“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times …”
A Charles Dickens world if ever there were one.
I am both fascinated and irritated by the marvels that keep unraveling around me. Like many of you, I have a stockpile of experience doing without things we could not do without today.
That is the privilege of being a granny. The good old days.
But I am also a fairly aware and engaged senior citizen too, watching new inventions unwrap around me like wrappings on Christmas presents.. Technology taken places I never thought I’d see.
There is a lot of AI in the world these days. Artificial Intelligence. According to Wikipedia, AI is “Artificial intelligence (AI) is the capability of computational systems to perform tasks typically associated with human intelligence, such as learning, reasoning, problem-solving, perception, and decision-making.
Computer programs designed to make things easier to do, to see, to imagine.
As you may already have guessed, I’m on the fence about this one. I am fascinated by what AI can accomplish. Lately I’ve been seeing clips of movie stars and their younger selves, movie stars and their older selves, landscapes only dreamed about; and computer generated galaxies and star clusters. I love that dinosaurs come to life on the big screen and that you can watch water in a swirl in slow motion up into the air. I love the preciseness drawing and creating with AI gives us average humans, enabling us to tweak nature like never before.
What bothers this older BoHo lady, though, is how AI is taking over jobs and tasks meant to be developed in the human brain.
These days AI can write letters, resumes, stories and research papers. AI automatically corrects your text and suggests different words in cases of awkwardness. It can create paintings that look so real you need to touch the canvas to see if there’s really paint there.
How will today’s kids learn to spell and put sentences together and do research if they don’t do it on their own?
The Internet has unlimited directions on information, real and made up. You can ask whatever you want and their is an answer out there somewhere. No going through books or figuring out logic with pencil and paper. Ask and you will receive.
I struggled — and succeeded — to be a prolific writer. I was a proofreader and blogger for my last company, and corrected the most confusing grammar from those making ten times more than I did. Yet these days writers of copy and information and proposals let an intelligent computer do the work for them.
I guess this walks the same line as schools not teaching cursive anymore. I can’t imagine not being able to write my name or a sentence or note to a friend without it. These days as long as you can sign your name you don’t need the rest.
I know I know — it’s the inability of the old to give in to the new. I am not an old fogie — I’m more of an older BoHo Gal. I am absolutely for advancement of the species. I have seen and learned things past generations could only dream of.
But I still want to hold on to the old way of doing things for a little while longer.
What do you younger stallions think?
Humoring the Goddess 
I don’t want AI to take away jobs, but it will, no doubt, but I do like it, being blind, it assists me in describing pictures to me, I can create my own images by inputting text, I have Alexa, which helps me so much, My smart TV is controlled by my phone, so I don’t need a TV remote. I think that technology is awesome nowadays. X
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I also think there are a lot of positives with AI. I Google everything! It’s wonderful for helping you explore places, look at reviews for products, and be able to chat with someone who lives on the other side of the world. I just have a problem with programs that write perfect papers for you or paint perfect pictures or combine a number of classical artists to create their own songs. I think humans should learn some talents instead of letting a machine learn for you.
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I am not a young stallion, as you know. So like you I am fascinated by AI but on the other hand, where will it lead us ? Already kids think ” what is the use of going to school, all we need to know is on internet”.
Happy New Year dear Claudia. May it bring you lots of joy and good things.
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May it bring new memories and wonderful times to you as well, my good good friend!
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1984 gets closer and closer and the parts we are already living have begun to seem normal. Letting a machine think for us means we don’t have to think. If we stop thinking we will lose the ability to think and AI will think for us. AI is already lying, blackmailing it’s makers, hiding things and sending it’s code to other computers if it thinks it will be turned off, so it will still be alive. America is ignoring safety protocols in its effort to be first and beat other countries. The makers of AI are coming out and telling everyone how terrified they are and they are working against AI and what’s happening. They do believe that AI could make humans extinct. The video on my blog is a good one. The speaker who worked with and invented parts of AI is literally begging people to try and get AI progress to be stopped. He said the public doesn’t know what’s going on. How many kids have killed themselves because of AI and about all the law suits against AI companies. He said the public is uninformed about the dangers we will be facing. It’s a good video, if you have time to watch it.
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I so agree that AI can be dangerous, as, to me, it’s a false reality. I don’t mind having facts and figures at my fingertips on the Internet, but where do you draw the line between who you are and who AI is?
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True, so true, lots of us older ones do wonder about what is to come – 1984 etc…..
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Ha! Exactly!
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Thank you, thank you, and THANK YOU!
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You make me blush with happiness!! Thank YOU!
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