Keep Drinking the Kool-Aid

Posted on 28/10/2024 by Grumpa Joe

Just as I suspected, the dream of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is just that, a dream. The book I am reading, titled “Feeding the Machine,” exposes the millions of workers behind the technology that is supposedly going to change the world. Although AI will help many of us be more productive when we find an APP developed expressly for a specific application we can use it for. My personal experience with AI is limited at best, and I find it annoying. Most times, I use a Chat bot at a website like my bank, or a vendor like the phone or cable service. The first thing I find useless are bots that answer only very specific questions. Most Chat-bots are developed like that. If you are seeking answers to a complicated problem there is a 99.999% chance you will need to connect with a human to get near an answer. Our suppliers, however, make us go through the steps before they give us a number to call for help. Evidently, a large number of callers are happy with the canned answers they receive.

The workers being employed live in East Africa and work nine hours a day in almost slave-like conditions. They watch videos to highlight activities that may escape the sensors used by AI applications. An example cited involved a lady walking a bicycle across a street in the crosswalk and being struck by a self-driving car. The AI used in the car could not determine that a human walking directly in front of the car was a safety issue. The job of the reviewer is to highlight this anomaly on the video to bring it to the attention of the programmer who then modifies the the algorithm to prevent a collision. The work to do this is mindless and boring. Managers require that the worker perform a set number of observations per minute and the worker keystrokes are measured and reported. If the worker does not match the requirements of the job, he is penalized, often by firing.

While all these observations are going on, billions of dollars are spent making artificial intelligence more intelligent and faster. We endure the chatbots just so big companies can use fewer paid employees to do the job. They truly believe we, the consumers, are getting the absolute best service experience that can be provided. It doesn’t matter what we believe we are getting. If they are making more money, we lose, and they keep on convincing themselves that they are making us happy.

Someday, AI may threaten society and cause people to lose their jobs, but I will not be around to witness the debacle. In the meantime, the venture capitalists who continue to pour money into AI companies will keep feeding us the Kool-Aid to convince us of how wonderful life will be when it all begins to happen.

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Looking At an AI Future

Posted on 24/02/2024 by Grumpa Joe

How many thoughts does a person have during one day?

Google says:

Every day, our minds are flooded with a constant stream of thoughts, ranging from mundane daily tasks to deeper contemplations about life and the world around us. According to research, the average person has approximately 60,000 thoughts per day.

That question is currently on my mind, but why? I have no clue why, but it occurs to me that with 8 billion people on planet Earth, there is a lot of thinking going on. Imagine if this thing called Artificial Intelligence (AI) could harness all the thinking going on worldwide. Would the genie in the computer be able to bring about world peace? Or cure all sicknesses? Indeed, that would be a dream come true. Perhaps someday we will build a computer with enough memory to accomplish feats like the ones mentioned. What if scientists discovered a way to link all human brains together to preclude the need to build a computer large enough to hold all the thoughts in the world? That might be easier to accomplish than trying to make something that is mechanical into which every human’s brain content could be transferred. Think about the loss of thought that would occur the day after the first brain dump occurred, and today humanity has a new set of thoughts.

Maybe the tequila over ice I drank last evening planted this conversation in my mind. Or, perhaps it is the fact that I spent an hour reading about AI yesterday to understand just how and why AI is so dangerous. Actually, what I learned is that AI will not take over the world by itself like a god but will be used as a tool to help people do their jobs. As I write this, I am using AI in the form of Grammarly to correct my lousy punctuation and grammar. What I am learning is that Grammarly has a writing style that is unlike my own, and I don’t like the changes it suggests about seventy percent of the time. I like to use extra words using my street vocabulary to inject my personality into a piece, but AI chooses to eliminate many of my adjectives for the purpose of making the writing clearer.

Eventually, AI will indeed take over the world and cause many people pain, just as every social revolution has in the past. People will lose their current jobs and will need to adapt to make a living. Or, they will beg and plead with the government to throw them a safety net in some form of a handout to save them from looking for new work. It isn’t going to be pretty, and I am glad it will not affect me. I will, however, be affected by the suffering I will see. As a Lion, it will afford me many new opportunities to serve my community. For every negative, there is a positive. Will we be smart enough to identify the opportunities, or will we need AI to do it for us? And if we do have to use AI to find the opportunities, so what? Isn’t that why AI has been invented in the first place?

Filed under: Aging, Education, Government, Science | Tagged: , | 3 Comments »

Monday Morning Coming Down

Posted on 27/11/2023 by Grumpa Joe

Yesterday, I had an exchange of wits with an Artificial Intelligence bot. The internet connection of my computer was lost, and I didn’t have a clue as to how to fix it. I didn’t even have a phone number to call. Usually, I go to a company’s website for information or a friendly phone number. With the Internet out, I couldn’t get help. All day long, I pondered how I would live without the connection. The funny thing was, I still got TV and streaming services. In desperation, I looked through my ancient card files, hoping to find a number. I did. I called and got an AI bot. The bot was useless because it was programmed to answer only precise questions, like, “Do you wish to add services?” I began shouting into the phone with my question, using different words each time. I hoped it would recognize a word and connect me to a real, live human being. After many tries, the Bot asked if I would like to speak to an agent, “YES,” I replied. After a few moments on hold, I listened to several phone clicks and finally a voice. The agent was the same damned bot as before. I answered more stupid canned questions, and finally, the bot asked, “Do you want to speak to an agent?” This time, a real live person came on, and we made some progress.

After checking the status of my area for outages, she checked the lines in the house. Everything was in order. “Try resetting your modem, and I will call back in ten minutes.” I did as asked and she actually called me back. “Any change?” She asked.

“No,” was my answer. “Try turning off your device (computer) for thirty seconds and then turn it back on.” I did what was asked. The computer came back online, but the internet was not working. As I reached for the computer, to rip it out of the wall, the internet began responding. “Thank you Lord.”

I was so glad to have the thing working again that I forgot how angry the experience made me. Then, I began thinking about how to make this problem-solving more productive. First of all, I am an actual live human, and I started the whole fiasco by speaking to a numb-nuts non-human bot. I realized we don’t speak the same language. What I need is a bot to talk to the bot for me. I’ll spend the whole day looking for a bot that knows and understands AI and can intervene on my behalf anytime a provider insists on making me communicate that way. I will give the AI bots one thing: they speak English, but, more importantly, they speak without an accent, and they speak slowly enough to be understood.

It is time for me to go to the AI bot store to find my new assistant.

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Writing Does Not A Writer Make

Posted on 14/11/2023 by Grumpa Joe

Many friends ask me to write something for them and preface the request with “You like to write.” My Lions Club will assign writing duties to me even when I am reluctant to do them. These requests have given me the idea that I may be a writer. When I analyzed my life and my interests, I learned this about myself: even in high school, I liked to write stories. In college, I hated classes about English authors (Shakespeare, Keats, Yeats), but I loved classes that required writing essays.

Ten Best English Authors

When I transferred from Saint Joseph’s College in Indiana to the University of Illinois, I had to prove English grammar and punctuation proficiency by writing a qualifying essay. The subject matter was to be chosen by me. In my classes at St. Joe, the Prof suggested we list things that interested us and then pick a topic to write about. He also indicated that you can shift to something else once you begin writing about the topic. I use this technique often. The same professor encouraged me to continue writing by selecting my essays to read before the class. Talk about an ego boost; he knew how to supercharge mine.

I got into the University of Illinois without having to take remedial English. Because I transferred to advance my career in engineering, I had few opportunities to write creative pieces, but I worked overtime writing lab reports. After a successful career in Engineering, I chose to start this blog. Writing became creative again, but my writing sounded like lab reports.

After retiring from the engineering world, one of my goals was to write my biography. I began by making a list of memories. SIngular recollections of things that happened to me, people I met, or projects I worked on. The next step was to write about one of the topics from my list by hand in a composition notebook. I filled three notebooks with stuff and realized what a tremendous job it was to transcribe all those cursive words into a word processor. I hired my former secretary, who could read my handwriting, to do the job. She was a very dynamic and talented lady. I had to warn her not to change what I wrote. I suspected she would rewrite everything to make it readable and sensible. She did exactly as asked. Later, when I began to edit the document, I realized what a mistake I made by not allowing her to correct my shitty writing. That is when I researched AI programs and bought one to help me become a better writer.

Biography-Jun-e-or

Using the AI editing program, I could write a readable biography. After completion, I stopped using the tool because I thought my writing had improved. When I began writing my book recently, I realized I needed help again, and now I know for sure that I am not a natural-born writer like I thought I was. I don’t have enough years left on this earth to learn to write as well as I do in my mind, but I will die trying.

Filed under: Biography, Memories | Tagged: , , | 1 Comment »

AI Is Coming

Posted on 30/09/2023 by Grumpa Joe

I am reading a book titled “AI Super Powers China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order” by Kai-Fu Lee. It has captured my imagination as a good story about something technical. I am nearing the end, and the author is presenting how AI will begin to take over in the very near future (like 5 years). He extols the many benefits of automation and the sadness of lost jobs. I thought about it and must tell you that automation doesn’t come easy. I spent 40 years at a company that produced what the world likes to call “zip ties.” At first thought, one can believe that a zip tie is not complicated, so why wouldn’t it be easy to automate? The tie is merely a plastic strip with a molded tip and a locking head on the opposite end. The product’s geometry comprises thin sections and thick sections, sharp edges and soft edges, massive sections like the tie head and body, and tiny delicate sections like the locking mechanism inside the head. Next is the material used to mold the tie. All plastics are not the same. Some are easy to melt and mold but don’t stand up to the rigors of application; the plastic must be tough, flexible, and strong. The material we finally chose to use was Nylon 6-6, but it came with its own list of problems. To mold, the material had to be very dry, but in actual use, the molded product must contain water to make it tough, flexible, and easy to apply. The product will be stiff and brittle if left dry as molded.

Raw nylon came to us as a pellet in boxes or bags. We use a special machine to melt the pellets and then to send the melted plastic into a steel mold with the product’s shape cut into it. This requires a channel cut into the mold that extends to the cavity. To make money, we required the number of cavities in the mold to be more than one. When I first began at the company, our typical mold had sixteen cavities with a binary runner system designed to make each runner extend from the nozzle to the cavity to be the same distance. We melted and molded more nylon in the runner system than in the product. What that meant was a gross imbalance in the cost. We didn’t make money molding runners. A human manually removed each shot of sixteen parts and its runner from the mold. This operator was incentivized to process the maximum number of shots per minute.

The molded product had to be removed from the runner, moisture-conditioned, and packaged before being sent to a customer. Initially, another department did the moisturizing, packaging, and boxing. When I left the company forty years later, we had the entire process automated. As many as two hundred parts were molded at one time. The parts were degated, counted, and packaged into plastic bags of one hundred or one thousand ties. A single person performed quality checks and put ten packages of a thousand ties into a box. We stopped automating at that point because paying back the machinery was more expensive than allowing the existing QC person who tended to four machines to take the final step. What I am getting at here is that AI makes sense, but automating every process may not.

Another aspect was in mold, and molding machine maintenance. When the mold is subject to being squeezed together by a machine capable of applying a million pounds of force to keep it closed during injection, the tiny parts inside the cavity are stressed beyond imagination. The result is that when a tiny part breaks, the product from that cavity is junk, and the process has to shut down to fix the flat. We then turn to quick mold change and maintenance procedures to replace broken parts. All of this is the result of thousands of man-hours of development.

Even the author agrees that automating the human hand motion is not possible at this time nor in the foreseeable future. AI may be great at analyzing orders and finding trends, or it might even be great at finding trends in the molding process, but only with scads of data. It took an entire team of electrical and process engineers years to determine how and what to measure to predict or even see trends. Eventually, we measured the process and improved our product’s quality and consistency.

The Way We Did It in 1970

In the end, we learned that automation comes at a great cost and that the cost of maintaining the equipment continues as long as the process goes on. Changing the process becomes unthinkable once it is solid and running smoothly. When that finally happened, the powers to be decided there was an advantage to sending the whole kit and caboodle to places like Singapore, Costa Rica, and Mexico, where the labor costs are lower. Just to let you know, I left out China. That is because the wisdom of our owner was that he paid for developing his process, and he believed the Chinese should pay their way, too. We had a security system in place that rivaled the NSA and CIA to keep our competitors from stealing our technology.

In conclusion, I say this, bring it on AI we are ready for you, but are you smart enough to take on the challenge in front of you?

Filed under: Biography, Book Review, Manufacturing | Tagged: , , | 2 Comments »

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