artificial-intelligence

ARE YOU IN CONTROL?

/ Alan Atkinson / Leave a comment

As the subjects of Artificial Intelligence or A.I. (1) and ChatGBT (2) continue to take centre stage of our daily lives, that is; us, we, the ordinary people; there seems to be a sinister plot to control the peoples of the earth.

How is that possible, you may ask? Let’s examine some possibilities:

Fillling in online forms. Either at the beginning or at the end of the process, which could be lengthy; you may be asked to:
1. Tick the box next to “I am not a robot” statement.
or
2. You will be shown a series of pictures and then be asked, “tick off the pictures that you see bicycles in them” or another, “flowers”. These pictures may look a bit unclear, like faded…

Now, ask yourself, “You have filled in (or filled up, whichever way you want to look at it) a rather complex form or document. Is it not possible for these sophisticated computers to tick the “I am not a robot” box? or do these simple tasks and pretend to be humans?” Or are these computers proving how gullible we humans can be to think we are still in control of our actions? Can you imagine us telling robots that we are not robots?

There is an advertisement on radio that says when you call in to their company, real people will answer your enquiries. How cool can that be? I thought that ad was cute. A few years ago, we would have said, “How cool can that be?” if we heard that A.I. will answer your enquiries.

As time advances into the future; we humans are made to believe that we are in control of ourselves. Not impossible. But we are getting there (the made to believe that we are in control of ourselves part…). We are made to believe that we are in control. Not altogether true.

Let’s try out a simple experiment. Leave your smartphone, the one that you are “in control of“😏😉at home for 1 day… maybe a week…a month is asking too much, I am sure.

How many of us have become overly dependent on the smartphone. Almost every function of our lives has got some app or another telling us that our lives become supposedly easier when we have downloaded the app to our phone and connected to the app. Health apps, house utilities, bank accounts, how to cook, sew, clean the house, besides all the social media apps, where your thousands of friends that are connected to you, are with you 24×7.

Oh yeah…and filling up those online forms: there is an app that you can download and auto-fill in the information. It can fill in all the “I am not a robot check boxes and identify pictures” automatically. You would have probably granted it access to your personal details stored on the phone.

I am a gadget guy. I love gadgets and everything that is new. I love playing around with new stuff.

However, nothing and I mean nothing beats a physically present human being relationship, and I mean nothing. Then, you can stand up and be countered as one amongst the small and possibly diminishing number of people who are still in control over technology. If you are not, there is still hope, you can take back control of your life.

NOTES:
1. A.I. or Artificial Intelligence in its broadest sense, is intelligence exhibited by machines, particularly computer systems. It is a field of research in computer science that develops and studies methods and software that enable machines to perceive their environment and uses learning and intelligence to take actions that maximize their chances of achieving defined goals.

2. ChatGPT is a chatbot developed by OpenAI. It enables users to refine and steer a conversation towards a desired length, format, style, level of detail, and language.

THE ELEPHANT AND A TINY ROPE

/ Alan Atkinson / Leave a comment

We are in the 21st century, or is it the 22nd or are we still stuck in the 20th century, where though the “needle of time” has moved forward crossing into the 21st; many of us may be still wondering what has happened? Where did mostly everyone go?

Everything else around us looks just the same. Many people seem to reminisce the past, even though the past may have just been last week. Memories of the past are a plenty. Each moment that has yet to come, is the future. When it arrives, it is the present. When it is gone, it is the past.

Likewise, when we aim for our goals, that is the future. We work hard towards them, we put in all our effort towards those goals. This is the present. At the end of the given time, we did not achieve it or them. It becomes the past. Some of us have the courage to try again and again. We failed two or three times or even more. We give up.

Many of us will have “The Elephant Rope” belief that even after many years, it is no use of trying, no use of breaking free from the tied rope. That maybe we have grown wiser, learned and gained experience which we could use to possibly help us achieve our goals.

But then, what if we fail…again, everyone around us is going to laugh at us and think us foolish. It is better if we don’t try again. People would have already forgotten our failures in the past. Don’t relive it again. It is better this way. We won’t have to go through the embarrassment again, the ridicule, the “I failed…yet again”. We condition ourselves to make our decisions on what we perceive others will think of us.

We will forever carry the “What if…we tried again?” And we achieve our goals, our dreams… We will never know unless we…

The Elephant Rope (story)
As a man was passing the elephants, he suddenly stopped, confused by the fact that these huge creatures were being held by only a small rope tied to their front leg. No chains, no cages. It was obvious that the elephants could, at anytime, break away from their bonds but for some reason, they did not.

He saw a trainer nearby and asked why these animals just stood there and made no attempt to get away. “Well,” the trainer said, “when they are very young and much smaller we use the same size rope to tie them and, at that age, it’s enough to hold them. As they grow up, they are conditioned to believe they cannot break away. They believe the rope can still hold them, so they never try to break free.”

The man was amazed. These animals could at any time break free from their bonds but because they believed they couldn’t, they were stuck right where they were.

Like the elephants, how many of us go through life hanging onto a belief that we cannot do something, simply because we were taught from young that we could not do it, or it simply was “not our place to do it”, or we failed at it once before?

Failure is part of learning; we should never give up the struggle in life.

The moral of the story is that we can become conditioned to believe in our own limitations, just like the elephant. However, if we challenge these beliefs and push past our perceived limitations, we can achieve much more than we thought possible.

NOTES
Elephants, the largest land animals on the planet, are among the most exuberantly expressive of creatures. Joy, anger, grief, compassion, love; the finest emotions reside within these hulking masses.

YES, GOOD ICE-CREAM IS IMPORTTANTER

/ Alan Atkinson / Leave a comment

It’s the evening after the storm. Or is to be referred to as the night . The time is 8.43pm. Home alone. Laura’s out with her work colleagues. Jeannie’s out with her work colleagues. I am with my work colleague – the computer. Otherwise, how is this essay forming? No A.I. (Artificial Intelligence) or ChatBGT or is it ChatCTB. Evident that this article is forming manually as we go along.

I don’t really get this A.I. thing. Are we putting all that we’ve got into A.I. because we have an overflow of Actual or Real Intelligence? I mean, think of it, the buzz word (phrase?) is “A.I.” Or is that we can’t get Actual Intelligence up to specs that we have to rely on going “artificial”? Don’t you think that if we can’t get Actual Intelligence up to specs, we should do something about bolstering it, learning to be more cleverer?

I have tried using A.I. (here I am talking about the Artificial “one”), on certain topics and the results were at best, weak. I tried out several times to see how intelligent its artificiallness of its intelligence would come out. First of all, most of the time its results hardly made any sense. Then, its English and grammar is scaringly horrific! I had to go through its results over and over again, trying to make head or tail what it was trying to say.

Maybe, my intelligence was so low, that I couldn’t really make out its results. Or, I am using a low grade Artificial Intelligence app; so this was the best it could offer. Artificial Intelligence software got grade meh? (Mind my Actual Intelligence English😉).

So, Subang Jaya (1) witnessed another thunderous, lightningness heavy rain storm in the afternoon. I was not really affected by it, as I was sitting with my cousin, Chris; our friend Jino, and his son-in-law, Martijn; from Sweden, at Jing’s Specialty Coffee, having coffee.

I ordered their waffle with Pistachio ice-cream, too. It was waa-a-a-a-yyy over-the-top too sweet for me. I don’t think I have eaten anything so sweet before. However, I have been working on reducing my sugar intake for quite a while now, so this waffle is way past my sweetner scale. I don’t have any health issues with sugar. It’s just that I want to consciously keep my sugar level at a good level, health wise.

I hear the waffles here at Jings, are quite a hit with customers. So, there are people with sweet-tooth aplenty.

When I got home, I received this picture on Facebook, which I thought quite cute. Here I am working towards reducing my sugar intake, but I had a McFlurry from the Scottish restaurant yesterday. And today, the very sweet waffle with Pistachio ice-cream. Now, this picture says Milkyway is good ice-cream. No more ice-cream for me for a long time to come. I’m good.

Milkyway claims that having good ice-cream is importanter that education. The brain freeze that you may get from time to time when eating ice-cream helps a person become gooder. However, by any yardstick of measurement, education is the importantest of them all. We continue to learn almost every moment of our lives. We need to be educateding ourselves continuously to keep abreast of the very fast ever-changing world.

We should never stop educating ourselves no matter how much importanter Milkyway says that good ice-cream is over education.

Maybe, just maybe; eating good ice-cream and education are equally importanter.

NOTES:
If good ice-cream was really importanter than education; then, brain freezes may become the norm and we may all be wearing heated hats.
I thought Milkyway is a chocolate brand.
1. Subang Jaya is a bustling city in the southern central state of Selangor, Malaysia.

Having fun with the English language. Must be the brain freeze😉😁😅😂