NLP, AI, and Social Science are About to Get A Lot Better

If robots can do backflips and cars can nearly drive themselves, why can't Siri and Alexa carry their side of a simple conversation? And how come there's no artificial intelligence (AI) able to read through all of our news and policy discussions to solve our social and economic problems? The answer is simpler than you might think. As it happens, human languages create very noisy data. Our ambiguous words, metaphors, and idioms make for beautiful poetry, but computers were built to compute math and logic on unambiguous numbers and categories.