader.

The air is wet and salty, like waves on the harbor, not even the smells of the market drown it out. The corners of his lips curl up at the thought tomorrow, or the day after, he'll be back out there, out on the sea, taking a dive into its depths, water everywhere, below and above, invisible current carrying him on its whims. Jack hails down the cab, the smile still on his face.

It remains there even twenty minutes later as he gets off by the hotel, both far too expensive and far too cheap at the same time. Too expensive for his own tastes, too cheap for Gabe to rent a room in it. Alas, here they are - and he sends a quick text.

'I'm coming up.'

Almost to the top, feeling vaguely claustrophobic in the humming elevator thankfully bereft of the usual muzak (apparently some taste did come with the money, but not enough for the interior to keep consistent style), he gets the customary message back. 'Open.'

Jack lets out the breath he's been inadvertently holding in when the doors open and he's left in the corridor, looking for the right entrance. A suite, of course, worth a chuckle as he walks inside, the only source of light the city's glow coming in through the windows.

And Gabriel, of course - again - standing with his back to the window, the only discernible features of his in the dim the almost glowing red irises and the white markings creating a vague outline of some animal face. Dramatic asshole, as usual.

"Show me."

The tone of authority and ownership demanding obedience - the order itself - coming from anyone else but the man who one way or another did own everything that made him, would have Jack snarling and pouncing whoever dared to speak to him like that. Hearing it from Gabe, though...

"Not even 'hi, how are you' or 'greetings, mortal'?"

Jack rolls his eyes, stripping down completely out of his clothes, leaving them lying on the plush carpet as Gabriel comes closer. Always smelling faintly of the deep ocean, or rather, of how Jack would imagine it to smell if it did.

Fingers dig around the edges of the sleeves on his shoulders, feeling the joints underneath, moving down to repeat the same around his hips. Synthskin sends confusing signals, not quite the pain yet, and a pinch of irritation.

"Looks fine."

"Will you tell me how you got your hands on last generation's milspec?" Gabriel ignores the question - no acknowledgment of it being asked even - as he's wont to do. Instead, he picks up a pillbox from the dresser. "I still got them."

"I know. You're dosing too low."

"Orgasm in a pill seems a bit too convenient." Jack massages the joint of his shoulder, moving to the bedroom. The carpet, probably soft on any other occasion, scratches his soles. "And a bit awkward."

"A fortunate coincidence of it interacting with your physiology."

"Yeah, coincidence. You're sure it's not another leash to keep me on?"

"If it were, you wouldn't be able to skip a dose. I'd make sure of it."

"I'm pulling your leg. I rather suspect you wouldn't do that, or would you?" Jack climbs the bed and props himself on the pillows - eyes focused on the single pill held between Gabriel's fingers, tracking it as he puts it in his mouth advancing - crawling over the covers, and Jack himself, with the grace of a predator playfully stalking a prey he knows cannot flee, the kill only a formality decided beforehand.

Drowning, always drowning in those eyes, black sclera and red irises blurring together into one, always looking too deep into him until he feels they don’t see him at all, his tongue brushing against sharp pointed teeth in an open-mouthed kiss, electricity traveling back and forth the nerves of phantom limbs with the speed of light coming to stop in a single burst leaving him breathless and shaking under Gabriel.

"Dutiful boy. You deserve a prize."

Jack chuckles at the first trace of any emotion in Gabriel's voice. The possessiveness is never truly gone, it's as much an integral part of him as are his looks, but there's a note of fondness giving Jack the incontestable impulse to almost preen: lower his lashes and incline back his head, hand sliding along dark red lines on Gabriel's arm.

"She's going to touch up off this."

"Are you worried about your privacy?"

"I'm used to having none with her. That was," he inhales sharply, feeling the bite on his collarbone, "for your benefit. I can see now you don't mind."

"I do not."

Jack merely snorts, rolling over and promising himself again to figure out Gabriel's trick with the clothes, there one moment and gone in the next, probably magic, but if he ever had any spark himself it was long lost with all the work done on him since the accident. Blunt as a troll's fist, this one.

Not that he has the ability to dwell on it while getting drilled into the mattress.

Later, the deep throbbing bites on his back, shoulders, and neck almost manage to take his mind off the itching under the sleeves, the kind anything but scratching the skin off whole does nothing for. The bites, they should bother him more but feel only right, as does the thumb following the line of his spine, up and down each bump, ceaseless, building the pressure and then letting go. Jack has to wonder as he drifts off if it's one of those times Gabriel will stay until he wakes.

"Lungs are still giving you problems."

Bathed in the sunlight, Gabriel looks as striking as in the darkness - minutely less dangerous now, however surface and not representative of his true nature the impression is. Regal. Focused on the multitude of holoscreens floating in the air before him.

"No. Not really."

"You were choking."

"Only a bit." Jack stretches, still feeling relatively boneless and exhausted, sticky with perspiration, too tired yet to consider the shower to be a genuine need right now. He slips off the bed only to retrieve the wrapped meat from the pile of discarded clothes in the other room and climbs right back into it.

"It's almost raw," Gabriel mentions when Jack's well into a third of his snack.

"Yeah. I'm finding it's not that bad at all, all things considered. Are you going to comment on my obviously poor dietary choices?"

"No. I'm rather curious about why would you consume it raw." A note of amusement, rare as it is, floats in Gabriel's voice. Jack shrugs.

"Started as a fucked up way to get closer and understand them better, and it grew on me. Not like I'm doing it a lot, wanted to treat myself tonight. Want some?"

To his astonishment, it does take Gabriel's attention away from the screens, as if he's considering the offer seriously - not that Jack would mind - and he leans in, hand trailing on Jack's shoulder for a moment and coming away with blood on the fingertips. Which he licks off.

One of the bites must’ve opened.

"No."

"Shit," Jack chuckles, pulling knees closer to his chest, resting his arms on them, just looking. "Could you just tell me what you are?"

"No. Probably never will."

"Suit yourself then, Knife-ears."

Soon afterward, Gabriel disappears in the bathroom and emerges back fully clothed, the suit so plain and unassuming it has to be worth its weight in diamonds, at least - and leaves without a word. Nothing about it bothers Jack, really, that's the only way he has ever known him to be: someone who's either rich or influential enough to never have had to conform to any social standards so they're like an alien concept to him. If anything, it tickles Jack's ego, the fact Gabriel spends both money and time on him regardless of his inscrutable reasons for it. And even if the time is scarce, the money comes in sums so high Jack’s not going to bother trying to figure the specific amounts out.

With a sigh, Jack plugs into his own pad, trying to ignore momentary vertigo any kind of connection, even the shallow one, gives him - waiting for Sombra to get to him. If she wanted anything from him, she always found him the second he jacked in.

The mental equivalent of a giggle has him rolling his eyes.

"You can say it."

"Boy, did you get screwed silly."

"I feel like I got some of my brain matter fucked out, that one's a freebie."

"What the hell are you eating now? Feedback from your tastebuds is giving me shivers."

"You too?" He bites off another chunk.

"What are you eating?" Sombra repeats, the tone akin to the one used towards a pet that definitely got into trash or picked up something suspect on the way.

"Almost raw meat."

"Interesting," she says after a pause. "Anyway, I'm done."

Jack flexes the free hand, clenching and unclenching his fist a few times.

"Not seeing any difference."

"You shouldn't because I know how to do my job. Also uploaded keys to the blocks, the data on the job, and you've got incoming charter on the roof in five hours."

"So I do have time for a bath then," he hums, smiling.

"Knock yourself out, I'm leaving you alone, you get weird in water."

"Thanks, Som."

"No biggie." Her presence warms up before blinking out, leaving Jack to sort through everything she's left behind both in, and on the pad. Processing plant, the floor plans from several flybys, one drone shot down by a spirit, two points of entrance, Genji on the spot, Jesse and him coming from the water with a few hours to spare, full carnage.

Jack smirks, pulling out the plug. Just how he likes it. He moves to the bathroom, the alarm set for two hours.

The bathtub is nothing spectacular, at best a tight fit for more than two people - still a fancy one with an array of controls barely anyone bothers to use. He picks the temperature and plays a bit with oxygenation and flow. Jack lowers himself into the water slowly, the cold playing havoc on the still sensitive synthskin. The nonexistent heat regulation of milspec freezes his joints with pain. All par for the course as he exhales before submerging in full.

And then, he breathes the water in.

The surface breaks with the remnants of the air pushed from his lungs. It's a poor man's substitute for the real thing but the pressure and the dampened hum of the surroundings, however dissimilar to a swim in the ocean, bring his mind some respite.

Running down the pier barefooted with the warmth of the sun on his back - jumping - the whiplash of the impact - diving deep, to look back from below at the light glimmering on the waves, the rays reaching for him - the hands reaching for him from the depths and pulling down.

With the sound of the alarm, Jack jolts up to a sitting position, coughing out the water. Another bout gets rid of the rest of it from the lungs, and he changes the temperature. The bath heats almost immediately.

The dream changes, but the ending remains always the same.

Head leaning against the rim of the tub, before properly washing, he spends minutes motionless except for the occasional shiver until his core warms up. Remaining two hours Jack idles away eating a late breakfast and not really watching some show on the holo while sprawled in the bed still smelling of sex.

Moving to the pad grants him some suspicious looks he can't fault people for because he does stick out here in his clothes like a sore thumb - and then surprise as his bracelet lets him pass through the gate and into the waiting Osprey with rotors running hot. A waste to use the craft fitted for carrying almost forty personnel merely for him, but he's not the one paying. At least, there's room enough to stretch his legs and to think very hard on how much he's unafraid of flying, his stomach doing backflips as it takes off.

The fact the crash might have been involved had occurred to him long ago.

Fifteen minutes in, Jack gives up and reaches out to Sombra, for which she ridicules him mercilessly but keeps him company. Getting angry helps to take his mind off of how fucking terrified he is. Even if he could run fucking laps inside the cabin, the changing tilt reminds him he's in the air, and the moment Osprey touches down three hours later, Jack's out like there's a pack of devil rats on his heels, relieved to have solid ground back under his feet.

Jesse, holding his hat down against the draft waves at him. The coyote stitched on his serape seems to stretch and yawn with the fabric moving, probably does so in truth, but Jack can never tell.

"Lúcio's finishing on the sub, we're going to drink tonight, coming too?"

Jack looks to the harbor and shakes his head.

"Not this time. I'll check the gear and maybe go for the swim."

"Dude, no, not in this water, trust me. Too much industrial, and many critters out here. Best case, you'd break out in boils after a dip."

"Can't be that bad."

"Well, Lúcio says that a pyramid had been hit hard some months back, there's been some runoff and an uptick in critters. Really want to chance it with whatever's in the water now?"

"Guess not." Jack shrugs, walking away from the powered down craft towards the only building on the pier.

"So how's about that drink?" The coyote on the red cloth sits down and scratches its ear. If he were to associate Jesse with any other spirit than it, he would be hard-pressed to find anything fitting.

"Pass. Just don't get in trouble with the locals. Or old pals."

"Hey, don't bring up my stalker vampire ex, the next time I see 'er, I have a stake with her name on it." Jesse throws his hands into the air, pausing in the doorway, letting Jack pass him.

"You know it doesn't work on her."

"It will slow her down."

"If you manage to stake anything vital."

"Oh, I will, because this," Jesse points to himself with a wide smile, "is absolutely irresistible to her."

Jack laughs, eyeing the crates set up inside.

"Yeah, there's no accounting for taste."

"Dude, harsh. Anyway, that's yours."

"Everything's in here?"

"I wouldn't know, I try not to touch your shit," Jesse gives an exasperated sigh while digging in his pockets for a cigar, the coyote snapping at it as he puts it between his lips. "Well, see you in the morning, dude," he adds before turning around. Jack nods, moving his attention to the boxes and working his way through their contents.

The story behind the coyote Jesse tells is as outlandish as the man himself, and a question for the ages of how he wasn't rad-insane or sporting another head. Yet.

In the German wasteland (the only place on earth one could be a real cowboy anymore, Jesse insisted), drunk off two shit beers because his ex fed off him earlier, and high on some local shrooms, staring at the dying campfire, the coyote came to him and took him on the trip. Jack would gladly chalk it up to alcohol, hallucinogenics, radiation, and exsanguination, all working in synergy - if not for the hard fact the coyote itself was very real, and as helpful as it turned out to be an impediment, or a bother, the other half of the time.

Methodically, Jack picks out the gear - the rest going back to their crates - and then he double-checks the selection, looking for any identifiable problems and defects. When he's finished and satisfied, it's well into the wee morning hours. He drags a random deck chair to the end of the pier and lays down in it. The city, as small as it is comparable to the majority on the coast, doesn't sleep - there is no escaping the lights and the sounds - but in his chosen spot overlooking more water than the land he can doze off.

If either Jesse or Lúcio notices him gasping for breath as they finish loading the sub, they don't mention it.

"I'm not hauling your shit," Jesse gestures to the container Jack left outside, by his chair.

"Hi, man," Lúcio smiles. "Also, I dig your new set, what's the specs?"

"You'd have to ask Sombra for technicalities, I'm only using them." Jack stretches, there's a kink below his left shoulder blade he tries to work out by rolling it. Almost manages to, too.

"Cool, will do. By the way, he tried to throw hands only once."

"Dude. Squeal much?"

"It's called being the responsible one," Lúcio shrugs and Jesse groans in response, muttering something sounding suspiciously like 'don't need a chaperone'.

"Sub's all ready?"

"She's right up purring now, the lady she is." Lúcio's eyes light up. "Nothing left to squeeze out."

"I'll hold you up to it." Jack gets up and drags the container to the sub, the box grating on the concrete, and brings it into the cabin, pushing it behind the seats.

"Oh, man, do that, love to see the data after you push her."

"Will do on the way back. Jesse, inside."

"That wasn't me sleeping when me and Lúcio were breaking our backs," Jesse snarks sliding into the pilot's seat, knowing well Jack's impatience and what they will use the spare time for. He doesn't mind, usually.

"Good hunting, guys." Lúcio mock-salutes as the hatch seals.

Before they're out of the harbor and submerged completely, Jack's out of his clothes, save for the boxers. Despite the sub being state-of-the art, with two people in it gets hot inside in less than an hour.

He starts on the sleeves, peeling them off slowly.

The synthskin underneath is still oversensitive, but no longer tries to overload his brain with conflicting or extreme stimuli. It just feels like blanched with boiling water and any negligible otherwise touch almost painfully tickles.

"Kinda creepy, like a snake's molt."

"Note to self, I look better with my skin falling off my frame."

"Hey, I'm just stating the bare facts. Fuck, ew!" Jesse leans away to evade the sleeve Jack waves in his direction. "Dude. No. That's uncalled for. I'm driving, I could crash us."

"Into what?"

"I'd find something!" It's either a threat, a promise, or a commentary on the nature of Karma.

"Out of the two of us, I'm the one who can breathe underwater, so..." Jack lets his voice hang as he reaches for the pillbox he left on the shelf earlier. It's a short debate if he should take one because even if he could take them as he felt like otherwise, risking going into implant rejection on the job was far from reasonable. As soon as the aftershocks fade, Jack leans back into the seat, lazily watching the water on the screen.

"And that's also creepy as fuck," Jesse comments, sounding a bit more somber. "You look like you just got your dick sucked off, every time."

"Honestly? Feels like it, every time."

"And you know what makes it even fucking creepier?"

"You're going to tell me and I can't stop it."

"Because this shit looks goddamn miraculous and I may have helped myself to some," Jesse begins, waving one arm in the air and Jack mutters that of course Jesse fucking did, "and they fucking don't work. And you know what's in them?"

"Not that interested as long as they work."

"It's people, dude."

Jack sends him a blase look.

"And you ate it."

"Yeah, but I didn't go looking like I creamed my pants after that."

"It's for implant rejection, so it only makes sense it has reconfigured genetic material in it. Also, do not eat my drugs, it's people."

Jesse grimaces.

"Dude, you made it sound weird."

"I made you getting into my stash of pharmaceutical drugs you personally can't get high off sound weird?"

"Dude, it's even weirder now. How do you do it?"

"What?" Jack chuckles. "You mean, use my brain, sometimes?"

Jesse mutters some expletive under his breath and Jack closes his eyes leaving it without comment as the whole chat makes him revisit more or less cloudy memories of the first months he's spent either half-conscious because of pain, or half-conscious because of drugs and pain.

At least, until the pill, and the moment when the pain finally went below the...

"Amida Bongo Christ Almighty!" Jack turns immediately at the sound of the genuine panic in the voice to see Jesse try to become one with his seat, pushing back with his feet against the floor, pointing at the screen where a shadow in the water comes into focus, massive, gliding with deliberation. "Of all the fucking things to run into, the Sea-Fucking-Dragon... we're all gonna die."

Jack kills the engine in his stead and swipes at the screen, focusing the image. He can't deny his own heart is hammering in his chest when he lets out the sigh of slight relief while trying to ignore Jesse's doom-saying.

"It's not her."

"What?"

"It's not her. Doesn't look like her, and it's much bigger."

"That's supposed to help us exactly how!?"

"Take her five hundred to the left," Jack, already climbing over the back of his seat and almost falling in a hapless heap on the container in the process, barks at him. "I'm going out."

"Are you fucking serious, dude? Of-fucking-course, you are!"

"Chance like this isn't going to repeat itself!"

"A chance to get fucking eaten by a dragon?"

"That too!" Jack locks the airlock behind himself and fits the propulsion module as it fills with water. There's no time to wait for the slow pressurization. When there's no air left inside, he forces the emergency release, pulling himself to the outside, and pushes away from the body of the sub.

"Dude." Jesse, switched to the comms, sounds appalled compared to the earlier panic, which is considerably better for the situation. "Did you just lewd a dragon?"

"Maybe possibly." Jack smiles, cutting across at an angle. "Remember, five hundred, match speed, if I do get eaten, go silent and wait, rendezvous with Genji, do the site rep, and then decide what you do."

"You're literally the last person who should give orders."

"Next to last. You're even less qualified."

"True what they say, the truth hurts."

The dragon is massive, its form much more suited to the open ocean than what footage of Sea Dragon there is shows of her. He's yet too far to discern if it has limbs or only the fins. It moves with a misleading slow grace, the powerful twists of the wide tail propelling it forward. Getting caught in the vortex of the currents pushed with each beat could be - is - deathly dangerous.

Smaller shapes swim with it, congregating around the middle part of its body.

At first, Jack takes them for merrows, they're known to attach themselves to big predators and form codependent relationships, but it's the perspective lying to him. They're bigger, more agile, gleam occasionally with reflective scales. A brood of young, maybe? If yes, the endeavor is even more foolish than in the beginning, but even that won’t deter him from undertaking it.

Two of the smaller creatures break away from the formation as he gets closer and approach, their tails swishing wildly in the water. Mermaids. Mermaids traveling in a pack with a dragon. Not something he had expected.

They're coming both from the above and the below, a male and an older female, judging by the scars and veils, still colorful but ripped and missing pieces. It's hard to keep up with their rapid movements. Jack curls his hands and legs to his body as they circle him.

"Please, don't bite," he tells them. "There's almost no meat and you will probably break your teeth on me."

The mermaids observe him warily. The female chirps once and turns back, the male following in her tow. She's green and yellow, the pattern reminiscent of the stripes on a perch or other fish known to thrive in greenery. When no light catches on her scales she blends with the deep green agate hue of the water, but Jack wonders if she's maybe better suited to sargassum forests. Her partner, on the other hand, with his solid canary yellow, stands out like a sore thumb - at least until both of them gain distance and rejoin the group amid some agitation from the closest mermaids, the reactions playing out like a change of direction in a school of fish.

It's his first close encounter with live mermaids since the accident, and he has been judged as neither a threat nor a meal. In this moment, Jack feels some of the rush bleed away, allowing him to slip into simple sensations, focus on them, and appreciate them: the steady pressure of water against every inch of his skin, the additional tension in his scalp when his hair, however short, drag with each movement, the cold seeping into him from the inside, the weightlessness - even if he knows his limbs would pull him much further down.

The ocean is far from silent - never silent - full of sounds he can hear with his ears, and the ones he cannot - he hears with his whole body - the symphony of the dulled hum of static and single notes played on different instruments, not unlike the sounds of traffic in its structure.

His eyes drift back to the dragon.

It's foolish. It's not borderline suicidal, it's just plain old suicidal. And he won't let a moment like this slip like air between his fingers.

Hand on the controls of the drive, Jack resumes the approach.

The dragon looms closer, its body at least thirty meters long from the tip to the tail, probably more. He can now see its limbs tucked close to the underbelly - the fins reminiscent of underdeveloped wings.

He swims parallel to its head, advancing.

Bone-like white crest covers its front. The black scales, even if they seem to have an inner shine to them, appear to consume the light voraciously. The dark red lines streaking along the sides twist and mold with each move of the powerful muscles hidden underneath.

Jack's heart does not fit into his chest, so hard it hammers against his ribs from the inside - with fear, with excitement, with awe - and that's before the low rumble resonates within him as the dragon opens its eyes, one after another, five of them on the side he's facing - each an abyss of darkness ringed with glowing red slowly focusing on him: an insignificant speck in comparison.

"God. You're beautiful."

No. It was a worthless descriptor when applied to the apex predator wrought with raw power both physical and not.

Sublime.

The dragon disregards him - its eyes swivel to look forward - he cannot fathom expecting to keep such creature's interest for longer than this. But it's also an invitation, he's considered to be harmless, hence nothing to bother with, and Jack slows slightly while swimming up. Above its bulk, he notices some mermaids just clinging to the body, clawed fingers curled around the edges of the scales. Stupid, again, but he is going to try the same: hitch a ride on a dragon.

The thought is intoxicating, sends his mind reeling with unsuppressed glee.

He dives forward, his fingertips brush the hard surface - with caution he digs his fingers underneath the scale - the other palm he lays flat against it as the propulsion module switches off.

Jack pulls himself closer against the current, that rush of underwater wind. Never has he wished for his limbs back more than now, to touch and feel with his real skin, not even when the bones that aren't his anymore burn with that deep ache that sends all the thoughts skittering away with no control. Instead, he pulls flush against its body, forehead pressed into the scales, each contraction of the muscle below them felt intimately.

At the moment, he doesn't count time, not until another rumble, one he feels against his skin, makes him realize almost two hours have passed.

He looks back to see the mermaids otherwise swimming try to grab onto scales as it continues. In the front, what he took for vestigial wings - the fins - slowly unfold to reveal skeletal-like frame filled in with dark ethereal filigree straining on the currents.

It's a profound kind of sadness Jack feels loosening his grip. Drifting - falling - sinking - away.

The wings spread and angle. The dragon's back winds up like a spring.

Then it soars underwater, deep in the ocean, each beat of the wings carrying it further away into darkness.

The rush of water pushed by the dragon sends him spinning. Jack instinctively curls his limbs to his core to wait it out, losing all sense of direction in resulting vertigo. When it stops, it takes him a while to orient himself, the leviathan nowhere to be seen anymore.

"Jesse, it's safe to approach. Can you get to my signal because I'm fucking lost?"

"I see you," the response comes with a delay. "Coming from your general six. Dude, do you know how much is the footage worth?"

"It's worthless." Jack turns around with a few kicks.

"All would kill..."

"You can't put a price on it, it will put a price on your life." He can see the incoming lights blinking for his benefit as they draw near. "And you want to put out there a proof of a dragon that had remained away from the public knowledge until now?"

"Fair, even I'm not that stupid. I think. With the way you put it."

Jack swims towards the sub and grabs one of the railings, pulling himself towards the airlock. Minutes later, he climbs into his seat, dripping water everywhere.

"Got what you wanted outta that one? Besides getting eaten?"

"I think I've found god," Jack smiles, genuinely. It's a memory he's going to treasure, one unlikely to be eclipsed by any other in the foreseeable future.

"You going to be one of them dragon-worshipping freaks? I've heard things, and none good, I say."

"Not like that."

"So," Jesse turns his head to look at him. "You want to dick down a dragon."

"When you get down to it," Jack starts carefully, eyeing Jesse with a certain degree of suspicion, "yeah, basically."

"Heard about that one club you can meet one, violet eyes and..."

"I don't want to dick down a dragon, I want to dick down this one."

"Okay. It's important to have goals in one's life. I'm not judging."

It's at this point that something about a much earlier conversation occurs to Jack and he stills before covering his eyes with his palm.

"Jesse?"

"Mhm?"

"When you said you have a stake with her name on it... Did you mean your dick?"

Jesse raises his eyebrows, makes finger-guns with his hands, and goes for a pithy imitation of 'badum-tss' sound.

"You fucking moron." And Jack can only laugh.

#sometimes I write #reaper76 #r76 #mermay

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inetmrktng75247 · 7 years ago

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What Does Natural Language Processing Mean for Writers, Content, and Digital Marketing? An Essay.

Terrible Movie Pitch:

The battle for the voice of the internet has begun. In one corner, we have computer programs fortified by algorithms, Artificial Intelligence, Natural Language Processing, and other sexy STEM buzzwords. In the other corner, we have millions of copywriters armed with the only marketable skill a liberal arts education can provide: communication. Who will lol the last lol?

Spoiler:

Writers, your jobs are probably safe for a long time. And content teams stand to gain more than they stand to lose.

I remember the day someone told me a computer had written a best-selling novel in Russia. My first thought? “I need to get the hell out of content marketing.”

The book was called True Love—an ambitious topic for an algorithm. It was published in 2008 and “authored” by Alexander Prokopovich, chief editor of the Russian publishing house Astrel-SPb. It combines the story of Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina and the style of Japanese author Haruki Murakami, and draws influence from 17 other major works.

Frankly, that sounds like it’d make for a pretty good book. It also sounds a lot like how brands create their digital marketing strategies.

Today, every brand is a publisher. Whether you’re a multi-billion-dollar technology company or a family-run hot sauce manufacturer, content rules your digital presence. Maybe this means web guides, blog posts, or help centers. Maybe it means a robust social media presence or personalized chatbot dialogue. Maybe you feel the need to “publish or perish,” and provide value and engagement in a scalable way.

Brands require a constant influx of written language to engage with customers and maintain search authority. And in a way, all the content they require is based on 26 letters and a few rules of syntax. Why couldn’t a machine do it?

In the time since I first heard about True Love, I’ve moved from content writing to content strategy and UX, trying to stay one step ahead of the algorithms. But AI in general and Natural Language Processing in particular are only gaining momentum, and I find myself wondering more and more often what they’ll mean for digital marketing.

This essay will endeavor to answer that question through conversations with experts and my own composite research.

Portent’s Matthew Henry Talks Common Sense

“The Analytical Engine has no pretensions to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform.”

-Lady Ada Lovelace, 1842, as quoted by Alan Turing (her italics)

Lady Lovelace might have been the first person to contend that computers will only ever know as much as they’re told. But today’s white-hot field of machine learning and Artificial Intelligence (AI) hinges on computers making inferences and synthesizing data in combinations they were never “ordered to perform.”

One application of this Machine Learning and AI technology is Natural Language Processing (NLP), which involves the machine parsing of spoken or written human language. A division of NLP is Natural Language Generation (NLG), which involves producing human language. NLP is kind of like teaching computers to read; NLG is like teaching them to write.

I asked Portent’s Development Architect Matthew Henry what he thinks about the possibilities for NLP and content marketing. Matthew has spent over a decade developing Portent’s library of proprietary software and tools, including a crawler that mimics Google’s own. Google is one of the leading research laboratories for NLP and AI, so it makes sense that our resident search engine genius might know what the industry’s in for.

I half expected to hear that he’s already cooking up an NLP tool for us. Instead, I learned he’s pretty dubious that NLP will be replacing content writers any time soon.

“No computer can truly understand natural language like a human being can,” says Matthew. “Even a ten year old child can do better than a computer.”

“A computer can add a million numbers in a few seconds,” he continues, “which is a really hard job for a human being. But if a cash register computer sees that a packet of gum costs $13,000, it won’t even blink. A human being will instantly say Oh, that’s obviously wrong. And that’s the part that’s really hard to program.”

“Knowing that something is obviously wrong is something we do all the time without thinking about it, but it’s an extremely hard thing for a computer to do. Not impossible—to extend my analogy, you could program a computer to recognize when prices are implausible, but it would be a giant project, whereas for a human being, it’s trivial.”

It’s not news that there are things computers are really good at that humans are bad at, and some things humans are really good at that computers can’t seem to manage. That’s why Amazon’s Mechanical Turk exists. As they say,

“Amazon Mechanical Turk is based on the idea that there are still many things that human beings can do much more effectively than computers, such as identifying objects in a photo or video, performing data de-duplication, transcribing audio recordings, or researching data details.”

Amazon calls the work humans do through Mechanical Turk “Human Intelligence Tasks,” or HITs. Companies pay humans small sums of money to perform these HITs. (A made-up example might be identifying pictures where someone looks “sad” for 10 cents a pop.)

Matthew might instead call these HITs, “Common Sense Tasks,” like knowing a pack of gum shouldn’t cost $13,000.

“People underestimate the power of common sense,” Matthew says. “No one has ever made a computer program that truly has common sense, and I don’t think we’re even close to that.”

And here’s the real quantum leap for not only NLP but Artificial Intelligence: right now, computers only know what they’ve been told. Common sense is knowing something without being told.

It sounds cheesy to say that our imaginations are what separate us from the machines, but imagination isn’t just about being creative. Today, computers can write poetry and paint like Rembrandt. Google made a splash in 2015 when the neural networks they’d trained on millions of images were able to generate pictures from images of random noise, something they called neural net “dreams.” And in 2016, they announced Project Magenta, which uses Google Brain to “create compelling art and music.”

So it’s not “imagination” in any artistic terms. It’s imagination in the simplest, truest form: knowing something you haven’t been told. Whether it’s Shakespeare inventing 1,700 words for the English language, or realizing that kimchi would be really good in your quesadilla, that’s the basis of invention. That’s also the basis of common sense and of original thought, and it’s how we achieve understanding.

To explain what computers can’t do, let’s dig a little deeper into one of the original Common Sense Tasks: understanding language.

Defining “Understanding” for Natural Language

NLP wasn’t always called NLP. The field was originally known as ”Natural Language Understanding” (NLU) during the 1960s and ‘70s. Folks moved away from that term when they realized that what they were really trying to do was get a computer to process language, not understand it, which is more than just turning input into output.

Semblances of NLU do exist today, perhaps most notably in Google search and the Hummingbird algorithm that enables semantic inferences. Google understands that when you ask, “How’s the weather?” you probably mean, “How is the weather in my current location today?” It can also correct your syntax intuitively:

And it can also anticipate searches based on previous searches. If you search “Seattle” and follow it with a search for, “what is the population,” the suggested search results are relevant to your last search:

This is semantic indexing, and it’s one of the closest things out there to true Natural Language Understanding because it knows things without being told. But you still need to tell it a lot.

“[Google’s algorithm] Hummingbird can find some patterns that can give it important clues as to what a text is about,” says Matthew, “but it can’t understand it the way a human can understand it. It can’t do that, because no one’s done that, because that would be huge news. That would basically be Skynet.”

In case you don’t know what Skynet is and you’re also too embarrassed to ask Matthew, too, here’s the Knowledge Graph.

Expert Opinion: NLP Scholar Dr. Yannis Constas on Why Language is So Freaking Hard to Synthesize

To find out what makes natural language so difficult to synthesize, I spoke with NLP expert Dr. Yannis Constas, a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Washington, about the possibilities and limitations for the field. [1]

There are a lot. Of both. But especially limitations.

[Note: If you don’t want a deep dive into the difficulties of an NLP researcher, you might want to skip this section.]

“There are errors at every level,” says Yannis.

“It can be ungrammatical, you can have syntactic mistakes, you can get the semantics wrong, you can have referent problems, and you might even miss the pragmatics. What’s the discourse? How does one sentence entail from the previous sentence? How does one paragraph entail from the previous paragraph?”

One of the first difficulties Yannis tells me about is how much data it takes to train an effective NLP model. This “training” involves taking strings of natural language that have been labeled (by a human) according to their parts of speech and feeding those sentences into an algorithm, which learns to identify those parts of speech and their patterns.

Unfortunately, it takes an almost inconceivable amount of data to “train” a good algorithm, and sometimes there just isn’t enough input material in the world to make an accurate model.

“When we’re talking about a generic language model to train on, we’re talking about hundreds of millions of sentences,” he says. “That’s how many you might need to make a system speak good English with a wide vocabulary. However, you cannot go and get hundreds of millions of branded content sentences because they don’t exist out there.”

Yannis says he once tried to make an NLP model that could write technical troubleshooting guides, which might be a popular application for something like corporate support chatbots. He only had 120 documents to train it on. It didn’t work very well.

Right now, his research team is trying to figure out a way to combine corpuses of language to overcome the twin pitfalls of meager input:

Output that doesn’t make much linguistic sense

Output that all sounds pretty much the same

“We tried to take existing math book problems targeted at 4th graders and make them sound more interesting by using language from a comic book or Star Wars movie,” says Yannis. “That was specific to that domain, but you can imagine taking this to a marketing company and saying, ‘Look, we can generate your product descriptions using language from your own domain.’”

That’s the grail of NLP: language that is accurate to the domain yet diverse and engaging. Well, one of the grails. Another would be moving past the level of the sentence.

“80 to 90 percent of the focus of NLP has been on sentence processing,” says Yannis. “The state-of-the-art systems for doing semantic processes or syntactic processing are on a sentence level. If you go to the document level—for example, summarizing a document—there are just experimental little systems that haven’t been used very widely yet…The biggest challenge is figuring out how to put these phrases next to one another.”

It’s not that hard for an algorithm to compose a sentence that passes the Turing Test, or even hundreds of them. But language is greater than the sum of its parts, and that’s where NLP fails.

“When you break out of the sentence level, there is so much ambiguity,” says Yannis. “The models we have implemented now are still very rule-based, so they only cover a very small domain of what we think constitute referring expressions.”

“Referring expressions,” Yannis tells me, are those words that stand in for or reference another noun, like he, she, it, or these. He uses the example, “Cate is holding a book. She is holding it and it is black.” An NLP model would probably be at a loss for realizing that “she” is “Cate,” and “it” is “the book.”

“It’s something that sounds very simple to us,” says Yannis, “because we know how these things work because we’ve been exposed to these kinds of phenomena all our lives. But for a computer system in 2017, it’s still a significant problem.”

Models are also inherently biased by their input sources, Yannis tells me. For example, we’re discussing an AI researcher friend of his who combines neural networks and NLP to generate image descriptions. This seems like it would be an amazing way to generate alt tags for images, which is good for SEO but a very manual pain in the ass.

Yannis says that even this seemingly-generic image captioning model betrays bias. “Most images that show people cooking are of women,” he says. “People that use a saw to cut down a tree are mostly men. These kinds of biases occur even in the data sets that we think are unbiased. There’s 100,000 images—it should be unbiased. But somebody has taken these photos, so you’re actually annotating and collecting the biases.

“Similarly, if you were to generate something based on prior experience, the prior experience comes from text. Where do we get this text from? The text comes from things that humans have written…If you wanted to write an unbiased summary of the previous election cycle, if you were to use only one particular news domain, it would definitely be biased.”

(Oh yeah, and using neural networks for creating image captions isn’t just biased, it’s not always accurate. Here are a few examples from Stanford’s “Deep Visual-Semantic Alignments for Generating Image Descriptions:

Sometimes it’s right. Sometimes hilariously wrong.

Finally, perhaps one of the biggest hurdles for NLP is particular to machine learning. Interestingly, it sounds a lot like something Matthew said.

“One common source of error is lack of common sense knowledge,” says Yannis. “For example, ‘The earth rotates around the sun.’ Or even facts like, ‘a mug is a container for liquid.’ You’ve never seen that written anywhere, so if a model were to generate that it wouldn’t know how to do it. If it had knowledge of that kind of thing, it could make the inference that coffee is a liquid and so this mug could be a container of coffee. We are not there. Machines cannot do that unless you give them that specification.”

[1] Note: This interview was conducted in May of 2017. Quotes from Yannis only reflect his work, experience, and understanding at the point of this interview.

NLP is Hard. So is Programming. English is Harder.

Source

It’s kind of funny that we need common sense to navigate our language, because so much of it makes so little sense. Perhaps especially English.

There are synonyms, homonyms, homophones, homographs, exceptions to every rule, and loan words from just about every other language. There are phrases like, ”If time flies like an arrow then fruit flies like a banana.” If you need this point really driven home, read the poem “The Chaos,” by Gerard Nolst Trenité, which contains over 800 irregularities of English pronunciation. Irregularities are systemic—they’re in pronunciation, spelling, syntax, grammar, and meaning.

Code is actually simpler and less challenging than natural language, if you think about this deeply. People have this impression it’s a heavy, mathematical thing to do, and it’s a job skill, so maybe it’s harder. But I can spend six months at Javascript and I’m fairly good at Javascript; if I’ve spent six months with Spanish, I’m barely a beginner.

-Internet linguist Gretchen McCulloch to Vox

Code is the “language” of computers because it’s perfectly regular, and computers aren’t good at synthesizing information or filling in the blanks on their own. That requires imagination and common sense. A computer can only “read” a programming language that’s perfectly written—ask any programmer who’s spent hours pouring over her broken code looking for that one semicolon that’s out of place. If our minds processed language the way a computer does, you couldn’t understand this sentence:

Sure, computers can autocorrect those four misspelled words, and there’s a red line under them on my word processor. But that’s because there are rules for that, like how you can train a computer to recognize that a candy bar shouldn’t cost $13,000 because that’s 10,000 times the going rate.

Humans, however, are great at making inferences from spotty data. Our bodies do it all the time. Our eyes and brain are constantly inventing stuff to fill in the blind spot in our field of vision, and we can raed setcennes no mtaetr waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are in, as lnog as the frist and lsat ltteer are in the rghit pclae.

Inference is something we were built (or rather, evolved) to do, and we’re great at it. In fact, humans actually learn languages better when they try less hard. Language takes root best in our “procedural memory,” which is the unconscious memory bank of culturally learned behaviors, rather than in our “declarative memory,” which is where you keep the things you’ve deliberately worked to “memorize.” Children can pick up other languages more easily than adults because they’re tapping into their procedural memory.

Computers, however, were designed to excel where humans are deficient, not to just duplicate our greatest strengths.

Trying to teach a computer to process and generate natural language is kind of like trying to build a car that can dance.

It’s fallacious to assume that because a car is much better than a human at going in one direction really fast, they would also make much better dancers if we could only get the formulas right. Instead, it seems, we should focus on the ways machines�� strengths help us compensate for our deficiencies.

The Future of AI and NLP means Helping Us, Not Replacing Us

The power of the unaided mind is highly overrated. Without external aids,..

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#What Does Natural Language Processing Mean for Writers #Content #and Digital Marketing? An Essay.

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babbleuk · 6 years ago

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Voices in AI – Episode 87: A Conversation with Sameer Maskey

[voices_in_ai_byline]

About this Episode

Episode 87 of Voices in AI features Byron speaking with Sameer Maskey of Fusemachines about the development of machine learning, languages and AI capabilities.

Listen to this one-hour episode or read the full transcript at www.VoicesinAI.com

Transcript Excerpt

Byron Reese: This is Voices in AI brought to you by GigaOm and I’m Byron Reese. Today my guest is Sameer Maskey. He is the founder and CEO of Fusemachines and he’s an adjunct assistant professor at Columbia. He holds an undergraduate degree in Math and Physics from Bates College and a PhD in Computer Science from Columbia University as well. Welcome to the show, Sameer.

Sameer Maskey: Thanks Byron, glad to be here.

Can you recall the first time you ever heard the term ‘artificial intelligence’ or has it always just been kind of a fixture of your life?

It’s always been a fixture of my life. But the first time I heard about it in the way it is understood in today’s world of what AI is, was in my first year undergrad when I was thinking of building talking machines. That was my dream, building a machine that can sort of converse with you. And in doing that research I happened to run into several books on AI and particularly a book called Voice and Speech Synthesis, and that’s how my journey in AI came into fruition.

So a conversational AI, it sounds like something that I mean I assume early on you heard about the Turing Test and thought ‘I wonder how you would build a device that could pass that.’ Is that fair to say?

Yeah, I’d heard about Turing test but my interest stemmed from being able to build a machine that could just talk, read a book and then talk with you about it. And I was particularly interested on being able to build the machine in Nepal. So I grew up in Nepal and I was always interested in building machines that can talk Nepali. So more than the Turing Test was just this notion of ‘can we build a machine that can talk in Nepali and converse with you?’

Would that require a general intelligence or are not anywhere near a general intelligence? For it to be able to like read a book and then have a conversation with you about The Great Gatsby or whatever. Would that require general intelligence?

Being able to build a machine that can read a book and then just talk about it would require I guess what is being termed as artificial general intelligence. That begs many different other kinds of question of what AGI is and how it’s different from AI in what form. But we are still quite far ways from being able to build a machine that can just read a novel or a history book and then just be able to sit down with you and discuss it. I think we are quite far away from it even though there’s a lot of research being done from a conversational AI perspective.

Yeah I mean the minute a computer can learn something, you can just point it at the Internet and say “go learn everything” right?

Exactly. And we’re not there, at all.

Pedro Domingo wrote a book called The Master Algorithm. He said he believes there is like some uber algorithm yet we haven’t discovered which accounts for intelligence in all of its variants, and part of the reason he believes that is, we’re made with shockingly little code DNA. And the amount of that code which is different than a chimp, say, you may only be six or seven mbps in that tiny bit of code. It doesn’t have intelligence obviously, but it knows how to build intelligence. So is it possible that… do you think that that level of artificial intelligence, whether you want to call it AGI or not but that level of AI, do you think that might be a really simple thing that we just haven’t… that’s like right in front of us and we can’t see it? Or do you think it’s going to be a long hard slog to finally get there and it’ll be a piece at a time?

To answer that question and to sort of be able to say maybe there is this Master Algorithm that’s just not discovered, I think it’s hard to make anything towards it, because we as a human being even neurologically and neuroscientists and so forth don’t even fully understand how all the pieces of the cognition work. Like how my four and a half year old kid is just able to learn from couple of different words and put together and start having conversations about it. So I think we don’t even understand how human brains work. I get a little nervous when people claim or suggest there’s this one master algorithm that’s just yet to be discovered.

We had this one trick that is working now where we take a bunch of data about the past and we study it with computers and we look for patterns, and we use those patterns to predict the future. And that’s kind of what we do. I mean that’s machine learning in a nutshell. And it’s hard for me for instance to see how will that ever write The Great Gatsby, let alone read it and understand it, but how could it ever be creative? But maybe it can be.

Through one lens, we’re not that far with AI and why do you think it’s turning out to be so hard? I guess that’s my question. Why is AI so hard? We’re intelligent and we can kind of reflect on our own intelligence and we kind of figure out how we learn things, but we have this brute force way of just cramming a bunch of data down the machine’s throat, and then it can spot spam email or route you through traffic and nothing else. So why is AI turning out to be so hard?

Because I think the machinery that’s been built over many, many years on how AI has evolved and is to a point right now, like you pointed out it is still a lot of systems looking at a lot of historical data, building models that figure out patterns on it and doing predictions on it and it requires a lot of data. And one of the reasons deep learning is working very well is there’s so much data right now.

We haven’t figured out how, with a very little bit of data you can create generalization on the patterns to be able to do things. And that piece on how to model or build a machine that can generalize decision making process based on just a few pieces of information… we haven’t figured that out. And until we figure that out, it is still going to be very hard to make AGI or a system that can just write The Great Gatsby. And I don’t know how long will it be until we figure that part out.

A lot of times people think that a general intelligence is just an evolutionary product from narrow. We get narrow then we get…First they can play Go and then it can play all games, all strategy games. And then it can do this and it gets better and better and then one day it’s general.

Is it possible that what we know how to do now has absolutely nothing to do with general intelligence? Like we haven’t even started working on that problem, it’s a completely different problem. All we’re able to do is make things that can fake intelligence, but we don’t know how to make anything that’s really intelligent. Or do you think we are on a path that’s going to just get better and better and better until one day we have something that can make coffee and play Go and compose sonnets?

There is some new research being done on AGI, but the path right now which is where we train more and more data on bigger and bigger architecture and sort of simulate our fake intelligence, I don’t think that would probably lead into solutions that can have general intelligence the way we are talking about. It is still a very similar model that we’ve been using before, and that’s been invented a long time ago.

They are much more popular right now because they can do more with more data with more compute power and so forth. So when it is able to drive a car based on computer vision and neural net and learning behind it, it simulates intelligence. But it’s not really probably the way we describe human intelligence, so that it can write books and write poetry. So are we on the path to AGI? I don’t think that with the current evolution of the way the machinery is done is probably going to lead you to AGI. There’s probably some fundamental new ways of exploring things that is required and how the problem is framed to sort of thinking about how general intelligence works.

Listen to this one-hour episode or read the full transcript at www.VoicesinAI.com

[voices_in_ai_link_back]

Byron explores issues around artificial intelligence and conscious computers in his new book The Fourth Age: Smart Robots, Conscious Computers, and the Future of Humanity.

from Gigaom https://gigaom.com/2019/05/16/voices-in-ai-episode-87-a-conversation-with-sameer-maskey/

#Gigaom

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