AI

Is this a little bit scary?…..

Jane JamesLeave a comment

Scrolling through online videos of life in the Scottish highlands, my personal nirvana, one of those annoying pop-up ads appeared!

You know the sort of thing. Designed to engage you in something you don’t need that will likely cost you money you really can’t spare. Usually I hit that ‘skip’ button pretty quickly!

But this appeared different. A publishing company selling the idea you can write a book, without any knowledge on the subject, get it published and start reaping royalties within hours!

It took me years to write and upload my non-best sellers, how could this idea be true? I was hooked!

Artificial Intelligence (AI) was the answer! Which got me thinking, how many books are being sold that were not written by a human? Not an issue if the buyer is aware of this. Afterall it saves searching endless pages online for information on a particular subject – you can just buy a book AI has put together. Of course this is only going to work for non-fiction books. At the moment, AI doesn’t have the capacity of empathy. How long before it does I wonder.

The era of AI has brought many fantastic advances including:

 Healthcare – robots doing intricate surgery under the guidance of the surgeon

 Neurodivergent people – AI and ChatGPT are hugely helpful

 Manufacturing – automating many tasks humans don’t want/can’t do

But it also has some concerns for me including:

 Digital Dementia – if we outsource our brains to our devices as illustrated by Dr Manfred Spitzer and Jim Kwik – how quickly will our brains decline?

 Are we on the verge of replacing human connection with AI – thinking of the care industry for example. Not so far fetched considering the film Robot & Frank was released in 2012.

 Are we losing integrity? Publishing a book we didn’t write and gaining royalties.

 Copyright – if AI is mining the internet to put ‘your’ book together, what is your protection against challenges of plagiarism and copyright?

The publishing company has over four stars on Trustpilot. Lots of reviews of people receiving royalty cheques. Very enticing advertising for an investment of around $2K

Or is it just a little bit too scary?

What do you think?

History repeating itself? Technology helping or crushing humans?

Jane JamesLeave a comment

Watching a feature on a news channel this morning about the pros and cons of capitalism has left me wondering if we have learned anything from the Industrial Revolution to the financial markets crash of 2008.

 

I’m not sure I’m any clearer on an answer!

 

Hundreds of years ago machines started replacing humans’ physical labour.  Less people were employed which more was produced.  But workers laid off faced destitution with no money to feed, clothe themselves or provide shelter – remember this was before state unemployment benefits.

 

With the advancement of machines cracking codes in WW2, computers reducing in size from huge rooms to pocket size and robots being used in medical sciences we’ve seen many pluses to this technology.  But is it now going too far?

 

The online news feature showed Bob Pisani, On-Air Stock Editor for CNBC – American news channel who liaises with stock traders and explains the markets to the general population.  Bob passionately believes in capitalism without which he feels  there would be no financial support within the economy.  Markus Koch a Stock Market Correspondence stated traders have been reduced from thousands to hundreds in recent years as machines have taken over.  More thought provoking for me was Tarek Mashhour, Audi Plant Germany explaining their goal is to have a production network of communicating robots meaning increased productivity with the same resources.  But if less humans are working – who is buying the Audi cars?

 

Dirk Heitmann of IBM Germany explained they are developing cognitive machines capable of learning on their own!  Dirk feels this increases human creativity capabilities.  But could this be at the price of human jobs?

 

Anthony Scaramucci, Hedge Fund owner believes capitalism is the only system which works.  ‘There is tremendous opportunity for growth over the next fifty years.  We can mine for minerals essential in technology in asteroids in space’.  Now that idea might sound completely out there but we have computers that can talk with each other, robots used in manufacturing, healthcare and so on.  Is it really out of reach?

 

An interesting thought concluded the news feature by Professor Tim Jackson – Economist at University of Surrey who believes ‘we live on a finite planet therefore the expectation we can all grow and profit from capitalism is false – we can’t’.

 

We seem to get richer in technological advancements but the divide between rich and poor seems just as wide and just as unbalanced.

 

We watched with baited breath…..