Advertising that works

How many times have we seen advertising on television that makes us wonder... how could anyone make such boring ads? Sometimes what seems odd at first later sticks in the mind. Take the clearsil ad that say "Agar hum yeh show mein ..." the voice over sounds like a child reciting a poem he hates in school. But it has turned into one of my favourite ads.

But the REALLY COOL advertising is one that others love so much that they forward it to others, put it on their blogs, etc. This kind of advertising spreads like wildfire and gets the right kind of attention.

Remember the Annoying Thing (aka crazy frog) by Erik Wernquist?




Making this kind of advertising requires us to think differently. Ok that is cliche...differently from what? Differently from the way our mind works when you are standing there facing a client desperately trying to convince him that advertising doesnt always have to be dull, boring, or even serious.

IT IS ALIVE!!

When I was young cognitive science caught my fancy. I guess my interest came from an earlier question..what makes us human? What is the essence of human beings? And that in turn came from another question, what is the human soul? Does such a thing exist? And to the question before that...What, if anything, survives beyond death?. I guess it is Descartes' Cogito Ergo Sum that made me decide what makes us human is that we can THINK.


What is the nature of thinking/ thought? If intelligence is the capacity to think, what is intelligence? Do animals and insects think the way we do? What if we could break thinking down to some rules and it could be mimicked? What if, God forbid, we could get machines (not even living things) to think??? Would it be right to say Organizations can be intelligent? If so, would they have a soul?
Years have gone by and my quest for the soul continues.....

So how do we know if a machine can think? Can following a few simple rules be genuinely called "thinking"? Over years several possible definitions have come up. Some of them require the machine to make mistakes (not be right all the time) while others require the machine to be able to solve new puzzles where there are no pre-existing instructions.. through learning. In 1951 Alan Turing suggested a simple test. If you can get a machine to respond in ways that mimic human responses to an extent that we cannot distinguish if its a human or a machine then it constitutes of thinking for all practical purposes. How many times have you met up with a chat bot on yahoo and flirted with it before you realized it was a machine after all? In 1964, Joseph Wizenbaum said that this is a trivial program and wrote the program Eliza to prove it. Eliza is a simple computer program that can hold seemingly meaningful conversations with you via a keyboard. Soon enough, despite the good professor's intentions, people began to pour out their heart to Eliza. She was programmed to be a therapist along the lines of Carl Roger's Client Centred Counselling. (You can have a date with her here.)

One of the tasks that require thinking is translation from one language to another. So here is a question. If a person is able to translate a text from English to Chinese, would that mean he understood the meaning of the text and was able to translate based on this understanding? John Searle (1980) in his famous description of the chinese room does not think so. (Try out some chinese here.)

All of this leaves us pretty much stranded without a clue what it means to say a machine or a human being can think. Sure we have a set of possible criteria, but none of them enough by itself. Perhaps there is no one criteria, but a mix, neither of them the answer but together, they capture a good part of what it is. Wittgenstien called this language games.

But Artificial Intelligence or (AI) has made progress. Perhaps not in building robots that act and think like human beings, but in a number of small robots like the roomba that cleans homes, or AIBO the robotic dog. Robots have been used extensively in industrial production lines. Now there are microprocessors inside car engines, even refrigerators. And with the ability to talk to each other by WIFI or through wires, how much longer will it take for skynet to become self-aware?

If all this hasnt utterly bored you, you can always read Scientific American's version of the Rise of the Machines.

theNamesnotimportant

View more presentations from Mathai Fenn.

A red pill to make you remember a blue one to make you forget

Remember the red and blue pills in the matrix? Remember memory implants in Blade Runner? Science is not that far behind science fiction. Soon we may have pills that implant memories (of things that never happened to you- like the "jump program"?) and other pills that may erase specific memories.

Read about the exciting new developments in Pyscho-Pharmacology

http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/04/memoryedit.html

A time to hide

From house by the river

I often have this urgent need to run away from everything and hide. Over the years I have come to believe that such a retreat from the world is a good thing from time to time, perhaps even necessary to keep your bearings in life. But to many people the thought of quietness is scary. If you are NOT one of those, please check out the links given below. If you know some place where people can go to be quiet (and not spend a ton of money). Let me know.

http://mathaifenn.googlepages.com/housebytheriver (don't forget to click on the other hideaway link)

Mathai