July 9, 2023, CBS 60 Minutes, AI, The Revolution, 27 minutes. Worthy of your time.

catch22

July 9, 2023, CBS 60 Minutes, AI, 27 minutes Note: A closed caption icon is available at the bottom of the video area, for those with hearing impairments or those needing to view the video without audio 'on'.

Yes, AI has been discussed for several years. I've posted videos and articles about this, too; in prior years....Boston Scientific, Quantum computing, etc.
I remain a technology person from my early days of tear downs of my bicycle, rebuilding a Chevy V-8 engine in my parents home basement at age 16, through formal training in electronics in 1968 and a work career in electro-mechanical, computer interfaced devices.

Today, there are many more areas in which to invest in these continuing expansive sector(s). Your desire and choices will vary from one another.

This 60 Minutes program link should be of interest, regardless of your feelings about the good or bad from high level technology. A portion of this technology keeps us invested in the medical technology area, as well as more broad based areas.

Remain curious,
Catch

WABAC

Thanks for the link.

For me, "tech" is pretty much there with utilities, consumer defensive, and med tech.

When will AI prompt stockholders to wonder why Pachai is making so much money when AI could do his job just as well?

Or would that be an "hallucination?"

WABAC

Speaking of revolutions, I wonder how many creators will join the class-action copyright infringement lawsuit filed in the 9th Circuit.

Turns out I knew one of the plaintiffs back in my 20th century San Francisco daze.

And in other AI news, I read that the Pentagon is testing LLM's by feeding them top-secret data. What could possibly go wrong?

Mark

@catch22 - it was an interesting segment to be sure. I share the reporter's incredulity at releasing these AI programs like Bard out into the community while admitting that it is inherently wonky but I guess folks thought other software releases were just as nuts. The magnitude of the physical hardware structures needed to support these programs/systems was an eye opener for me.

@WABAC - for now Pachi as CEO can eliminate AI but the reverse does not hold. Funny question though, I was thinking the same.

Old_Joe

Thanks Catch, especially for the CC info. That's very important these days.
OJ

hank

What is this going to do to the publishing business? Who’s gonna pay to read the WSJ or NYT if their AI robot can print out similar (or vastly superior) content and analysis on demand? ?

I ask because i have been trading in and out of a business with publishing part of its model. Currently out. Really curious how AI will affect these types of businesses.

Level5

This is both brilliant and frightening all at once

hank

I love some of Hemmingway’s novels. But, yikes, his trademark choppy, sometimes awkwardly staccato sentence structure wouldn’t seem that difficult to imitate. Fear we’ll end up with a boatload of excellent Hemmingway imitations - yet devoid of the humanity Hemmingway brought. I’d think Scott Fitzgerald’s eloquence a tougher act to immitate … but give ‘em time.

Actually, the 60 Minutes program mentioned that Hemmingway would sometimes spend all morning writing a single page. (Than go drinking fishing.)

catch22

I'll add this with my experience with what I considered an early A.I. My wife was working on her Masters thesis in 1999. We were both working full time and this was a daunting task for her. As my typing skills were very good, I assumed the task of dictation/transcribing from yellow legal sheets, her notes and statements for this work. At the time, we had a '1997' desktop computer running Windows 98 which also had the MS Word program. This was fine, but still not getting the work done fast enough. I purchased the 'Dragon Systems NaturallySpeaking 1.0 ' voice recognition program. This was simply the program and a headset microphone. I spent about 1 week, during off hours, teaching the program my voice 'sounds' for whatever word I spoke. The error rate became very small for its understanding of how I spoke numerous words. I could now read into the Word document what had been written or spoken by my wife. There were always some corrections to be made (typed) from words not understood or known, but the speed of producing the final printed document increased a great deal. I was amazed with the use of a computer interfaced with this program. Voice programs are available now, too; and are embedded into some office suite packages (MS 365, etc.) And cell phones.

I remain most hopeful, using A.I. and computing power, with the speedy process(es) for medical applications of all types.

NOTE: This was written by me without use of any additional programming features.

Below, about the Dragon speak program.

Dr. James Baker laid out the description of a speech understanding system called DRAGON in 1975.[5] In 1982 he and Dr. Janet M. Baker, his wife, founded Dragon Systems to release products centered around their voice recognition prototype.[6] He was President of the company and she was CEO.
DragonDictate was first released for DOS, and utilized hidden Markov models, a probabilistic method for temporal pattern recognition. At the time, the hardware was not powerful enough to address the problem of word segmentation, and DragonDictate was unable to determine the boundaries of words during continuous speech input. Users were forced to enunciate one word at a time, clearly separated by a small pause after each word. DragonDictate was based on a trigram model, and is known as a discrete utterance speech recognition engine.[7]

Dragon Systems released NaturallySpeaking 1.0 as their first continuous dictation product in 1997

Remain curious,
Catch

MikeW

Thanks Catch!

hank

Yes, thanks Catch. Too much to comprehend for some of us old farts who watched Howdy Doody on a big fat black & white tube TV. Math, even simple addition, was done pretty much with paper and pencil until electronic calculators came onto the market sometime in the 70s - seemed as revolutionary than as AI does today.

Pondering where all this may take us, I’m reassured by Robert Frost’s closing line to It Bids Pretty Fair:

Frost says, ”We’ll be all right if nothing goes wrong with the lighting.”

catch22

Speaking of A.I. How ironic that Malwarebytes (our anti-virus provider) sent this via email today about Google pulling data to train their A.I data base. I'll believe that Malwarebytes is not feeding me bogus information.

Old_Joe

@catch22- I finally had the time and opportunity to watch this. Excellent, just excellent. There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that this field will lead to some amazing advances in many sciences.

There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that this field will lead to some amazing advances in chicanery, warfare, and general evil.

Let's all sign a pledge to do no harm. Right. Sure thing. I'd trust AI well before I'd trust humans on that.

Anna

@Old_Joe - Asimov had the AI bots pledging "do no harm". I guess his futuristic picture did not realize that it was the human, not the robot, that needed to take the pledge.

Old_Joe

@Anna- thanks for that reminder. Even as a teenager I loved Asimov.

By the way, Nanette Asimov, niece of Isaac Asimov, writes occasionally for the SF Chronicle. Her articles remind me of "the old days", when the Chronicle was a real newspaper, rather than the pathetic shadow of what was once a decent publication.

WABAC

@Old_Joe, we used to buy the Examiner in the morning and the Chomicle in the afternoon, often at the news stand at Fillmore and Chestnut across the street from an Original Joes.

Old_Joe

@WABAC- Yes, we used to eat there fairly often. It's long gone, but there are still a couple of good "Original" Joe's in SF.

If you enjoyed Arthur Hoppe's old column in the Chomical you should also enjoy an occasional "column" from his son, Nick Hoppe. He's a businessman, not a journalist, but he's surely inherited his father's perspective on life. Here's a recent column-

https://nickhoppe.substack.com/p/interesting-way-to-run-a-business

And if you want to subscribe, it's free: https://nickhoppe.substack.com/

OJ