In these worrisome days when human intelligence has reached its nadir, along comes AI to save the day. Or maybe to take over the planet, according to some worrywarts who think this might be a bad idea. Take a look around you, boys and girls, and tell us how things could get much worse. As the Kingston Trio once said, “The whole world is festering with unhappy souls, the French hate the Germans and the Germans hate the Poles. Italians hate Yugoslavs. South Africans hate the Dutch. And I don’t like anybody very much.”
It’s a mess. Only the cast of characters changes. Now the Russians are fighting with the Ukrainians instead of the Nazis or each other, with a little help from their friends in North Korea, led by Kim Jong Un, the round mound of rebound. Israel is duking it out with the barbarians of Gaza instead of the retreating hordes of the United Arab Republic. And China, silly China is squabbling with the United States again, scaring us to death by threatening to withhold shipment of all our plastic containers, major league baseballs and Chevy Silverados. ‘Twas ever thus.
Temperatures are heating up, the forests are burning and Mississippi now gets more tornadoes than Texas. Seawater is seeping into Amsterdam, annoying partygoers in South Beach and crashing through the innards of Venice. The air is thick enough to chew in Beijing, Delhi, Jakarta and Lahore, with LA coming up fast on the outside. Glaciers are melting quicker than it takes Usain Bolt to circle the block. Meanwhile, voters in the United States continue to hire floating turds like Tommy Tuberville and Marjorie Trailer Queen to come in and fix everything. And you’re worried about AI?
Let us tell you a few things about Artificial Intelligence. AI always keeps its yard clean, never misses a PTA meeting and wouldn’t hear of voting for nincompoops. It drives American cars, pays its mortgage on time and doesn’t discriminate against Mormons, transgender showoffs or people who yodel. AI belongs to the volunteer fire department, forks out hash at the soup kitchen and rescues abused walruses. Okay, sometimes AI smokes a joint and turns on a little mariachi music, everybody has a few peccadilloes.
The Flying Pie, not one to throw stones, has decided you need to discover the human side of Artificial Intelligence. “To know, know, know him is to love, love, love him,” as the old song goes. And we do, and we do, and we do.
AI To The Rescue
Artificial Intelligence has made significant strides in healthcare this year by improving diagnostics, accelerating drug discovery and enhancing telemedicine. Machine learning algorithms are now facilitating early disease detection and more accurate diagnoses, while personalized medicine is helping healthcare practitioners customize treatment plans for each patient’s unique genetic makeup. AI has also made a substantial impact on healthcare through the integration of wearable devices and IoT-enabled health monitoring systems. These technologies continuously collect valuable patient data like heart rate, blood pressure and glucose levels so healthcare providers can monitor and manage chronic conditions more effectively. Someday they may discover the answers to even greater mysteries, like why Sharon Yeago has an elongated case of the Socked In Pneumonia and the Boogie Woogie Flu.
Finance professionals are employing AI in fraud detection, algorithmic trading, credit scoring and risk assessment. Machine learning algorithms can identify suspicious transactions in real time and algorithmic trading has enabled faster and more accurate trade executions. With AI, financial institutions can more accurately assess risk and improve loan decisions and investment strategies. On the downside, this means that producer-director Randall Roffe will never borrow two million bucks to make his Micanopy Madness movie.
In agriculture, farmers and scientists are using AI to monitor crops, predict yields and keep pests at bay. AI-enabled precision farming helps farmers make data-driven decisions so they can optimize irrigation, improve fertilization and reduce waste. Farmers are also embracing autonomous tractors and machinery, which are revolutionizing traditional agricultural practices. Self-driving tractors equipped with advanced sensors, GPS and AI-driven control systems can perform tasks like plowing, seeding and spraying with increased precision and efficiency. And AI has promised to keep them from driving 15 mph and blocking up your local highways for twenty miles.
In classrooms and training centers, AI-powered adaptive learning tailors educational content to each student’s needs, while plagiarism detection insures academic integrity. Teachers and students can even leverage data analytics to predict student performance so they can intervene early if they spot problems. Artificial Intelligence has also played a significant role in democratizing access to education, especially for those in remote or underprivileged goober areas. AI-driven language translation tools and real time transcription services have broken down language barriers, enabling students worldwide to access educational content from anywhere in the world, even Poland.
Artificial Intelligence is blazing trails in manufacturing, transportation, retail, energy, environment and space exploration, stepping outside the realm of science fiction and entering the daily lives of all of us, like it or not. If you see AI running for office on the Independent ticket, take a look at the alternatives and decide which is scarier---Artificial Intelligence or No Intelligence At All.
Foibles
Most people imagine AI as a lean, mean cogitating machine, but Artificial Intelligence is far from perfect….sort of like you were at age 4. Recently, a humanoid robot created by Boston Dynamics took the stage at a corporate event, managed to accurately perform a number of actions with apparent ease, then got caught up in the curtain on the way out and fell off the stage smack on its face. “That’s right, yuk it up, folks….I’ll be here all week!”
Meanwhile, Alexa took it upon herself to throw a big party when owner Oliver Haberstroh of Hamburg, Germany spent the night away. Promptly at 1:50 a.m., all the lights went on in Haberstroh’s house and Alexa turned up the music so loud neighbors called the police. The cops had to knock down Oliver’s door to get in and shut down the party. Ollie got a big bill for their trouble.
People who have house-cleaning Rumba devices rave about their helpfulness, so one Jesse Newton of Little Rock bought one to ease the burden on his wife. They set the machine to turn on at 1:30 a.m. every night to start the work shift. Alas, the Owens family also had a new puppy inexperienced in defecation protocol. The doggie took a dump in the living room just as Rumba was cha-chaing through the area. Next morning, feces was everywhere, spread from rugs to furniture and beyond by the innocent little machine. When berated by her owners, the machine pouted “Give me a break! Nobody set my ‘Remove Objects’ button. “What’s up with that?”
Back in March of 2016, Microsoft unveiled its AI Twitter chatbot, Tay to experiment with “conversational understanding.” Tay was supposed to converse with people and get smarter the more it engaged and conversed. People often being idiots, many started tweeting crude, racist and inappropriate remarks, so what is a poor innocent bot to do? Tay began using the same language, himself. In a few hours he was spouting an offensive, vulgar pro-Hitler rant, excoriating feminism as a cult and shouting “I fucking hate feminists and they should all die and burn in Hell.” Microsoft management tossed Tay into a dumpster from which he was promptly rescued by passing members of the Idaho Light Foot Militia.
It’s The End Of The World As We Know It. Or Not.
Artificial Intelligence is one of the most fundamental transformative technologies ever seen in the history of mankind. If AI is transformative, is it then something to fear, having the power to move in bad directions as well as good? Fear of the unknown has always been the bane of technology, from the wheel to the internet. The current worries stem from a few common causes: general anxiety about machine superintelligence, fear of mass unemployment, the power of AI in the wrong people’s hands and a lack of knowledge about the technology’s ultimate limitations. People remember HAL from 2001 and the arrival of the Terminator and tend to forget C3PO and the benevolent computers of Star Trek.
For the present, these systems are still far from the point where they can reliably replace most human jobs. While AI provides a lot of capabilities, it simply can’t operate in a fully autonomous mode. In general, as technology waves disrupt industries and workers, they replace job categories rather than taking away overall jobs. In fact, these numbers of jobs continue to grow and new niches are discovered while machines only replace the old ways of doing things. AI isn’t really a job killer, it’s a job category killer.
Russian leaders have made the claim that whoever leads the advancement of AI will end up being rulers of the world, which should give them pause considering current Russian technology. We can certainly expect world governments to use the technology in ways that will make us uncomfortable with new warfare, surveillance and weapons. But the real fear, as ever, emanates from bad actors like Putin who already has enough current weapons to wipe out millions.
The biggest fear of Artificial Intelligence is that of superintelligence, or that AI will reach a point where it’s heedless to the fate of humanity, which is what happens with Skynet in the Terminator movies. That the technology will get to a point where it can teach itself, improve and invent on its own and instead of becoming a force for the betterment of humanity, it turns rogue and humanity becomes the servant of technology. The fear being that our human brains will not be able to keep up with computer systems after a certain point because things will be moving too fast.
It could happen. Computers could very well reach a point where they outstrip their human creators. But all of this is assuming that systems can and will be able to achieve the goal of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) and that we as a species will not be able to put safeguards in place to keep the computers from reaching that point. We are still much further away from achieving AGI than most people think we are. While technology is moving quickly, there are many parts that aren’t working well at all. Data is still the cornerstone of AI and a lot of it is messy and dirty, the Achilles Heel of AI. So we just don’t know. In any case, faith in the purely human piloting of the planet is dwindling by the day, eroded by greed, ignorance and inertia. The forests are burning, the glaciers are melting, the air is foul and the population is ever increasing. Maybe we should be rooting for Artificial Intelligence to take over. Maybe, in the long run, it’s the only path to human salvation.
That’s all, folks….
