Ready for Prime Time?

Some say it will be the savior of mankind, others the cause of its demise. It's what's keeping the economy afloat, and also what's going to cause it to collapse. It will have a major impact on you whether you are a businessperson or a student, a techie or a luddite, a retiree or an entrepreneur. And it's already embedded in almost everything we do, from checking the weather to getting directions, from choosing which is the best vacuum cleaner to suggesting a vacation itinerary. The most recent two-letter combination to become part of our everyday speech, to GE and ET, VW and UN, add AI.

The term "artificial intelligence" itself isn't particularly new, coined in 1956 by John McCarthy for a workshop on the topic at Dartmouth. It evolved in fits and starts, and until relatively recently was strictly the province of backroom nerds. Then just three years ago ChatGPT was demoed, attracting over a million users in 5 days. And now it seems that every search, every customer interaction, every shopping experience, every routine online engagement has an AI overlay. 

But while AI is most definitely prime time it is not always ready. It's hard to remember a time when products were endlessly tested before they were released, so that the version we encountered was virtually glitch free. We then moved into the "always beta" era, where what we are using is very much "of the moment," with bugs and glitches assumed, and patches and updates expected. And nowhere is that truer than with ChapGPT, Copilot, Gemini and their ilk.

Much has been written about AI "hallucinations," where references are made up out of whole cloth. But each version makes mistakes when the answers are in plain site as well. If you've played with any of it you've likely seen a summary of a conversation that is mostly correct, yet screws up some obvious facts, such as a daughter who is actually a wife. And the more you mess around the more you see random glitches.

As a "for instance," when a friend was getting a new boat I asked Gemini to help me create a logo. I gave it the prospective name and a style, then asked it to create something. The first attempt was impressive on its face, but needed refinement. I typed back my suggestions, and a new iteration appeared. Not quite right, so I tried again: the exact same thing came back. When I noted that non-response, I got, "You are absolutely right, and I am truly sorry." It repeated back what I wanted and said it would make the fix. Next output: no change again. I flagged it. "You are absolutely correct, and my apologies are not enough. I am failing to follow your instructions, and I deeply regret the ongoing frustration this is causing." It rebuilt it once more, this time making some incremental changes. Still not what I wanted, I asked for tweaks and tried again. That cycle repeated, some 25 times in all, until I got even close. Had it been a probationary employee, I would have cut him/her/it loose around output 14. 

In that same vein, a presenter at a recent conference I attended told how he liked to quiz ChatGPT as he commuted in on the train. A passionate Pittsburgh Steelers fan, he asked it a staple of sports radio: which was the best football franchise in history? As might have been expected it returned that the New England Patriots get that nod. But wait, he asked: have you considered turnovers? Rushing yards? First downs? He gave it a bunch of metrics where he knew the Steelers excelled. The AI went silent for a while. When he asked what was happening, it said it was still looking at the data set. Radio silence again. As his commute was coming to an end, he asked one more time. "Sorry, I don't have access to the correct statistics," was the response. As the presenter put it, "I think I created the first AI teenager." 

Make no mistake: what AI can do is nothing short of amazing, and we've seen it get better and better with each new release. The trick will be in using it where appropriate, providing the appropriate checks and guardrails, and making sure there is a disconnect switch. Looked at another way, unless it grows opposable thumbs, at least for now, I think we're OK.

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Marc Wollin of Bedford is learning to use the new tools where he can. His column appears weekly via email and online on Substack and Blogspot as well as Facebook, LinkedIn and X.

Not Lost to History

After the party the host sent out a thank you note along with a link to a collection of snapshots, including the video he screened that night showcasing the life of his wife, the birthday girl. It was a wonderful remembrance of a fun gathering, one that was a singular event in space and time. As a historical record it may someday be of interest to an archivist, though it's unlikely to have significant impact beyond those in attendance. Still, unless it's deleted out of the cloud, it will probably stay safely ensconced in some data center from now until the end of time, available to anyone who cares to find it.

Contrast that with what we know about, say, Shakespeare. Almost every detail of his personal life is a guess, educated though it may be. For all of the words he wrote that are venerated and performed, what we know of him as a person is much thinner. There are the bare facts of his marriage and children, as well as his work as an actor and playwright. But so little is actually known about his life that scholars call the seven years after his children were born "the lost years." As Ian McEwan writes in his new novel, "What We Can Know," there are no new facts, only new angles.

The opposite of that is someone like Churchill. Though in a different genre, he also wrote voluminously, and many wrote about him. There are journals and diaries, correspondence and notes, in one archive alone over 800,000 pages. Through first, second and third hand observations and recollections, we know chapter and verse of the man and his life.

Between those two extremes lie the rest of the people who existed in those times, people like most of us: the shopkeepers, the tradesmen, the homemakers, the bookkeepers. Unless they did something exemplary or atrocious, we likely barely know of their existence, let alone the details of their lives. There might be the odd person who penned a letter which is discovered years later in an attic or folded into the back of a book. From that we might glean something about their lives or their thoughts and their outlook on the world. But as for an extensive record? To say we know little about them is charitable at best.

Fast forward to today. For sure, those of note whose names appear above the fold like Will or Winston have their comings and goings, their thoughts and musings, well documented. Future chroniclers of their lives will have no shortage of material from which to work when describing their existence and their impact. There will be no need for conjecture, for it will be all spelled out in a collection whose biggest problem will not be its scarcity but its size.

But unlike in times gone by, every single one of us is also creating the same type of staggeringly massive contemporaneous record. It is an annotated transcript of what we think, what we say, what we do, what we see and how we're seen. We place it not in some impenetrable vault but rather in a publicly accessible central database, guarded, if at all, by the most cursory of security protocols. Should some future curious individual want to, that Saturday night party would be there for the taking, showing what we wore, what we ate, who we were with and more. Cross referenced with the emails, texts, phone records and search histories gleaned from the WhatsApp contact info, they could recreate it completely to be all but a clone.

As McEwan writes, "We have robbed the past of its privacy." 

Is that a bad thing?  It's your call. We talk about leaving our mark on the world, creating something of permanence that will endure once we are gone. In the past that took a deliberate effort, taking an action or building a thing that would withstand the test of time. But that's hardly necessary anymore. Estimates are that we are online over a third of our lives, with each interaction leaving multiple digital breadcrumbs. True, someone would have to want to find it, but odds are that the raw data will be kicking round for a very long time. The bottom line is that while we may be lost in history, we are no longer lost to it.

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Marc Wollin of Bedford appears in many databases, only some of which he knows about. His column appears weekly via email and online on Substack and Blogspot as well as Facebook, LinkedIn and X.

The Other Peace Prize

Over the last few weeks we saw a role out of the highest acknowledgment of excellence on the planet in the form of the Nobel Prizes. In six fields the awards recognize giant strides, discoveries that set the table for the next generation of breakthroughs. Much of it is highly specialized, the kind of stuff that is the building blocks of progress rather than the end of result of it. And so the prize in physics did not go to Apple and the iPhone 17, but to John Martinis, France Michel Devoret and John Clarke for the discovery of "macroscopic quantum mechanical tunnelling and energy quantisation in an electric circuit." It's way more complicated than the iPhone's new improved selfie camera, but potentially more groundbreaking.

If there's a problem with the Nobels, that's it in a nutshell. The discoveries may be envelope-breaking, but they have little application to the day-to-day challenges we all face. Not that it's not good to recognize advancements which could be game changing in the long run, but our need for immediate gratification means it would be nice to bestow some recognition on the kinds of things that make a difference today.

Enter the Ig Nobels. While the real ones have their roots in a bequest made by the Swedish chemist, engineer, and inventor Arthur Nobel in 1895, the Igs have a more recent pedigree. Begun in 1991, they are administered by the scientific humor magazine "Annals of Improbable Research," and bestowed in a ceremony at MIT by actual Nobel laureates. While the criteria for the Nobels is for people whose work "confer the greatest benefit on mankind," the Igs aim is to "honor achievements that first make people laugh, and then make them think."

This year's crop falls squarely in the sweet spot. Take the award In Biology. It went to 11 Japanese researchers for their experiments to learn whether cows painted with zebra stripes can avoid being bitten by flies. They used water-based lacquers that washed away after a few days, enabling them to rotate their test subjects in three different groups: zebra stripes, just black stripes, or no stripes. The results showed that zebra stripes significantly decreased the number of biting flies. Maybe try that on yourself instead of Off!

In Physics, eight Italian researchers delved into the blending of ingredients in pasta sauce. They came up with a foolproof recipe for the classic "Pasta alla cacio e pepe," or pasta with cheese and pepper. The trick: using corn starch for the cheese and pepper sauce instead of relying on however much starch leaches into the boiling water as the pasta is cooked. Meanwhile, in Engineering Design, two Indian researchers were cited for their work on "how foul-smelling shoes affects the good experience of using a shoe-rack." Their research led them to craft their own odor-eating rack using UV light that killed the odor-causing bacteria. In both cases, it's news you can actually use.

There're more offbeat examinations of everyday issues. In Pediatrics the prize went to a group noting how nursing mothers who ate garlic had babies that breastfed longer. And the Chemistry prize demonstrated that adding some powered Teflon to your dinner increases volume without affecting taste, thereby decreasing calories consumed. They do note that this is strictly experimental, so don't try this at home.

And then there's the big gun, no pun intended. For the Ig Noble Peace Prize, four German researchers showed that the perhaps the way to better communicate across cultures and languages is to drink more. Working with native German speaking undergraduates at Maastricht University in the Netherlands who were also fluent in Dutch, they showed that getting a little drunk makes you more fluent. Scrupulously scientific to the core, they had two groups, one drinking plain water, the other vodka with bitter lemon.  Turned out the tipsy group was judged by native Dutch speakers to sound more natural. The researchers postulate that alcohol lowers anxiety, thereby increasing proficiency. So perhaps think about pregaming before heading through airport security in France. Just not too much.

In the spirit of the Ig Nobels, forget Ukraine/Russia, Pakistan/India and Israel/Gaza. You want to solve an intractable conflict? Get Mets fans to like their Yankee counterparts, or Cubs fans to break bread with Sox aficionados. Do that, and you truly deserve an award.

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Marc Wollin of Bedford is unlikely win a prize of any kind in literature. His column appears weekly via email and online on Substack and Blogspot as well as Facebook, LinkedIn and X.