Tag Archives: technology

AI and languages

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I just watched a video where the new Chat GPT-4o seamlessly translated a conversation between an Italian and English speaker. I know this isn’t the first tool to do this, but it’s the first time I’ve seen an example where I thought about how useful this is. It gave me the realization that instant language translation will revitalize diversity of language

In my travels, I’ve noticed that English is a language that is becoming more and more widespread. Not everyone knows English, but recently in both France and Spain I had far less challenges communicating compared to my travels to France 12 years earlier. I think this stems from a move towards everyone desiring to speak a common language. Want to be able to talk to people in most parts of the world? Learn English.

But maybe that desire will diminish now. If I get to speak in my mother tongue and someone who speaks English can hear a seamless translation, do I really need to learn English? Maybe in the future people will be less likely to pick up a new language? Will we see a slowdown in the acquisition of the English language?

While I think we’ll see this shift, it won’t be drastic. Yet I can see both positives and benefits to this. A positive is that people will be more likely to hold on to the language of their heritage. A negative could be that in countries with high immigration the effort to learn the country’s home language might be less desirable. While this won’t necessarily cause an issue communicating since these AI tools can help, it can potentially undermine the social fabric of the country.

And maybe that’s not as big a concern as I’m making it out to be?

Still, I’m excited about the ease with which I’ll be able to travel to countries where the primary language isn’t English. I look forward to having conversations I could not have previously had. Tools like this make almost every person in the entire world a possible acquaintance, colleague, and friend. That’s a pretty exciting thing to think about.

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As an aside, a lot of AI image creators still have issues with text, as the image accompanying this post demonstrates. This was my prompt: An English, Spanish, and French person sitting at a table, each saying “Good Morning” in their own language, in a speech bubble.

Ashtrays and Newspaper Racks

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If you are Gen X, then at some point in your schooling you probably made your parents an ashtray out of clay. I did, and my parents didn’t even smoke. And if you were in a woodworking class you probably made some sort of newspaper or magazine rack, which was something your parents might have had in your living room. Depending on how good it was, this wooden creation may or may not have been as prominently displayed in your house as the ashtray. But these were a couple ‘practical’ things we made in school ‘back in the day’.

Both my daughters, who went to different middle schools, made gum ball machines out of wood, which used a mason jar to hold the gum balls. And I think for both of them the other option was a birdhouse. These were their versions of ashtrays and newspaper racks.

I bet most kids today will come home from school at some point with a 3D printed keychain. Most houses don’t have ashtrays, or newspapers or even magazines. Most parents wouldn’t know where to go to buy loose gum balls to put in a school made gum ball machine. Times change and so do the crafts students create at school.

Some of the other things students might (and do) create at school these days include: Apps, websites, and online businesses. These are the modern day ashtrays. A bit more practical, and a lot more relevant. That said, I hope kids still get a chance to work with clay and wood. I still want to see art that is 3D but not 3D printed. No one needs a newspaper rack or gum ball machine but bird houses can still be made.

There are cookie-cutter style ‘everyone makes the same design’ kind of bird houses, and then there are versions of the same project which are open to design thinking and personalization. And it really doesn’t have to be a bird house… just a hands-on creation using tools rather than a keyboard. But when I said, “I still want to see art that is 3D but not 3D printed.” I also should have mentioned that I want kids to also 3D print things.

The message of this little, nostalgic visit down memory lane isn’t just to say bring back the old hands-on projects, and do away with the new ones. Rather it’s to say we need both. We need students creating physical crafts, with their hands, at school and we need them designing new digital products with new tools as well. I’d be a bit concerned if kids today came home with ashtrays, but I’d still love to see them producing creative works that involve building and creating physical things with their hands.

I also wonder what the 2050 version of the school made ashtray will be?

Ancient Wisdom

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Watch this video about tomorrow’s solar eclipse.

@welchlabs

How rare is the April 2024 #eclipse?

♬ original sound – Welch Labs

Predicting the next total eclipse is not a simple math problem, having several independent factors. Yet as the video mentions, an ancient Babylonian tablet tracked all the solar eclipses from 347 to 258 BCE.

It makes me wonder about the wisdom of some ancient civilizations. What did they know, that has been lost to us? From medicines to space to science, what intelligence was previously discovered and has since needed to be rediscovered, relearned.

And what did the ancients know that we still don’t know?

How soon, Siri?

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I’m excited to see how Siri will be updated with the advancements seen in Artificial Intelligence. AI has come a long way and I think it’s time Siri got a serious upgrade.

I will often ask Siri a question and the response I get is, “Here is what I found,” with web links from a simple Google search.

I want Siri to give me the details in a conversation. I want Siri to ask me follow-up questions so its response is better. I want Siri to figure out better searches based on my previous lines of questioning. I want a fluid conversation, not just a simple and often unhelpful question and response.

Essentially I want a Siri that feels less like voice response to a simple query, and more like a personal assistant. when is this upgrade going to happen?

It’s already here!

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Just yesterday morning I wrote:

Robots will be smarter, stronger, and faster than humans not after years of programming, but simply after the suggestion that the robot try something new. Where do I think this is going, and how soon will we see it? I think Arther C. Clarke was right… the most daring prophecies seem laughably conservative.

Then last night I found this post by Zain Khan on LinkedIn:

🚨 BREAKING: OpenAI just made intelligent robots a reality

It’s called Figure 01 and it’s built by OpenAI and robotics company Figure:

  • It’s powered by an AI model built by OpenAI
  • It can hear and speak naturally
  • It can understand commands, plan, and carry out physical actions

Watch the video below to see how realistic it’s speech and movement abilities are. The ability to handle objects so delicately is stunning.

Intelligent robots aren’t a decade away. They’re going to be here any day now.

This video, shared in the post, is mind-blowingly impressive!

This is just the beginning… we are moving exponentially fast into a future that is hard to imagine. Last week I would have guessed we were 5-10 years away from this, and it’s already here! Where will we really be with AI robotics 5 years from now?

(Whatever you just guessed is probably laughably conservative.)

The most daring prophecies

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In the early 1950’s Arthur C. Clarke said,

“If we have learned one thing from the history of invention and discovery, it is that, in the long run — and often in the short one — the most daring prophecies seem laughably conservative.”

As humans we don’t understand exponential growth. The well known wheat or rice on a chessboard problem is a perfect example:

If a chessboard were to have wheat placed upon each square such that one grain were placed on the first square, two on the second, four on the third, and so on (doubling the number of grains on each subsequent square), how many grains of wheat would be on the chessboard at the finish?

The answer: 264−1 or 18,446,744,073,709,551,615… which is over 2,000 times the annual world production of wheat.

All this to say that we are ill-prepared to understand how quickly AI and robotics are going to change our world.

1. Robots are being trained to interact with the world through verbal commands. They used to be trained to do specific tasks like ‘find one of a set of items in a bin and pick it up’. While the robot was sorting, it was only sorting specific items it was trained to do. Now, there are robots that sense and interpret the world around them.

“The chatbot can discuss the items it sees—but also manipulate them. When WIRED suggests Chen ask it to grab a piece of fruit, the arm reaches down, gently grasps the apple, and then moves it to another bin nearby.

This hands-on chatbot is a step toward giving robots the kind of general and flexible capabilities exhibited by programs like ChatGPT. There is hope that AI could finally fix the long-standing difficulty of programming robots and having them do more than a narrow set of chores.”

The article goes on to say,

“The model has also shown it can learn to control similar hardware not in its training data. With further training, this might even mean that the same general model could operate a humanoid robot.”

2. Robot learning is becoming more generalized: ‘Eureka! NVIDIA Research Breakthrough Puts New Spin on Robot Learning’.

“A new AI agent developed by NVIDIA Researchthat can teach robots complex skills has trained a robotic hand to perform rapid pen-spinning tricks — for the first time as well as a human can…

Eureka has also taught robots to open drawers and cabinets, toss and catch balls, and manipulate scissors, among other tasks.

The Eureka research, published today, includes a paper and the project’s AI algorithms, which developers can experiment with using NVIDIA Isaac Gym, a physics simulation reference application for reinforcement learning research. Isaac Gym is built on NVIDIA Omniverse, a development platform for building 3D tools and applications based on the OpenUSD framework. Eureka itself is powered by the GPT-4 large language model.”

3. Put these ideas together then fast forward the training exponentially. We have robots that understand what we are asking them, which are trained and positively reinforced in a virtual physics lab. These robots are practicing how to do a new task before actually doing it… not practicing a few times, or even a few thousand times, but actually doing millions of practice simulations in seconds. Just like the chess bots that learned to play chess by playing itself millions of times, we will have robots where we ask them to do a task and they ‘rehearse’ it over and over again in a simulator, then do the task for the first time as if it had already done it perfectly thousands of times.

In our brains, we think about learning a new task as a clunky, slow experience. Learning takes time. When a robot can think and interact in our world while simultaneously rehearsing new tasks millions of times virtually in the blink of an eye, we will see them leap forward in capabilities at a rate that will be hard to comprehend.

Robots will be smarter, stronger, and faster than humans not after years of programming, but simply after the suggestion that the robot try something new. Where do I think this is going, and how soon will we see it? I think Arther C. Clarke was right…

…the most daring prophecies seem laughably conservative.

Google proof vs AI proof

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I remember the fear mongering when Google revolutionized search. “Students are just going to Google their answers, they aren’t going to think for themselves.” Then came the EDU-gurus proclaiming, “If students can Google the answers to your assignments, then the assignments are the problem! You need to Google proof what you are asking students to do!”

In reality this was a good thing. It provoked a lot of reworking of assignments, and promoted more critical thinking first from teachers, then from students. It is possible to be creative and ask a question that involves thoughtful and insightful responses that are not easily found on Google, or would have so few useful search responses that it would be easy to know if a student created the work themselves, or if they copied from the internet.

That isn’t the case for Artificial Intelligence. AI is different. I can think of a question that would get no useful search responses on Google that will then be completely answerable using AI. Unless you are watching students do the work with pen and paper in front of you, then you really don’t know if the work is AI assisted. So what next?

Ultimately the answer is two-fold:

How do we bolster creativity and productivity with AND without the use of Artificial Intelligence?

This isn’t a ‘make it Google proof’ kind of question. It’s more challenging than that.

I got to hear John Cohn, recently retired from MIT, speak yesterday. There are two things he said that kind of stuck with me. The first was a loose quote of a Business Review article. ’AI won’t take over people, but people with AI are going to take over people.’

This is insightful. The reality is that the people who are going to be successful and influential in the future are those that understand how to use AI well. So, we would be doing students a disservice to not bring AI into the classroom.

The other thing he said that really struck me was, “If you approach AI with fear, good things won’t happen, and the bad things still will.”

We can’t police its use, but we can guide students to use it appropriately… and effectively. I really like this AI Acceptable Use Scale shared by Cari Wilson:

This is one way to embrace AI rather than fear and avoid it in classrooms. Again I ask:

How do we bolster creativity and productivity with AND without the use of Artificial Intelligence?

One way is to question the value of homework. Maybe it’s time to revisit our expectations of what is done at home. Give students work that bolsters creativity at home, and keep the real work of school at school. But whether or not homework is something that changes, what we do need to change is how we think about embracing AI in schools, and how we help students navigate it’s appropriate, effective, and even ethical use. If we don’t, then we really aren’t preparing our kids for today’s world, much less the future.

We aren’t going to AI proof schoolwork.

Beyond a simple blood test

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I have to go get some blood work done. It’s time to check a few levels, and make sure that I’m in the healthy range. I have an issue maintaining my Vitamin D levels, and cholesterol issues run in my family… and also in me. So I’ll head to the medical center and line up this weekend for them to poke me in the arm and fill a few small vials of blood. I’m a week or so I’ll get a call from my doctor after she looks at the results.

I wonder how far away we are from being able to do this from home? Prick your finger, put a drop of blood on a sensor, and get a full spectrum of results. Add to this a health monitor on your smart watch that tracks heart rate and rhythm, as well as activity, and you’ve got a full service health monitoring system that can be preemptive and preventative. And add to this a toilet that analyzes your urine, and you’ve got a regular no-line-up doctor’s visit without ever leaving your home.

Cholesterol levels seem high? The monitor will tell me, and my doctor. Vitamin D levels low? My watch tells me to double my morning dose. Imagine your watch telling you that you should go to the hospital because it detected a heart arrhythmia that is consistent with the early signs of a heart attack. Wouldn’t that be so much better than not knowing?

The possibilities of what you can do to improve your health with a system like this are incredible. Is this possible in the next 5 years? I think so! It’s going to be amazing to see the way technology enhances our healthcare system in the next decade. We will literally be able to regularly and continuously monitor things that we used to have to do several doctor and clinic visits to do on a yearly (or longer) basis. And when you do go to the doctor, your complaints about your health won’t just be anecdotal, you’ll have streams of data to share. This is exciting for everyone except hypochondriacs… these poor people are going to have a lot more to worry about!

Conversational AI interface

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A future where we have conversations with an AI in order to have it do tasks for us is closer than you might think. Watch this clip, (full video here):

Imagine starting you day by asking an AI ‘assistant’, “What are the emails I need to look at today?” Then saying something like, “Respond to the first 2 for me, and draft an answer for the 3rd one for me to approve. And remind me what meetings I have today.” All while on the treadmill, or while shaving or even showering.

The AI calculates your calories used on your treadmill, and tracks what you eat, and even gives suggestions like, “You might want to add some protein to your meal, may I suggest eggs, you also have some tuna in the pantry, or a protein shake if you don’t want to make anything.”

Later you have the ever-present the AI in the room with you during a meeting and afterwards request of it, “Send us all a message with a summary of what we discussed, and include a ‘To Do’ list for each of us.”

Sitting for too long at work? The AI could suggest standing up, or using the stairs instead of the elevator. Hungry? Maybe your AI assistant recommends a snack because it read your sugar levels off of your watch’s health monitor, and it does this just as you are starting to feel hungry.

It could even remind you to call your mom, or do something kind for someone you love… and do so in a way that helps you feel good about it, not like it’s nagging you.

All this and a lot more without looking at a screen, or typing information into a laptop. This won’t be ready by the end of 2024, but it’s closer to 2024 than it is to 2030. This kind of futuristic engagement with a conversational AI is really just around the corner. And those ready to embrace it are really going to leave those who don’t behind, much like someone insisting on horse travel in an era of automobiles. Are you ready for the next level of AI?

What are you outsourcing?

Alec Couros recently came to Coquitlam and gave a presentation on “The Promise and Challenges of Generative AI”. In this presentation he had a quote, “Outsource tasks, but not your thinking.”

I just googled it and found this LinkedIn post by Aodan Enright. (Worth reading but not directly connected to the use of AI.)

It’s incredible what is possible with AI… and it’s just getting better. People are starting businesses, writing books, creating new recipes, and in the case of students, writing essays and doing homework. I just saw a TikTok of a student who goes to their lecture and records it, runs it through AI to take out all the salient points, then has the AI tool create cue cards and test questions to help them study for upcoming tests. That’s pretty clever.

What’s also clever, but perhaps now wise, is having an AI tool write an essay for you, then running the essay through a paraphraser that breaks the AI structure of the essay so that it isn’t detectable by AI detectors. If you have the AI use the vocabulary of a high school student, and throw in a couple run-on sentences, then you’ve got an essay which not only AI detectors but teachers too would be hard pressed to accuse you of cheating. However, what have you learned?

This a worthy point to think about, and to discuss with students: How do you use AI to make your tasks easier, but not do the thinking for you? 

Because if you are using AI to do your thinking, you are essentially learning how to make yourself redundant in a world of ever-smarter AI. Don’t outsource your thinking… Keep your thinking cap on!