AI is upon us
 

I was listening to a recent Youtube interview where Bill Gates was talking about the effects that AI is going to have on our education system. Most of it will be good thankfully.

What seems more doubtful is how it will be leveraged in society in general. The bad actors (Cyber Crime) are already all over it, and a lot of white collar jobs are being impacted already.

Does anyone have any stories about how it's impacting them? I know CoPilot, ChatGPT etc is already available to the masses, and I use it for so many things with great effect. I'm really looking forward to seeing it being applied to the healthcare industry. But my biggest concern is that without proper governance it will be abused - are our governments up to the task?

Interesting times.

What can a person do?

So far I like ChatGPT. It lets me talk to it in my native language - haven’t had a chance to use my mother tongue in 30 years. Then I have a Chinese gf I plan to surprise by learning some Mandarin to talk to her at our MahJongg games.

I get the best coupons and sales available anywhere when I ask.

AI is teaching me how to play Canasta and Bridge, too bad it can’t analyze my golf swing (yet). It’s really a lot like having a smart toaster that can talk back.

So on a personal level, I’m having fun with it.

I use a Grammarly tool when writing on a computer. It makes helpful suggestions on sentence structure, grammar, and punctuation.

I'm not entirely confident that what Bill Gates and I think are good for the education system are the same things. I'm about the basics: reading, writing, math, philosophy (logical analysis), and physical science. I'm not about DEI, climate panic, brainwashing, bias inducing, or population control.

I suspect we might be diametrically opposite in our ideas.

Not so good.
 

Yeah, not so good. Last week made an appt. on the phone with a specialty doc office; forced to speak with a female-sounding AI/robot.
Took a long time. She suggested next available appt. and it took a long time to figure out how to get another choice. Long pauses in conversation while AI/robot thought about it.
NO, I didn't enjoy it. I'd much rather talk to a real person. Wasted lots of my time.

Of course, I already don't like dealing with this doc's office. Two years of lousy customer service, NOW WORSE.

Yeah, you might be thinking their online appt. making would be better than a phone call. Nope.
I think I'm gonna fire this doc.

I am for certain that Bill Gates and I are diametrically opposed. .
No one should listen to BG for anything outside of how to operate a microsoft DOS.

plutocracy's definition in full display.

The best AI so far has to be Galileo FX. Joined 3 months ago and was kinda skeptical. After fine tuning the settings that make me comfortable, it has more than delivered.

Many said the same of Elon Musk, until he became another person's besty!

Right now, I like AI searches. I can get my search results without all the ads.

Understated
 

[SIZE="5"]Interesting? There's an old English curse (some think it's Chinese) that goes, "May you live in interesting times." Well, those times are here. I have a college prof friend who tells me he uses AI to check whether student essays are written by AI

Doesn't matter whether you're a Bill Gates fan or not. Doesn't change the fact that AI will change our lives, and in significant ways.

Not to mention autonomous robots, self driving cars. All within our life time (even for us old folk).

I know I'm probably talking to the wrong crowd about this. I know my next vehicle will be an EV with a self driving option.

reminds me of a song by Stealers Wheel!

barf :shocked: :22yikes:

AI, yes in many ways.
You can type at us about AI as there are alot of high tech experienced people on this site.
But as far as AI in education, I think you might want to talk with some front line teachers who deal with it everyday, versus a plutocrat

However, BG is just an anachronistic plutocrat trying to stay relevant in technology today. Don't conflate the two. .

Just don't ask ChatGPT who David Mayer is.

LOL! yea, that was funny!

I don't know why folks hate Bill to this degree, but what I do know is that he is intelligent and has some interesting ideas as do other folks. For example, AI can be used to actually score students on how original their work is. That might help teachers in their job. AI bots could also do much of the teaching in time - I can definitely see that happening. And it could be personalized for each student.

It's a new frontier we're embarking upon. The sooner it replaces those automated voice systems that customer service likes to use today the happier we will all be.

Absolutely!

The younger generations...too many no longer have the basics, even though all of them have attended a K-12 generation.

Without analytical and critical thinking skills, as well as mastering reading, writing, and arithmetic, MEI will be much more important.

And for those who didn't know, MEI means:
Merit
Experience
Intelligence

I was an English professor at a university for forty years. My daughter is one now. Fifteen or twenty years ago, students began buying papers online and trying to pass them off as their own work. I caught a small number of these on my own and punished the students. Then several apps became available that let teachers paste in all or part of an essay and in seconds receive a report on if any of it is plagiarized. Then some teachers began requiring that all papers be submitted directly to one of these apps before the teacher would look at it. Instead, I assigned individualized topics that students couldn’t find online. That worked.

For my daughter, teaching in central Georgia, dealing with ChatGPT over the past few years has been very difficult, as students can be much more specific about what they want. She has had a number of students turn in papers they ordered up from ChatGPT or a similar source and tried to pass off as their own work. Often the students are minority students who deny cheating and know how to make a fuss with the social equity office if a teacher lowers their grade. Teachers generally let them get away with it. I’m so glad I don’t have to deal with that. A lot of college students have very low moral standards and think cheating is acceptable. It’s disgusting.

I have a friend here in The Villages who recently published a large book. The vocabulary was graduate school level. Her editor told her her audience was likely to be people who read on the eighth grade level. She submitted the entire book to ChatGPT and “dumbed it down.” Then we had to go through it carefully and find phrases or sentences where the meaning had inadvertently been changed. I had thought it would take her several months to rewrite the book, but the changes took seconds. The proofreading took several weeks, though.

The following is an AI response to whether it is helpful or harmful.

Whether AI is helpful or harmful depends on the context in which it's used. AI can be incredibly helpful in many areas, such as improving healthcare, automating repetitive tasks, enhancing productivity, and solving complex problems. It can also drive innovation and improve accessibility to services.

However, AI also poses risks. If misused, it can contribute to job displacement, amplify biases in decision-making, or even be used in harmful applications like surveillance or weaponry. Additionally, there are concerns about privacy, security, and the ethical implications of AI systems making decisions without human oversight.

Ultimately, AI itself is neutral—it's how we design, deploy, and regulate it that determines whether its impact is beneficial or harmful.

One major problem worsening with AI is the huge impact it’s having on draining our electric grid system. I’ve seen numerous news reports and been researching online. It could impact our home use of using electricity by designating times of usage, especially for large items like car charging, dishwasher and washing machine. There’s also concern about the extent of the huge power plants that will be needed and the harmful RF and other emissions they radiate to neighbors on top of all the fuel they take to run.

I spent 45 years in high tech and bill gates is the last person I would look for advice in the high tech area, unless you want to know how to rip off somebody’s technology or are still using dos/windows. This guy is a clown!
If you want to listen to somebody intelligent on AI, go out to many YT videos and podcasts that has Elon Musk describing the good and the bad that AI can bring us. In today’s AI arena, you still have programmers that are influencing the output from AI programs, like ChatGPT. We all know how biased our search engines are from all the high tech companies and this is from programmer code. Same goes for ChatGPT.
I read AI books 4 decades ago so it’s not new technology.
What we have to worry about is when a rogue country or when robots get smart enough to write AI code that will do harm. We program all the robots used in our factories today and humans still check the robots work, but when robots are smart enough to check their own work and make modifications to themselves, watch out, all you need is 1 bad apple/robot/programmer and things will get out of control.

There's always someone who swings for the fences and ends up with a pop fly to left field.

"if a teacher lowers their grade"

In the old days; cheating was instant expulsion.
There's no cure for this. We're stuck with stupid.
Entropy is the engineering term for it.

I have a friend who is dean of the education dept. at a fairly large state U. Says she had an experienced HS teacher who returned to U for a master's - for a pay raise. Could not put a paragraph together. So we have stupid teaching cheats?

AI
 

I would not listen to anything Bill Gates has to say. He is a fraud.
In the end AI will be more destructive than beneficial. It will destroy trust.

I see the risk vs reward as a negative.
People need to be doing more not less. That’s the whole problem with the world. Everything being done for you is the cause of a degenerate society with to much time on their hands leads to deviance.
My career was in healthcare. As far back as 2019 I have seen the plans for AI. I refuse to be apart of it. The goal is to monitor everyone in their home 24/7. What you eat, activities, sleep, etc. then penalize you for behavior not “approved”.

For those who want to understand the effect of data and technology, you might want to read this book:
Explains why many of us here aren't technology worshippers for education. .

Amazon.com

and at some point in our lives, we have all, myself included, used google information to believe we are more informed than experts. . inch deep knowledge versus mile deep experienced subject matter experts.

Yes, the world is changing, however, is it for the better? ie, at some point, if the internet is rendered useless, ie, you can't look up any information, will the youngest generations know how to survive easily?

Golf Swing
 

Ai can analyze your golf swing, BUT, it cannot help you feel your golf swing.
Ai has no feel mechanism only facts mechanism. Ai cannot relate to you, never will.
Seek human help with your golf swing and develop feel.

What I found most concerning about ai is that it is open sourced and China has vacuumed up enough code to reverse engineer their own ai… smart disinformation, damaging infiltration anyone? It won’t be spy balloons next time.

We all grew up in a world that valued knowledge and information.

We now live in a world, that all the world's knowledge and information, is available to anyone with a cell phone.

To use this decade's word of choice, we are now in a world where the ability to curate knowledge and information, is what's valuable.

AI is the future, just like TV took over from radio. Time to embrace it and not just try to wish it away.

AI /Education
 

IMO It isn't AI that people should be worried about in Education. The biggest impact will be with religion in the public education sector and historical revisionism.

I share doomerists concerns that competing AIs may (will?) be used for nefarious purposes and will be highly disruptive to mankind if not an outright existential risk (note: I only use the word existential to describe what I believe are actual existential risks). Here you have a novel system that runs at full speed making them exponentially more productive. This system may soon outpace and outmaneuver humans, and have powers of persuasion that enable them to bypass safety brakes. Add recursive self-improvement, a stratospheric knowledge base that will allow them to synthesize insights, draw correlations and become master prognosticators, an unearthly evolutionary trajectory, ***unknown emergent behaviors,*** and coordination at scale whether acting solo or with other AIs and you have a looming disaster in the making. It could explain Fermi's Paradox. It could also be quite good...in the short term.

The brightest among us don't understand what really goes on in the 'black box' and that black box is expected to morph into a singularity.

There is no room for error yet here we are, plowing at lightning speed in our quest in who can create the most god-like machine. Most folks have no idea what is down the pike.

AI. You either embrace it, or get left behind.

New hobby :-)
 

Wow. Had no idea. Had merely learned to ignore that first answer from AI on my Google searches, having found too many blatant errors in them. This post of yours is the most interesting thing I've heard - by far. Thanks!

I agree, I find it much easier to go to a golf pro.

Interesting how some people seem worried about the potential of AI. I think that it has the potential for misuse by people such as fusion had. But that AI may develop a super consciousness and try to master its own destiny — naw I don’t see that happening. A long way for a machine built on zeros and ones to go. Until it becomes a living being, and even then, not just any living organism… The idea comes straight out of sci-fi.

Want to defeat AI, just ask it to play tic-tac-toe against itself. That will keep it busy while you sneak around the back to unplug it.

My PCP works for one of the world's greatest hospitals, Mass General in Boston. He's been using AI for at least 2 years. I was there the week before my annual migration to TV and watched him type in question with symptoms, etc ... it spit out a diagnosis in about 5 seconds.

I opted to forgo the personality transplant that was suggested. Too late in life for a do-over.

Let me take that in sections -

1) I wouldn't listen to Gates, he's long been out of it as well as being his own orchestra, and by the way he's not all that technical either. (yes I've spent time with him in Seattle) he is a saleman and a real good one.

2) AI is still new, and being jumped on much like cloud was in IT. The problem is power in 2 ways. AI having more power (not good), and power to run AI (aka Nvidia's new chip).

The thing to watch out for is what we said back in the 80's when AI was tossed around (for those in the business - this is back when Prolog was introduced). Artificial Intelligence will only be as intelligent as the idiot that programmed it. This still holds true today. Let's take Watson (IBM) this was the first entry in an "AI Like" platform and for the most part it failed. Reason I said that was it's primary intention was to use in the Medical arena. It in turn wasn't fed all that accurate information....which leads me to..

3) Using AI for health services. I'd consider this to be quite dangerous in many ways, much like Watson failed, so will AI. The reason is that every human is different which means with every human the 'basis' changes, including the unknown. Do you know if you are not allergic to everything produced by Pharma? Actually you don't, because there are so many different drugs, antibiotics, dose levels, etc out there you could never know 100%. Currently the public expects AI to work at 100%, in IT "it works" is 100% until we want the public to consume something for our own good (cloud). Face is 99.9% is termed "it doesn't work" from a true strict software testing perspective...and the shoe drops - IT doesn't really test software like they used to. They would rather shove it into your hands and let you find the problems - it's less expensive (enter India, Brazil, Philippines) for the company. IT has been doing it for decades. Why does Windows 11 stil have issues? easy answer Microsoft doesn't really test it, you do.

So when you end up in the ER because of AI.... WHO will take that call? India? LOL how ridiculous (as it already is).

Bottom line - don't run to it, crawl very cautiously. Cloud still sucks, costs more than having the equipment in house, and isn't 100% uptime like they promised. So what do you want from AI? You will get the same result. IMHO I don't want to accept mediocre at 'perfect' pricing like the rest of corporate america has sucked into.

That's what almost 50 years of IT does to you - welcome to reality. and no the government isn't even close to keeping anything safe or managed properly they are still "working on it"

The word "embrace" carries a certain connotation that I don't think necessarily applies. For example, one need not "embrace" gun culture to know what guns are or how to use them if/when necessary. (ref: Quigly, down under. "I said I don't like hand guns. I never said I couldn't use one")

At some point it might be useful to distinguish between

lookups (google) - finding information that matches the actual words in the questions
expert systems (many automated help desks) - traversing a pre-programmed decision tree to follow the right branch
AI (chatGpt and others) - learning systems that are trained on large amounts of data and return answers based on that training

Lookups are as good as the user who consumes the returned data. Expert systems are as good as the "expert" who created the decision tree. AI is as good as the training material and the trainer which in some ways is a combination of the previous two.

To me, the most frightening thing about AI is the level of confidence people are likely to give the results. Some very specialized AI will be trained on tightly controlled data sets by true experts in the field. Much AI will be trained on the internet with all its bad information, trained by a human with all their inherent biases, and trained in a hurry in order to make a buck - not a system that should inspire the confidence it will likely be given.