techcrunch: Hunch Gets A New Board Member: Wikipedia Co-founder Jimmy Wales

techCrunch (press release)

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales is joining decision-making engine Hunch's board of directors and will serve as an advisor to the startup...

View the article

Well, so much for that company.

I can see the first board meeting.

Jimbo: "I have an idea! Let's make a wiki! Wikify the thing and you can get free labor from human brains!"

Board: The only site that's ever worked for is Wikipedia, and it works there only because people work on what they want to, like classifying cartoon characters, not what YOU or somebody else wants them to. A search engine cannot and does not work that way.

Jimbo: My search engine did!

Board: Your what?

Jimbo: Nevermind

The concept actually has some potential, if they can get a few talented artifical-intelligence guys to work for them. (I'd be willing to do it, though I'm more of an "artificial stupidity guy.") You'd think that would be possible these days, with everyone getting laid off all over the place.

I tried a few questions last night, and the results were mixed, I must say. I realize the whole thing's still in beta, but it really needs some decent natural-language processing. Awbrey knows about this stuff... Anyway, here are some examples:

If I eliminate my company's CEO, how can I assure myself of personal control?
No matches found

Who is buried in Grant's Tomb?
No matches found

Should I burn down my apartment complex?
No matches found

Should I start drinking?
2 matching results:
When should I start drinking today?
Popular Hunches
1. Right now
2. In a little while
3. Never

What should I drink?
Popular Hunches
1. Water
2. Sprite - Sprite is a transparent, lemon-lime flavored, caffeine free soft drink, produced by the Coca-Cola Company...
3. IZZE

Note: At no time did the site offer an opinion of whether or not I, being a tea-totaler, should actually begin a downward-spiral into a life of abject misery caused by alcohol abuse. I believe it simply assumed that I was already drunk.

Who should I have sex with?
5 matching results:
This is the one I responded to...
Should I have sex tonight?
Q. Do you have kids sleeping close by?
(Clicked this, which led to a series of questions, including "Do you like to dance?")

Answer: Yes (87%)
Pros: Yeeeee ha! Ride 'em skipper! Watch out baby, here comes the duke! We're using all the ...
Cons: What would your mother say? Really!

Is it possible that I will someday find my perfect match, get married, and break the cycle of loneliness and despair?
No matches found

What's my favorite color?
1 matching result:
1. Blue
2. Navy blue
15. Red - Red is the warmest of all colors. Red is the color most chosen by extroverts and one of the top picks of males. On the negative side red can mean temper or anger. In China, red is the color of
(This actually turns into a personality test.)

I've just doused myself with kerosene - would you care to give me a light?
No matches found


So, as you can see, the site still needs work. In particular, I'd recommend that suicidal individuals not look there for answers, as this might yield unfortunate results.

Quote the raven: "Nevermore!!" There's nothing like an automatic answer to help a guy torture himself!

Hunch is pretty plainly a marketing data collector: they ask you a buttload of personal information questions (in other words, marketing data) in exchange for providing you with something resembling a "personalized answer". From their privacy policy:Their data would be more valuable to marketers if not anonymized, but the data they do collect will be very useful both for targeting advertisements (I assume the site has ads, although I haven't seen any that made it through ABP) and for sale to market research groups (who are quite adept by now at deanonymizing anonymized data). I imagine their long-term goal is to gather a big corpus of information, then sell the whole kit and kaboodle to someone who doesn't care about privacy policies, and walk away very much enriched. Sounds like the sort of exploitation that Jimmy's all for.

For all of that, it doesn't sound as invasive as offering a free email service, then having the computer rummage around in your mailbox to see what keywords trigger what kind of stuff you might want to be advertised to, about.

Didn't Vibber leave WMF in order to help start a company that would offer such bits of personal info to the world as a sort of cookie-package, so you could control it without having the world try to figure it out, from your buying activities or your facebook account? I wonder how Hunch is going to interface with such accounts?

There's always the problem that what you think you're willing to "tell the world" about yourself, is always far less than what the world can infer about you, from any interaction you have with it. Of course this is not a new problem. The new problem is that all this is being recorded and databased on a world-wide scale, for everybody. "Know yourself; if you need help, call the FBI" is a joke from the Deteriorata; but switch "FBI" to "any gov or commmercial .org with computers" and it's suddenly a lot less funny. Our quest to keep BLP off WP is just a symbol of a far larger struggle. One we're destined to lose, not unlike that with the Grim Reaper, but that doesn't mean you don't do what you can to delay Skynet and Judgement Day.

Sorry — like I have to tell you this — I'm more about Unnatural Language Processing (ULP).

But I do know where you can find a lot of artifecal intelligence workers …

Jon

The whole things sounds like a malformed business plan to me.

1) Program a computer to understand natural language, for search purposes.
2) Massive profits!

The problem being that if you could do 1), you wouldn't be doing something so stupid as a search engine. You've have voice operation for you-name-it. You can replace all your 911 operators with it, for example.

A decent search on-command requires wisdom = sapience (though not necessarily self-awareness = sentience). A computer is not going to do a really good job of it until it has had human experience, somehow. The sort of knowledge-base they are trying to develop for Cyc (Cycorp, Inc) is a minimal requirement.

Remember my Henny Youngman joke about the guy who calls Schwartz, Schwartz, Schwartz, & Schwartz, and asks four times for Mr. Schwartz, getting a different answer each time? I've told it now to a number of people, and my experience has been that females nod through the list, following it logically, and then when I get to the end, they say, "and the punchline is..."? I gather that your average executive secretary or mother has to make inferential social judgements far more complex, on far more limited information. Some men, however, find the story amusing.

Anyway, a 2010 corporation may aim for some lesser sort of automated thing, as already happens where you order a tactical flashlight and the computer has a rule-set that assumes you might also be interested in general hunting and survival gear, and maybe a set of Torx wrenches. These things can be put in by humans, who try to reduce their own intuition to a set of simple rules that can be wrong, but are more often right than a simple guess. The results can be hilarous, but no more so than non-targetted advertising now.

Just don't order Crisco on-line.

I see some definite opportunity for a local marketing person to have a field day. For example...