In our final post of 2016, in which we reviewed the biggest math-related stories of that year, and in particular, a story about the first statistically significant demonstration of Zipf's Law, we discussed why the story was important to the development of artificial intelligences (AIs):
While not much more than an interesting finding now, that Zipf's Law appears to hold across such a large body of human language will have applications in the development of artificial intelligence, particularly for machine understanding of human language. That next generation Amazon Echo, Google Home, or whatever mobile voice recognition app will be on your mobile devices in the future will get better at understanding and communicating with you as a result. More practically, because technology will be better able to replicate the patterns inherent in human writing, movie producers have moved one step closer to realizing their long-held dream of being able to replace all those annoying and costly human screenwriters with automated script writers, where audiences won't be able to tell the difference for most Hollywood productions.
That day is closer than you think, as an experiment between two AIs named Vladimir and Estragon, who happen to have been manufactured by Google, appear to have fallen in love. As you can see in the following video clip, the dialogue between the two Google Home units is approaching the emotional depth of what might pass muster as the script for a sequel to a recent blockbuster romance.
According to Core77, they have also discussed tacos, where with additional technological development, it wouldn't be hard to anticipate that dialogue worthy of Nora Ephron cannot be far behind.
At the very least, that's something to think about now that we're well into the entertainment industry's award season. The world of the future will be far stranger than most people alive today appreciate!