When I think back to my years growing up, I have to laugh at those old science fiction movies we would watch. Everything seemed so far-fetched. It was also packed with excitement as R2D2 whistled and beeped and C3P0 knew exactly what he was saying. Robots were the coolest things imagined. And the Jetsons with the readymade food, zooming cars, and spaceship houses juxtaposed to the Flintstones with bare feet running around in wooden carved cars.
The microwave was, I guess, the first step toward the Jetsons. Then there was cruise control, aerodynamic automobile designs, blue tooth syncing to your phone, and now a seat that buzzes my bottom on left, right, front or back depending on approaching traffic or even a warm body walking behind me in a parking lot.
We can order our groceries online to be delivered to our vehicles which is one of many creations sticking after the pandemic. We have telemedicine from our office at home straight to the medical clinic. What we moms would not have given to have this luxury in the 80's and 90's when our children popped up with the fever.
I started hearing the term AI some time back in bits and pieces, but it since has grown into just about every aspect of our lives. It spans across most industries mainly because of the benefits like saving time, increasing efficiency, and accessibility to data. Many younger people prefer to speak to AI rather than a warm body to the point they will email, text, private message, or send a smoke signal before making a personal call to speak to an actual human being.
Article after article will explain the benefits if not necessity of automative intelligence. It can process large amounts of information in only a small piece of the time it would take for a human. But I have found that when a great deal of data is read and moved around without the need of a human to study it, the information just gets stored in some database or even old school printed out and shoved in a binder. The slow process of a human pouring through data is the time when this data becomes a tangible thing to build upon.
But then articles will tell you it cuts out human error. When actually to err is human and how have we learned as a society for hundreds of years but by our own mistakes?
All this aside, I ran into a neighbor who was excited to tell me he had caught the largest fish ever to be caught from our lake. He showed me an awesome picture of the fish. I asked him how he did this when our lake had almost dried up at that time during the drought. He explained to me there was still enough water in the deepest part.
He showed me the gorgeous mount now hanging on his wall, and I asked him about our “throw back” policy, not that I was going to tell a soul. He explained to me that now you can take a picture then throw the fish back. You can send the picture to a mounting company, and they will recreate the fish exactly as it was while the fish gets to continue swimming around with his mommy and daddy in the lake.
I don't know. I mean, even Farah Fawcett on Charlie's Angels had a car phone that still needed a cord, and now we don't even need a dial tone ....just a screen to swipe. Is that really the real fish hanging up on that wall whose truth will forever be mounted in the living room? Or did he use AI to digitally create the picture to have this mount made. Or did it actually happen as he said it did? Add this to those fish stories our grandfathers passed down, even though they would be shaking their heads in bewilderment!
