[Sigia-l] IA and the MS Office Paperclip

[Conal Tuohy]

Joe Dombroski wrote:

> The amazing aspect of the feature is its ability to infer goals and 
> model events based on categorizing user events with Bayesian ...

Amazing is right. I found it amazingly poor at doing this. I think if it could reliably detect where you REALLY wanted to go today, then it would be more popular. Its apparent smugness would be justified. But if it is usually wrong (and this was my own experience) then it is just an annoyance, and its smugness comes across as plain idiocy. 

More to the point, it may be able to tell that I'm writing a letter, but it would not usually have an idea of exactly what I was trying to do. It might give me perfectly reasonable suggestions about how to format the date or whatever, but usually I am more focused on higher-level tasks like what I'm actually trying to say to my correspondent, rather than how to format letters, so Clippy's suggestions would usually be a distraction from the task I'm focused on. As a result, whenever I see Clippy now (on a new computer), I always disable it immediately.

Have you seen the open-source-bloatware parody of Clippy, named "Vigor"? This is a pop-up paper-clip for the Unix text editor "vi". Vigor was written specifically to be unhelpful and annoying, popping up inappropriately and offering useless advice. Amusingly, the author reported that they got an email once from a user, thanking them for something that Vigor had said, namely that vi is a "modal" editor, and that you have to switch from edit mode to command mode to enter a command. For a new user this was a useful reminder, so the author removed the message.

Con