Tag Archives: technology

Dial tone

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When was the last time you heard a dial tone? When was the last time you used a rotary phone? Or a pay phone?

I tend to use Siri a lot. I don’t go to my phone app, I just ask Siri to call the number for me. And I call people a lot less than I text them.

We’ve come a long way from a family phone being connected to our wall, with a long cord attached to the handset. We’ve moved the phone from a side character to the protagonist. From an item to occasionally connect to one person to a tool of constant contact to the world.

Along the way, the idea of the dial tone disappeared. What else has disappeared?

In the middle

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I think that a robust and healthy middle class is essential to maintain a vibrant society. But what I see in the world is an increasing gap between the wealthy and an ever larger group of people living in debt and/or from paycheque to paycheque. The (not so) middle class now might still go on a family vacation, and spend money on restaurants, but they are not saving money for the future… they simply can’t do what the middle class of the past did.

A mortgage isn’t to be paid off, it’s something to continue to manage during retirement. Downsizing isn’t a choice to be made, it’s a survival necessity. Working part time during retirement isn’t a way to keep busy, it’s s necessity to make ends meet.

I grew up in a world where I believed I would do better than my parents did. Kids today doubt they will ever own a place like their parents, and many don’t believe they’ll ever own a house. Renting and perhaps owning a small condo one day are all they aspire to. Not because they don’t want more, but because more seems too costly and out of reach.

Then I see the world of AI and robotics we are heading into and I wonder if initially things won’t get worse before they get better? Why hire a dozen programmers, just hire two exceptional ones and they are the quality control for AI agents write most of your code. Why hire a team of writers when one talented writer can edit the writing done by AI? Why hire factory workers that need lunch breaks and are more susceptible to making errors than a team of robots? While some jobs are likely to stick around for a while like trades, childcare, and people in certain medical fields, other jobs will diminish and even disappear.

I don’t think a robot is going to wanted to provide a pregnancy ultrasound any time soon, but AI will analyze that ultrasound better than any human professional. A robot might assist in laying electrical wire at a construction site, but it will still be a human serving you when you can’t figure out most electrical issues that you have in your home. It will still be a human who you call to figure out how to fix your leaky roof or toilet; a human who repairs your broken dishwasher or dryer. These jobs are safe for a while.

But I won’t want my next doctor to be diagnosing me without the aid and assistance of AI. And I would prefer AI to analyze my medical data. I will also prefer the more affordable products created by AI manufacturing. The list goes on and on as I look to where I will both see and want to see AI and robotics aiding me.

And what does this do to the working middle class? How do we tax AI and robots, to help replace the taxation of lost jobs? What do we do about increased unemployment as jobs for (former middle class) humans slowly disappear?

Will we have universal basic income? Will this be enough? What will the middle class look like in 10 or 20 years?

There is no doubt that we are heading into interesting times. The question is, will these disruptions cause upheaval? Will these disruptions widen the wealth gap? Will robotics and AI create more opportunities or more disparity? What will become of our middle class… a class of people necessary to maintain a robust and healthy society?

Promise and Doom

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I see both promise and doom in the near future. Current advances in technology are incredible, and we will see amazing new insights and discoveries in the coming years. I’m excited to see what problems AI will solve. I’m thrilled about what’s happening to preserve not just life, but healthy life, as I approach my older years. I look forward to a world where many issues like hunger and disease have ever-improving positive outcomes. And yet, I’m scared.

I also see the end of civilized society. I see the threat of near extinction. I see a world destroyed by the very technologies that hold so much promise. As a case in point, see the article, “‘Unprecedented risk’ to life on Earth: Scientists call for halt on ‘mirror life’ microbe research”.

We are already playing with technology that has the potential to “put humans, animals and plants at risk of lethal infections.” What scares me most is the word I chose to start that sentence with, ‘We’. The proverbial ‘we’ right now are top scientists. But a decade, maybe two decades from now that ‘we’ could include an angry, disenfranchised, and disillusioned 22 year old… using an uncensored AI to intentionally develop (or rather synthetically design) a bacteria or a virus that could spread faster than any plague that humans have ever faced. Not a top researcher, not a university trained scientist, a regular ‘Joe’ who has decided at a young age that the world isn’t giving him what he deserves and decides to be vengeful on an epic scale.

The same thing that excites me about technological advancement also scares me… and it’s the power of individuals to impact our future. We all know the names of some great thinkers: Galileo, Newton, Curie, Tesla, and Einstein as incredible scientists that transformed the way we think of the world. People like them are rare, and have had lasting influence on the way we think of the world. For every one of them there are millions, maybe billions of bright thinkers for whom we know nothing.

I don’t fear the famous scientist, I fear the rogue, unhappy misfit who uses incredible technological advancements for nefarious reasons. The same technology that can make our lives easier, and create tremendous good in the world, can also be used with bad intentions. But there are differences between someone using a revolver for bad reasons and someone using a nuclear bomb for bad reasons. The problem we face in the future is that access to the equivalent harm of a nuclear bomb (or worse) will be something more and more people have access to. I don’t think this is something we can stop, and so as amazing as the technology is that we see today, my fear is that it could also be what leads to our demise as a species.

The cat’s out of the bag

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I find it mind boggling that just 5 years ago the big AI debate was whether we would let AI out in the wild or not? The idea was, AI would be sort of ‘boxed’ and within our ability to ‘contain’… but we have somehow decided to just bypass this question and set AI free.

Here is a trifecta of things that tell me the cat is out of the bag.

  1. NVIDIA puts out the Jetson Orin Nano. A tiny AI that doesn’t need to be connected to the cloud.
  2. Robots like Optimus from Tesla are already being sold.
  3. AI’s are proving that they can self replicate.

That’s it. That’s all. Just extrapolate what you want to from these three ‘independent’ developments. Put them together, stir in 5 years of technological advancement. Add a good dose of open source access and think about what’s possible… and beyond possible to contain.

Exciting, and quite honestly, scary!

A prediction nears reality

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Andrew Wilkinson said on X:

“Just watched my 5-year-old son chat with ChatGPT advanced voice mode for over 45 minutes.

It started with a question about how cars were made.

It explained it in a way that he could understand.

He started peppering it with questions.

Then he told it about his teacher, and that he was learning to count.

ChatGPT started quizzing him on counting, and egging him on, making it into a game.

He was laughing and having a blast, and it (obviously) never lost patience with him.

I think this is going to be revolutionary. The essentially free, infinitely patient, super genius teacher that calibrates itself perfectly to your kid’s learning style and pace.

Excited about the future.”

– – –

I remember visiting my uncle back when I was in university. The year was somewhere around 1988-90. So, at least 34 years ago. We were talking about the future and Joe Truss explained to me what learning would be like in the coming age of computers.

He said, (loosely paraphrased, this was a long time ago):

‘In the future we will have virtual teachers that will be able to teach us exactly what we want to know in exactly the format we need to learn best. You want to learn about relativity? How about learning from Einstein himself? You’ll see him in front of you like he is real. And he will not just lecture you, he will react to your questions and even bio-feedback. You look puzzled, he might ask a question. He sees you looking up and to the left, which he knows means you are trying to visualize something, and so he changes his lesson to provide an image. He will be a teacher personalized to any and all of your learning needs.’

We aren’t quite there yet, but the exchange Andrew Wilkinson’s son had with ChatGPT, and the work being done in virtual and augmented reality, suggest that Joe’s prediction is finally coming into being.

I too am excited about the future, and more specifically, the future of learning.

How good, how soon?

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I am still a little freaked out by how good the Google NotebookLM’s AI ‘Deep dive conversations’ are. The conversations are so convincing. The little touches it adds, like extended pauses after words like ‘and’ are an excellent example of this.

In the one created for my blog, the male voice asked, “It actually reminds me, you ever read Atomic Habits by James Clear?” And the female voice’s response is, “I haven’t. No.”

Think about what’s happening here in order to continue the conversation in a genuine way. The male voice can now make a point and provide the female voice ‘new’, previously unknown information. But this whole conversation is actually developed by a single AI.

How soon before you have an entire conversation with a customer service representative oblivious to the fact that you are actually talking to an AI? Watch a newscast or a movie unaware that the people you are watching are not really people?

I shared close to 2,000 blog posts I’ve written into the notebook, if I shared my podcasts too and it replicated my voice, I wonder how long it will be before a digital me could be set to write my posts then simultaneously do live readings of them on my blog? Writing and sounding just like me… without me having to do it!

As a scary extension of this, could I learn something from the new content that it produces? Could I gain insights from the digital me that I would struggle to come up with myself?

This is just the beginning. How much of the internet is going to end up being AI generated and filled with AI reactions and responses to other AI’s? And how much longer after that before we notice?

A (creepy) digital friend

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What is Friend? Watch this reveal trailer.

No matter how I look at it, this feels creepy and dystopian. Even when I think of positive things, like perhaps helping someone with special needs, or emotional support for someone with anorexia, the idea of this all-seeing AI friend seems off putting.

Even this advertising doesn’t resonate well with me. In the scene with the guys playing video games, the boy wants to check in with his digital friend rather than pay attention to his friends in the room. And in the final scene with the girl and boy on the roof, I thought at first the girl was candidly trying to take a photo of the boy, but then realized she was just fighting the urge to converse with the AI friend. Either of those scenarios feels like she has replaced a phone distraction with a more present and more engaging distraction… from life.

There are a lot of new artificial intelligence tools that are on their way, and I’m excited about the possibilities, but this one has a high creep factor that doesn’t seem to me like it’s adding the value I think it intends to.

You’ve made good time

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It wasn’t a a question, but rather a statement, “You’ve made good time.”

We were on our way to holiday in Kelowna and our youngest daughter was spying on us. Well, not really spying, that suggests something clandestine and this was fully consensual. We share our locations with each other on our phones.

I think my daughter uses it on my wife and I more routinely than we do on her, and that’s perfectly ok with me. I tend to use it when I’m headed to bed and she’s not home yet, and sometimes when I’m the first one home from work and wondering where everyone else is?

I’ll sometime get texts from my daughter that say, “You’re still at work?”, and I know that again is more of a statement than a question… she checked my location before asking. Then the conversation moves to dinner plans or evening plans, and maybe even a request for a drive so that she doesn’t have to take her car somewhere that she may have drinks. Again this is perfectly fine with me.

I can see how this tool can be weaponized by a controlling parent or spouse, but in the hands of mutually respectful people it is really handy. It allows us to connect and feel connected, even when we are headed on holidays. And it changes the conversation from ‘Where are you?’ to the follow up questions that matter more.

It shouldn’t be this hard

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I get really frustrated when things don’t work like they should. I’m putting in medical claims into my online insurance claim form and the form won’t let me upload the requested evidence of receipts. Is my file too big? No. How do I know? Because it’s my second time through and I’ve made the file smaller this time.

I’ve refreshed the page and restarted my claim from scratch. I’ve made the file into a different format… and I’m watching the little spin-wheel loading symbol go around and around and around. I’m now going to start again on a different browser.

It amazes me how in such a technologically advanced age we run into issues like this so often. I’ve had people tell me they wanted to leave me a comment on my blog but they couldn’t figure out a way to sign in. But if I don’t have a sign in either by email, Facebook, or WordPress then I’m inviting spam messages. It shouldn’t be a process that doesn’t work, people sign in to things all the time.

I’m now on a second web browser and the file still is t uploading. I’m going to give up and try again later. Maybe restart my computer first. Maybe reduce the file size some more. Basically I’m going to waste a whole bunch of time doing something that should already have been over 30 minutes ago.

It really shouldn’t be this hard. I feel for elderly people who run into issues like this, then spend 45 minutes on hold waiting to ask for help, then getting flustered even more trying to follow instructions over the phone. Maybe AI will help, eventually, but I see things getting more frustrating rather than better in the short term. It all boils down to bad user experience and ultimately bad customer service.

(And as a final thought, I was trying to cut/paste a few words in the last sentence on my blogging app and my highlight feature froze on the wrong words… I had to save the draft to be able to do anything else. A small inconvenience but still, one of those little things that should just work!)

The Nvidia omniverse

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The future is here. In this quick video Nvideo CEO Breaks Down Omniverse, Jensen Huang discusses a virtual space where robots and Artificial Intelligence (AI) practice and rehearse their actions in a virtual space before trying things out in the real world. Specifically, he discusses car manufacturing and trying out designs of both machines and factories before physically building them, reducing rebuilding and redesigning time.

This is a game changer in the design of not just systems but in building physical things. The design phase of new products just got a steroids boost, and the world we know is no longer the world we live in.

We are now in an era of AI assisted design and manufacturing that is going to explode with amazing new products. Robots using AI in a virtual omniverse, trying out new creative ways to build new items faster, and more efficiently. Robots building robots that are tested in a virtual world, tweaked by AI, and retested virtually, tweaking the design of the very robots that will be building the new robots. Let that last sentence sink in… robots and AI redesigning other robots and AI… machines building and designing machines.

But that in itself isn’t the steroid boost. The real power comes from practicing everything first in this virtual omniverse world. Trying out the physics and dynamics of the new tools in an environment where they can be tested thousands and even millions of times before actually being built. This is where the learning is accelerated, and where things will move so much faster than we’ve ever seen before.

Products used to takes years of development to be built, but now a lot of that time is going to happen virtually… and with iterations not happening sequentially but simultaneously. So years of development and production design happen in moments rather than years. With the omniverse we are going to see an acceleration of design and production that will make the next few years unrecognizable.

It makes me wonder what amazing new products await us in the next 5-10 years?