[encoderer]

Your optimism on this seems unfounded in my opinion.

When there are no domain restrictions, computers have not proven very capable of comprehension. Look even at the comparatively simple domain of handwriting recognition.

More importantly, you entirely miss the problem that many times the human doesn't know exactly what he wants until he sees it.

As a software engineer, I have no fear my job will be replaced by computers talking to product managers.

[seanmcdirmid]

That's why the program should be expressed as a conversation! We don't know what we want so we should start vague, get feedback, provide clarifications, and so on. The conversation with the computer must be a two-way thing!

[lifeisstillgood]

That's brilliant. Not in terms of some AI working out what a silver haired old grandmother meant but in terms of talking to clients - they could imagine talking to a computer and I am just providing that feedback.

Daily or weekly, feedback nice and quick

[seanmcdirmid]

The thing is, we probably don't need hard AI yet to do some of this. Yes, it must be a dialogue system, but we have those today. We already saw the movement in this direction with Hugo Liu's concept.net work, but for some reason no one has followed up yet. We are getting to the point with speech rec/understanding technology that someone is bound to try again soon.

[eli_gottlieb]

In general, we don't need Hard AI for much anything, and usually don't want it. Any specific problem you want solved will require some specific solution method or algorithm rather than the whole and entire "make a computer hold an adequate water-cooler conversation" thing.

[saraid216]

I think it's less worthwhile to argue this than to try to build it.