I used to think AI was a hyped-up distraction. I thought it would do a clumsy job of things, and be annoying, but mostly harmless. I’ve changed my mind. What initiated my change of mind was playing around with some AI tools. After trying out chatGPT and Google’s AI tool, I’ve now come to the […]
AI
As we entered the third decade of the third millennium, many of the science and tech words and phrases in popular circulation had lost all meaning. “AI”, “machine learning” and their newer synonym, “cognitive technology”, for example, had joined the pantheon of synonyms for “snake oil“. Or at least they were becoming placeholders for anything […]
Are you afraid of the coming AI overlords? Then you’ve probably been sold an exaggerated narrative. Beth Singler, a Cambridge University anthropologist who tires of gratuitous media use of the Terminator pictures, thinks these kinds of representations have skewed our ideas of what AI is capable of. So what is AI really capable of? For […]
Google saved my life so many times last month, as I trudged through Europe alone. Without Maps, I would never have made it to my meetings, train connections, flights, meals, or anything. Google sent alerts to remind me when to leave; it translated my questions, so I could bleat them in a pathetic form of […]
You’ve heard of René Descartes. 17th century French philosopher; cogito ergo sum (I think therefore I am); first principles of enlightenment philosophy and science and all that. You might be less familiar with Descartes’ robot daughter Francine. The tale of her birth and gruesome death makes for a wild historical(ish) ride in its own right, but […]
We live with machines. And our machines are getting smarter. They’re still very dumb, they do what we tell them to, and often not really all that well. But we’re teaching them. And I do mean “we.” When you tag your friends on Facebook, you’re teaching its facial recognition system what to look for in […]