alwaysAI Insider, vol. 36: What do AI, money, and power have in common?
Welcome back, Insiders!?
A common refrain around my house this year was my youngest muttering, “I can’t wait until I’m in middle school and can use a calculator.” He'd scratch out long division in the margins of the paper while his older brother tapped away neatly to solve for X during homework time.
Fast forward several weeks and math homework is essentially irrelevant.?
On Monday,?Apple announced its new Apple Intelligence . (A.I. – what a gift to their branding team!) Basically, they’re taking all the apps we use to edit photos, check our grammar, summarize our emails and making them available on the phones we can stash in our pockets.
Now your AI-enhanced phone will be able to read your email and know your friend wants to meet you for dinner, make the reservation, text your friend back, and suggest an outfit. It just can’t drive you there…yet.
But what had my house abuzz, was the iPad calculator. You can use the pencil to write out a complex algebraic equation and it will solve it in an instant. If you haven’t seen it,?it is impressive ?(skip to minute 46 if you just want to see the calculator demonstration).
I know technological advancements have always generated concerns when first introduced – the typewriter (the end of penmanship!), copy machines (secretaries will be obsolete!), handheld calculators (kids will never learn to add!), email (it?dulls your IQ !). I’m not panicked about an AI apocalypse but I do wonder how this will all shake out in the next decade (or year).?
Against the backdrop of the recent?UN AI for Good Summit , AI has got me feeling all kinds of ways this week. ????????????????????????
?? The?star speaker ?of the event, organized by the International Telecommunication Union, was Sam Altman. The Summit's broad goal was to – you guessed it – promote AI for good, with a more narrow focus on how AI can help drive the UN’s sustainable development goals.
As Altman fielded questions about AI for good, several former and current?OpenAI employees went public with the company’s “reckless” behavior .?
? More than 2 billion people around the globe will vote in elections this year. Yay for democracy!
But deepfakes, and AI-generated images and videos, are poised to muddy the democratic waters. (Check out this series from?Wired ?to help you wade through the muck.)
???? A vast majority of people (75%) are using generative AI at work but over half of them (53%) don’t want to admit it. Many fear that admitting to using AI, will highlight how replaceable they are.
These numbers are published in?Microsoft and LinkedIn’s Annual Work Trend? report which also shows 71% of leaders would rather hire a less experienced worker with AI skills rather than a more experienced person without them.
So…there seems to be some confusion.?
?? I can understand why workers might be reluctant to praise AI with headlines like this:??The AI-Generated Population Is Here, and They’re Ready to Work . This WSJ article discusses creating digital twins to replace humans, for example in fashion, clinical trials in medicine, and to create focus groups for marketers. But you don’t have to dig too deep to find a myriad of questions this raises.?Am I real? What is real? ?
?This week, I also?listened to Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on Hard Fork , a podcast dedicated to exploring all kinds of questions about AI. It got me thinking about AI for good. And AI for bad. And AI as useful and AI as a waste of time and resources. (Have you heard about the?“Miss AI” beauty contest ?)
AI is all of those things. Like the inevitable forces of money and power, AI can be good and bad and weird and useful.?
If you’re a faithful alwaysAI Insider, you know that now is the time for me to recommit to allowing for all that to be true while staying the course on our AI mission: delivering practical, useful solutions through real-time visual data. We are using AI to provide visual access to parts of your business without visibility to improve productivity.?
Thinking about how my kids will navigate a world where they don’t have to write an essay, learn another language, or spend hours working out math problems is unsettling. But it also emphasizes the need for more conversations, for lessons on how to ask questions and be curious. They still need to know how to evaluate a good essay. They still need to understand what the equation is trying to solve. They still need to understand other cultures.????
After watching the Apple announcement yesterday, my oldest said, “Teachers will still find a way for us to do homework.”?
He's right. AI is not making homework irrelevant. It's not making humans irrelevant. It is changing the ways we live and work but we get to decide how. By allowing you greater visibility into your operations, we're shining a light on how to ensure you and your workforce stay relevant. ??? ?
Industry Roundup
Learn how Amazon is using computer vision and multimodal AI to help detect defects and improve customer satisfaction.?
Read more.? (2 mins.)
This is a fun article that helps explain how computer vision works compared to how human vision works.?
"...as more and more visual tasks are being outsourced to computers, Kreiman and other [Harvard Medical School] researchers are working to identify AI’s blind spots, examining how much we can trust computer vision — and how it stacks up against our own."
Continue reading.? (13 mins.)
In case you missed it, alwaysAI was featured in the May edition of The Canadian Mining Journal. ?Read about how computer vision is transforming the mining industry starting on page 20.?
Read it here. (10 mins.)
alwaysAI Insights
?AI video analytics is revolutionizing a broad spectrum of industries by delivering advanced solutions tailored to specific operational needs. For any business whose operations include repeatable processes or stretch across areas that are difficult to monitor at all times, AI-based video analytics can provide unprecedented visibility in real-time.?
Continue reading. ? (10 mins.)
Developer Digest
Listen to our talented Senior Software Engineer, Lila Mullany, explain how the alwaysAI platform makes developing computer vision solutions easy, accessible and highly scalable.?
Watch now. (2 mins.)
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