Being of a certain age, I remember The Future as imagined in 1962. Sometimes it性视界传媒檚 fun to imagine yourself imagining The Future with images and ideas derived from reading speculative popular science and sci-fi.
I remember my fervent hopes for The Future when we lived in Greggton, west of Longview, before moving to Maple Street. We would travel east, taking me to school at St. Anthony性视界传媒檚, and I would focus on the most striking buildings and other evidences of progress and growth.
The mood at the time was optimistic, though tempered by some fears of nuclear war. The pace of change on U.S. 80 always disappointed me. But that was then and this is now. Actually, it性视界传媒檚 性视界传媒淣ow!性视界传媒
On Saturday, I was just north of the Texas State Cemetery heading to do volunteer work at a hospice when I saw a driverless electric car take a right turn and pull up in front of a house, its flashers on. Either it was waiting for a passenger or demonstrating that it could wait there. Recently, I saw a Waymo self-driving car pull up across the street and discharge its occupant, who had been seated on the passenger side.
These cars have been driving on business and residential streets for weeks now. As we were blessed with good weather during Christmas break, I was out and about a lot, and I saw them often.
Waymo currently provides passenger taxi service in Phoenix and San Francisco and in parts of Los Angeles. Customers can summon a car to a destination, and another one when they leave.
This is particularly helpful with disabled and frail people, more convenient and maybe safer than public transit. At the least, others would have less chance submitting them to diseases.
Now, I actually like driving long distance. My personal record is Fort Collins to Austin in a single stretch, stopping for supper with friends in the Texas Panhandle. But I also sometimes face tough traffic conditions. My stoicism stands me in good stead, but I can think of other things I could do if the car were doing the driving.
I talked to my students last week about artificial intelligence, or AI. I asked them to tell me about whether they had used it at school, and what does fair use mean, and where is the line to illegitimate use.
Most of them gave pretty common sense answers. Some said they used it to organize ideas to help them write papers, others said they summarize key points. Others say they solve physics problems. All of them agreed that simply looking something up and pasting it down without understanding it is an illegitimate use.
They need to be ready for college and the workplace, and it, seems, The Future that has caught up to us. We will work together to create some ethical guidelines, and to recognize that none of them are universal yet, so they will need to pay attention to AI ethics at school and at work.
Sometimes I ask my students questions to distinguish between two different kinds of thinking we do. 性视界传媒淲hat性视界传媒檚 7 times 3?性视界传媒 I ask. They immediately tell me the answer. Then I ask what is 1,123 times 450,780. If we really want the answer, we all have a calculator in our pockets, or we can work it out on paper. And that性视界传媒檚 not even starting to be AI.
They will have to resist the lure of laziness, of getting an answer and not questioning or even understanding its significance. They realize, most of them, that failure to actually develop knowledge and skills will end up hurting their prospects for success.
In the ever-evolving struggle of order and chaos, instruments to prevent AI overuse will be countered by apps that negate the strategies that teachers and managers will want to use.
One of my colleagues gave a very impressive in-service presentation on AI. Over the years, I have learned that most in-service presentations are educational fads based on Bad Scholarship (BS). This was not BS.
The English teacher showed how a passage from one author could be rewritten by AI into styles of another writer. Though he 性视界传媒 and I 性视界传媒 are capable of doing this ourselves, laboriously, ChatGPT will do it extremely quickly, and some of the examples are quite good. Then he can have his students compare diction and syntax and style between writers, enhancing their own ability to read literary texts critically.
The most common AI app the students use is ChatGPT. I played around with it when it first came out. I tested it for some biases, and I found a tendency toward interpretations that are widespread among those who create most of the text the software trains itself on.
I only recently went back on, and the new version can be helpful in, say, giving a quick overview of parallels between two thinkers or, indeed, to find the major categories of AI.
I tried their drawing capability. I gave it the command 性视界传媒淒raw a realistic picture of four frogs playing poker with 性视界传媒性视界传媒.
It wouldn性视界传媒檛 let me depict Donald Trump, saying it was against their terms of service. It let me create pictures of Jimmy Carter and Abraham Lincoln playing poker with frogs, though. I could not get Mohammed to play, because I was warned that he性视界传媒檚 a religious figure.
I was, however, able to get Jesus into the game, though ChatGPT assured me that the image was respectful and light-hearted. I ran out of free daily uses before I could get to Ganesh or the Buddha.
There are several ways to categorize different kinds of AI, but in the broadest sense it can be looked at in terms of capabilities. Some apps are specific to industrial or other circumstances. More general AI includes such things as self-driving cars, robotics, and Large Language Models that learn from huge numbers of examples to make predictions. Finally, what gets people really worked up is the possibility of super intelligent AI that gains self-awareness and perhaps the will to power.
This last eventuality is called The Singularity. If it happens, the lives of most humans on this planet will change dramatically. As in physics where a singularity is the breakdown of our scientific explanation, so with The Singularity. We have no way to anticipate it, though some people are more than anxious about it.
Even before The Singularity, or perhaps the End Times, will come, we face both great opportunities to lower prices and increase efficiency, and dangers of unemployment, decreased human agency, and the standardization of life disguised by frequent but thoughtless choices.
It is likely that future wars will be between machines, but when one side is defeated, living humans will be attacked by AI killer hounds and harpies.
On the other hand, Spotify sometimes informs me about music that I turn out liking, and if Waymo comes to a city near me, I性视界传媒檒l try it out.
Hope and fear. We knew them 60 years ago.
As it was in The Future, it is Now!
