A couple years back while visiting a friend, she showed me her new technology gadget.
Without warning me, she said: “Alexa what time is it?’’
From a black spherical object on a side table came a response in a woman’s voice: “4:46 p.m.’’
I was caught by surprise.
Alexa was, said my friend, an Amazon technology that can do a lot of tasks for the owner — things like tell a joke on command, look up the meaning of words and my friend’s main use — play in her favourite music.
Alexa removed the need for doing lots of tasks. Although vacuuming is not among them.
I learned later that Alexa presents a horrific invasion of privacy.
Anything said or done that reaches her “ears’’ is picked up by her memory and stored in a data bank.
Alexa was one of the first applications of what became artificial intelligence. That technology made headlines around the world as a new ChatGT app has emerged among others.
This new artificial intelligence (AI) —not to be be confused with cattle producers’ AI — has tremendous capability.
It can write essays, books, reports, songs anything. By some estimates AI can replace one in three jobs world wide.
The computing power of AI allows the application to scour all the Internet pages in the world, distill them and produce whatever the user wants.
The benefits are awe-inspiring. It can shorten time to build, to invent medicine. It can write essays for students and do homework.
And it can mimic real life. Someone wrote a song and recorded it in the artist Drake’s voice. All they needed was a few seconds clip of his voice.
That mimic ability is scary. We will never know what to believe in the world of AI.
Watch the next U.S. presidential election. AI gives opponents the ability to make videos of other candidates saying outlandish things and fooling people.
AI isn’t perfect.
A study by the Washington Post of hundreds of AI tasks discovered about two-thirds of the AI work was very accurate. One in 10 was horribly inaccurate and the rest were so-so for accuracy and truth.
AI is so scary that the professor who invented it just quit his job at Google’s AI division so he can freely warn the world how terrible the technology is in the wrong hands.
Geoffrey Hinton, 75, who invented AI at the University of Toronto, has warned that AI will flood the Internet with fake photos, videos and texts. These fakes will be of such a standard most people won’t be able to figure out they are incorrect.
He consoles himself by saying if he hadn’t invented AI someone else would have.
And he says Google is not “a proper steward’’ of this technology.
Welcome to Alice In Wonderland in real time.
Ron Walter can be reached at ronjoy@sasktel.net
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect the position of this publication.
