it’s everywhere (AI, that is)

I can’t escape the discussion about AI (Artificial Intelligence). It’s everywhere. I see it constantly on my LinkedIn feed, and it shows up frequently on Mastodon (that non-commercial, open source alternative to Twitter). Geoffrey Hinton, the head of Google AI (and often called the Godfather of AI), recently resigned, according to The New York Times, “so he can freely speak out about the risks of AI.” It’s rather like Dr. Frankenstein leaving town and saying, “I guess creating that monster wasn’t such a good idea after all.” But Dr. Hinton deserves credit for taking action and speaking out.

The whole conversation is overwhelming, rather like (spoiler alert!) the conspiracy between the Changelings and the Borg to wipe out humanity, as revealed in the final two episodes of Star Trek: Picard, season three. So much so that I have to write about it.

In the interest of full disclosure I have to admit to once having had a dog in this fight. During the nineties I worked for a software company that developed AI applications for the banking and insurance industries, although the preferred term was Expert Systems. (The software ran on a mainframe and on IBM OS/2, just to date myself.) Of course, the technology has evolved considerably since then.

It’s true that AI is everywhere. I have had predictive text on my iPhone for several versions of iOS now. Microsoft Word is now intrusive with its predictive text feature. My trusty grammar and style checker, ProWritingAid, uses AI to offer suggestions. (Will you please stop telling me I need to add commas all the time, dammit!) When Kaiser notified me that I needed to see my primary care physician, it directed me to an automated phone system with which I had a spoken conversation about the timing of the appointment. I suppose that beats sitting on hold for twenty minutes. Perhaps the system is in beta, because the next day I received an email in which they asked me to complete a survey about my experience with it. All of this is not to mention Alexa, to whom I speak several times a day and who lives in my three Amazon Echo devices.

A lot of the conversation, however, is around ChatGPT, a tool that is supposed to assist in creating content. By content I mean articles, essays, blog posts, thought pieces, etc. Even poems, it seems. One of the people I follow on LinkedIn opened a post saying, “ChatGPT is great.” Really? Are you kidding me? She then added some nuance and caveats, but still.

I have seen more than one LinkedIn post saying that ChatGPT is valuable for research, allowing the human writer to fill in and complete the piece. But ChatGPT has been documented to provide flat out wrong information, and it provides no attribution for the content it spews out.

For research, I can use Wikipedia, as long as I go back to the original references cited in the article and not rely on the Wikipedia article itself. (The Chicago Manual of Style monthly Q&A told me that.) And Google can provide useful references if you carefully check the sources. Google Scholar is even better.

The great theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking, who died in 2018, warned about the dangers of AI in 2014, even though the technology he used to communicate with the world used a basic form of AI. At the end of March over a thousand technology leaders and researchers signed an open letter urging a pause in the development of AI. Signers included Elon Musk, Apple Computer co-founder Steve Wozniak, and Yuval Noah Harari, professor at Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the author of Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. The original web page, published by the Future of Life Institute, states that over thirty thousand signatures have been collected, of which over twenty-seven thousand have been verified. On Thursday Vice President Kamala Harris met with the CEOs of companies involved in AI and President Biden dropped by the meeting long enough to tell them, “What you’re doing has enormous potential and enormous danger.”

Perhaps ChatGPT has its uses, but I’m not convinced. There is, I believe, great danger here. There is greater danger in other applications of AI.

People, we need to pay attention.

confessions of an old internet person

As I wrote here on Monday, according to Gretchen McCulloch in her book Because Internet I am an “old internet person.” That means that I have been online from the earliest days that the internet became available to the general public. It’s true that I have been, so I guess I am.

In fact, I have been online since before the internet was publicly available. I was dialing into electronic bulletin boards on my Apple IIe as early as 1986. I also had a CompuServe account, which gave me access to whatever resources CompuServe made available to its users. Later, on my IBM-compatible PC (as we called them then), I dialed into Prodigy which was a consumer service that IBM developed. That had some nice features, such as access to American Airlines reservations. This feature came in handy during the two years Terry and I had a commuting relationship between Southern California and the Bay Area. After that I had an America Online account, which you may know as AOL. Perhaps you remember the sign-up CDs they kept sending you in the mail. Again, you were limited to the content that AOL provided.

AOL started offering an internet gateway in 1993, though it was rather clumsy and unwieldy. I signed up for a dial-up internet account with a company called Netcom. They provided a UNIX shell account, which meant I had some space on a UNIX server and access to tools for email and for creating text files. It was all text-based. As the web started to emerge, Netcom offered an account with graphical web access. The problems were 1) you had to have a separate account for the web-based service, and 2) you had to use their proprietary tools for things like web access and email.

Terry and I were living in Mountain View at the time and an independent company opened up shop downtown on Castro Street called Best Internet. They were friendly people and when you opened a dial-up account they gave you a 3.5 inch floppy disk filled with freeware and shareware internet applications. It was with Best that I got my first custom internet domain (which I sold for a nice sum a few years ago) and where I created my first web site, something I coded by hand.

When we moved to Gilroy in 1997 I set up a dial-up account with a company called South Valley Internet. They offered reliable internet access, but the customer service was terrible. Eventually I was able to get always-on DSL service through a company called Covad. When Covad discontinued their residential service in Gilroy I was able to get DSL with the phone company, Verizon. They hadn’t offered DSL in our part of town previously. That worked, but the speed deteriorated over time to the point where dial-up might have been faster. At the same time, Terry and I were unhappy with DirecTV’s constant nickel-and-dime price increases for our satellite television service. In early 2011, therefore, I called up Charter Cable and arranged for cable television and internet service with them. So, really, it wasn’t until 2011 that we truly had high-speed internet.

High-speed internet is something that we almost take for granted today, and with all of our wireless devices and streaming services it is integrated into our daily lives. But it’s good for this old internet guy to remember that it was not always so.

life with Alexa

We bought our first Amazon Echo in February of this year for the bedroom. We quickly followed with a second Echo for the dining room/kitchen. When I learned that my legacy internet radio was about to be obsoleted I bought an Echo Show for my office.

I had thought about buying a current-generation internet radio for my office, but I decided it made sense to have consistency throughout the house. And besides, with my Echo Show (since I subscribe to Amazon Music) I can say, “Alexa, play the Broadway cast recording of Rent” and Alexa will do just that. Can’t do that with an internet radio.

Of course Alexa gets confused sometimes. In trying to get the movie soundtrack to Cabaret she insisted on playing the revival Broadway cast recording, which is a tad different. Alexa was having trouble understanding my instructions to play the Los Angeles classical music radio station KMZT and kept coming up with other stations. So I set up a routine on my iPhone Alexa app specifying the exact radio station along with its source (TuneIn Radio). The command is “Alexa, play Mount Wilson classical.” (This also to avoid confusion. Mount Wilson FM Broadcasters, Inc. owns KMZT.) However, unless I carefully pronounce “Mount” Alexa wants to play classic Matt Wilson songs from Amazon Music.

Sometimes Alexa responds differently to the same command. I have a routine that has Alexa turn on the light in the dining room and play the jazz radio station KCSM. The command is, “Alexa, it’s dinner time.” Usually Alexa handles this fine, but every so often she responds with the comment “Bon appétit!” in a proper Julia Child voice. That’s why I have an alternative routine with the command, “Alexa, we’re sitting down to dinner.”

My routine, “Alexa, good morning” used to give me an “on this day” trivia fact and the moon phase for the day, but I discovered that the moon phase was off by a day. So now I get the trivia fact and the day’s weather forecast. Sometimes, though, Alexa does some very odd things. When I ask my Echo Show, “Alexa, what is the moon phase?” Alexa responds, “There are no moon phases for this date.” Now that’s scary. (Did you ever read the Arthur C. Clarke short story, “The Nine Billion Names of God”?)

My fourth generation Echo in the bedroom and my Echo Dot in the kitchen/dining area just sit quietly when not in use. However, the Echo Show in my office always displays something if I am in the room and I am not listening to audio. It used to just display my photos, but now it displays all kinds of suggestions. It prompts me to ask Alexa to find the nearest Starbucks or wants me to have Alexa tell a joke. I get around town. I know where all the Starbucks are. And I don’t need Alexa telling me a joke. Fortunately, the remedy to that is to simply tell Alexa to display my photos.

And there is a lot that Alexa does well. We listen to KCSM in the evenings. On Wednesdays at 9:00 p.m. a program comes on that we don’t especially like. Fridays at the same time longtime KCSM host Kathleen Lawton broadcasts her program “Crazy About the Blues.” Neither Terry nor I are crazy about the blues. It’s easy to say, “Alexa, play KSDS,” or “Alexa, play KKJZ” (the San Diego and Los Angeles jazz stations, respectively). That’s convenient.

Alexa has certainly integrated herself into our lives.