KM8: Machine Learning vs AI

Questions & Suggestions
1

In case you haven't noticed, KM 8 has some new features (and/or maybe old features revamped) that use Machine Learning system:

For example all of the prompts to get something by its name:

This got me to thinking (I know, that's dangerous. :wink: )

What is . . .
The Difference Between AI and Machine Learning by Intel.

I still don't have a clear understanding (maybe @peternlewis can help us), but here's what Intel had to say:

The working definition of artificial intelligence now has become maybe 50 different definitions…. It is many different tasks that humans are good at but computers are not.

For a long time we were trying to replicate our thought process by putting in a lot of different rules into the computer, by programming them… a lot of logical rules that went one by one — and the computer could follow them, and eventually we thought if we had enough of these rules, we could come up with AI.

That turned out to be a terrible way forward, in that many of the tasks that we can now solve cannot be solved using that approach of write down a bunch of rules. Instead, we write down an algorithm that can look at a lot of data and learn from the data.

Machine learning… is this idea of marrying algorithms and statistics, learning from data. Deep learning is a subset of machine learning. So we build these algorithms that have lots and lots of numbers that we don't know how to set, and then we set those numbers by looking at data. That's the general machine learning task.

It's like you have this algorithm, you have this program that has many, many, many knobs, and we don't know what these knobs should be set at, so we just set them using data, and we call that learning.

If any of you can add clarity to this, or have your own questions, please post.

2

Not necessarily related to your question of AI vs ML.

But one thing I have been thinking a lot about is how KM could possibly use ML in a meaningful way.

One thing I wish KM could do in the future, is infer from user’s actions things that he or she repeats a lot and then give advice or even give complete macros that would help save user’s time.

Essentially it would infer from what it is you are doing and learn from how you like doing things (do you like to use mouse more or keyboard?) and then assist you in doing these things. Whereby you don’t have to go to KM and explicitly make macros but instead following KM’s advice, edit the macros it creates for you.

3

I believe Text Expander tried this and ran afoul of people not being overly happy to have something watching what they were doing and making suggestions about what they do frequently. There is a whole can of worms in there.

That and it sounds incredibly difficult to do even vaguely well.

4

Yeah I agree. But we are talking about the future here. :smiley:

Machine learning research is going at really impressive speeds. Who knows what comes of it in 5-10 years time.