If you ask me, one of the best and worst modern-day inventions that has brought about the destruction of mankind is the drive-up window.
A lady recently told me she had lost fifteen pounds. When I asked her what she was doing she said, "I no longer eat anything from a window."
This brought about a quick reassessment of my own personal health and routines. Life gets busy. We forget to eat until we are stuck in traffic and our stomach growls, and that sign offers a quick fix for a low price and problem solved in minutes. Life moves on, weight gets deposited, and arteries get more clogged, but that is a quiet underlying process we don't have to acknowledge until days if not weeks later.
And so goes our latest introduction to the evolution of mankind. Artificial Intelligence --- AI. Is it a friend or a foe? The accuracy blows my mind. The speed of it blows my mind. And the ability to replace many human actions stops me in my tracks.
My first stumbling block with AI was the writing that is offered. Mothers told me they encouraged their children to use AI when writing. Students told me they used AI when writing and only tweaked a few things to make it seem like it came from them. The whole point of writing is to demonstrate what one has learned or to communicate something to another or a host of others. Having a computer program do this negates the entire point. As does eating a cheeseburger from a drive through as you try to lower your cholesterol or lose weight.
I have a plant AI ap on my phone that can identify any plant I come across in less than a minute. I can retrieve information on planting advice, sunlight needed, fertilizers recommended, and soil preferences. I love it. AI is reported to improve the efficiency of numerous sectors from healthcare to environmental sustainability, to research and development to customer service. I mean don't we all love talking to a fake human when we are trying to get to the bottom of an issue with a company? They don't even get their feelings hurt when we drop a bad word or two as they ignore our word "representative" ten times showing no emotion.
AI powered tools assist people with disabilities providing better communication and interaction with the world around them. AI is said to take up repetitive tasks in various industries, improving operational efficiency, and freeing up the human workforce for higher-level thinking tasks. AI offers early disease detection through analysis of medical images, personalized treatment plans, drug discovery acceleration, and improved patient monitoring.
It is also creating a huge shift in the workforce, replacing the jobs once performed by humans. It is opening a potential opportunity for exposure of sensitive user data but at the same time reports that it strengthens cybersecurity. And at the end of the day it is created, distributed, manipulated, and utilized by human beings who have the potential to do good or harm to others.
That's a lot. But it brings me back to my first comparison of modern-day efficiency and convenience. Many once believed the invention of the automobile was nothing more than a deathtrap creating noise and irritating horses. The microwave oven encouraged processed food. And the television which evolved into gaming machines was proclaimed to be a glorified babysitter. They needed to be reading books. There is some truth to all of that.
There is no need for artificial intelligence to surmise the direction of my thoughts on these light speed developments in our world. My mind could not even grasp all the ways AI is being utilized or even manipulated. But I do know that, like anything else, it is what we make it as a society. With the good there is the bad.
And I still hit up that drive through for plastic cheese sticks when I am hungry and strapped for time. So, I guess where artificial intelligence steers us or where we steer it is something we will have to see.
