Computers May Be As Good As (Or Better Than) Human Biocurators 35
Shipud writes "Sequencing the genome of an organism is not the end of a discovery process; rather, it is a beginning. It's the equivalent of discovering a book whose words (genes) are there, but their meaning is yet unknown. Biocurators are the people who annotate genes — find out what they do — through literature search and the supervised use of computational techniques. A recent study published in PLoS Computational Biology shows that biocurators probably perform no better than fully automated computational methods used to annotate genes. It is not clear whether this is because the software is of high quality, or both curators and software need to improve their performance. The author of this blog post uses the concept of the uncanny valley to explain this recent discovery and what it means to both life science and artificial intelligence."
misunderstanding the concept of "uncanny valley" (Score:5, Insightful)
This author seems to have inappropriately compared the "fear" of machines doing better than humans with concept of uncanny valley.
The concept of the "uncanny valley" is that the affinity of humans for observing the appearance or behavior of a human-like entity (robot, alien, whatever) has this unexpected dip when it is too close to the human behavior (we have this apparent built-in viceral problem with the entity). However, this is only true when it is trying to mimic human-like behaviors. If it's doing something totally different or totally exceeding human behaviors (say distinctly non-human speed, accuracy, strength, appearance, etc), the uncanny valley doesn't say anything about affinity, in fact, if you were to extrapolate the curve out, humans might even have more affinity for these "super-human" behaviors. Maybe that's why many express affinity for live-action versions of comic book super-heros, or airbrushed models in magazines. The behavior is so far from the uncanny valley that it doesn't invoke the supression response that is responsible for it.
Just like what was once observed with "space-shuttle" pilots, the computers can probably do a better job at this task, but we don't quite trust them yet (for some reason). That's really just the human fear of being replaced by machines, not uncanny valley. Note that the only people fearful about this behavior are the people that are likely to be replaced (and maybe a few that sympathize with them)...