15 Things people are trying to get AI to do–from solving crime to detecting wildfires

Can A.I. solve rape cases? To find out, a Cleveland professor programmed a computer to analyze thousands of police reports -Cleveland.com

Some in the (book) publishing world are already experimenting with AI programs in areas such as marketing, advertising, audiobook production and even writing, weighing their promise of supporting work done by humans against the threat that the machines ma. -NY Times

AI-powered technology may also help revitalize endangered languages, including by processing and storing languages and identifying language patterns. Additionally, AI may help accomplish these tasks at unprecedented speeds or just in time, before an endangered language goes extinct. -Inside Higher Ed 

Many in publishing are taking action to protect their work. The Authors Guild recently organized a petition signed by thousands of writers demanding that companies seek their approval before using their work to train A.I. programs. New York Times

Text With Jesus replicates an instant messaging platform, with biblical figures impersonated by the artificial intelligence program ChatGPT. The launching of the app stirred reactions ranging from amusement to accusations of blasphemy and heresy. -Religious News Service

Can ChatGPT become a content moderator? The technique is still not as effective as experienced human moderators, OpenAI found. But it outperforms moderators that have had light training.-Semafor

Can A.I. Detect Wildfires Faster Than Humans? California Is Trying to Find Out. -New York Times

AI providers begin to explore new terrain: chatbots in salary negotiations – Axios 

Coca-Cola launches beverage created with the help of artificial intelligence -Food Dive  

Get Ready for AI Chatbots That Do Your Boring Chores - Wired 

Alexa, will generative AI make you more useful? -Semafor  

Can AI predict, and try to prevent, homelessness? -NPR

ChatGPT was allegedly used to generate an apology statement about The Lord of the Rings: Gollum - TechRadar

Best Free & Paid AI Resume Builders: Build a Resume in Minutes - Tech.co

Multinationals turn to generative AI to manage supply chains - Financial Times

It’s All in the Attitude

Several years ago on an extremely hot day, a crew of men were working on the road bed of the railroad when they were interrupted by a slow moving train. The train ground to a stop and a window in the last car – which incidentally was custom make and air conditioned – was raised. A booming, friendly voice called out, “Dave, is that you?” Dave Anderson, the crew chief called back, “Sure is, Jim, and it’s really good to see you.” With that pleasant exchange, Dave Anderson was invited to join Jim Murphy, the president of the railroad, for a visit. For over an hour the men exchanged pleasantries and then shook hands warmly as the train pulled out.

Dave Anderson’s crew immediately surrounded him and to a man expressed astonishment that he knew Jim Murphy, the president of the railroad as a personal friend. Dave then explained that over 20 years earlier he and Jim Murphy had started to work for the railroad on the same day. One of the men, half-jokingly and half seriously asked Dave why he was still working out in the hot sun and Jim Murphy had gotten to be president. Rather wistfully, Dave explained, “twenty-three years ago I went to work for $1.75 an hour and Jim Murphy went to work for the railroad.”

Zig Ziglar, See You at the Top

We’re All Lousy Self-Evaluators

A stranger walks into a room and sits down behind a table. He picks up a piece of paper and read aloud a generic-sounding weather report. He completes his “report” in about 90 seconds and walks out of the room.

Next, you’re asked to guess his IQ.

You’re part of a psychological experiment, and you object to the absurdity of the request. I don’t know anything about that guy. He just came into a room and read a report. It wasn’t even his report- you gave it to him to read! How am I supposed to know his IQ?

Reluctantly, you make a wild guess. Separately, Fake Weatherman is asked to guess his own IQ. Who made a better guess?

Amazingly, you did, even though you know nothing about Fake Weatherman. Two (German) psychologists … conducted this experiment, and they found that the strangers’ IQ predictions were better than the predictions of those whose IQ was being predicted- about 66 percent more accurate.

To be clear, it’s not so much that you’re a brilliant predictor; it’s that he’s a lousy self-evaluator. We’re all lousy self-evaluators. College students do a superior job predicting the longevity of their roommates’ romantic relationships than their own.

Savor, for a moment, the preposterousness of these findings. Fake Weatherman has all the information, and you’ve got none. He’s got decades of data- year’s worth of grades, college entrance exams cores, job evaluations, and more. Fake Weatherman should be the worlds foremost expert on Fake Weatherman!

Chip & Dan Heath, Switch

10 Quotes Worth Reading about the Future of AI

Within five years everyone would have access to an AI personal assistant. He referred to this function as a personal chief-of-staff. In this vision, everybody will have access to an AI that knows you, is super smart, and understands your personal history. -Venture Beat 

Some experts in generative AI predict that as much as 90% of content on the internet could be artificially generated within a few years. -Bloomberg

Currently, most AI falls under narrow or specialized intelligence — good at one thing but pretty useless otherwise. However, we’re inching closer to Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), where machines can understand, learn, and apply knowledge across different domains. -Christophe Atten writing in Medium

It is certainly the case that many new technologies have led to bad outcomes – often the same technologies that have been otherwise enormously beneficial to our welfare. So it’s not that the mere existence of a moral panic means there is nothing to be concerned about.  But a moral panic is by its very nature irrational – it takes what may be a legitimate concern and inflates it into a level of hysteria that ironically makes it harder to confront actually serious concerns.  And wow do we have a full-blown moral panic about AI right now. -Marc Andreesen writing in a16z

All of the software we’ve ever used was engineered to work backward from an outcome. Its creators wanted to help you find a webpage or play a game or operate a laptop. Perhaps you’ve noticed that the major AI chatbots arrived with almost no user documentation or instructions. A lump of clay doesn’t come with instructions either. That’s what makes this moment unique — and so worthy of species-level #1 foam-finger pride. We humans have created a tool for potentially infinite tasks. Its imperfections are ours to solve — and its powers still ours to shape. -Washington Post 

“AI may cause a new Renaissance, perhaps a new phase of the Enlightenment,” Yann LeCun, one of the godfathers of modern artificial intelligence, suggested earlier this year. AI can already make some existing scientific processes faster and more efficient, but can it do more, by transforming the way science itself is done? Such transformations have happened before. -The Economist

DeepMind’s cofounder says generative AI is just a phase. What’s next is interactive AI: bots that can carry out tasks you set for them by calling on other software and other people to get stuff done. “Technology is going to be animated. It’s going to have the potential freedom, if you give it, to take actions. It’s truly a step change in the history of our species that we’re creating tools that have this kind of, you know, agency.” -MIT Tech Review

What If the Robots Were Very Nice While They Took Over the World? First it was chess and Go. Now AI can beat us at Diplomacy, the most human of board games. The way it wins offers hope that maybe AI will be a delight. -Wired

People need to develop “rugged flexibility,” to manage change most effectively. In other words, people need to learn how to be strong and hold on to what is most useful but also to bend and adapt to change by embracing what is new. -Venture Beat

Imagine if your brain got 10 times smarter every year over the past decade, and you were on pace for more 10x compounding increases in intelligence over at least the next five. Throw in precise recall of everything you’ve ever learned and the ability to synthesize all those materials instantly in any language. You wouldn’t be just the smartest person to have ever lived — you’d be all the smartest people to have ever lived. (Though not the wisest.) That’s a plausible trajectory of the largest AI models. -Washington Post 

We seem to be in what I can only call an “AI lull.” The initial excitement about ChatGPT, which started in January, has receded. Do not be deceived. While the hype and marketing may have died down, at least on the retail side, the AI revolution will continue. -Bloomberg

What Overinvolved parenting does to Kids

When parents have tended to do the stuff of life for kids—the waking up, the transporting, the reminding about deadlines and obligations, the bill-paying, the question-asking, the decision-making, the responsibility-taking, the talking to strangers, and the confronting of authorities, kids may be in for quite a shock when parents turn them loose in the world of college or work. They will experience setbacks, which will feel to them like failure. Lurking beneath the problem of whatever thing needs to be handled is the student’s inability to differentiate the self from the parent.

When seemingly perfectly healthy but overparented kids get to college and have trouble coping with the various new situations they might encounter—a roommate who has a different sense of “clean,” a professor who wants a revision to the paper but won’t say specifically what is “wrong,” a friend who isn’t being so friendly anymore, a choice between doing a summer seminar or service project but not both—they can have real difficulty knowing how to handle the disagreement, the uncertainty, the hurt feelings, or the decision-making process. This inability to cope—to sit with some discomfort, think about options, talk it through with someone, make a decision—can become a problem unto itself.

Julie Lythcott-Haims, How to Raise an Adult: Break Free of the Overparenting Trap and Prepare Your Kid for Success

Please Understand Me

We want desperately to be understood. But if we put the power to decide whether we are understood into the hands of strangers, strangers who may or may not care about us, strangers who may or may not have our best interest at heart, we may waste our time and resources trying to please them.    

Why give people who don’t know us an outsized influence over our lives? Why provide them with control they haven’t earned by getting to know us by respecting us? How much better to find solace in those who truly care! Those people we can trust! People who will stand by us as they are invested in who we are becoming.

Stephen Goforth

The heroes of an epic adventure

A team of researchers interviewed a group of people who've been through a course of psychotherapy this is what they found:  

Those former patients who currently enjoyed better psychological health tended to narrate heroic stories in which they bravely battled their symptoms and emerged victorious in the end.

In other words, these people saw themselves as the heroes of an epic adventure and their problems as obstacles that are part of the hero's journey. Now crucially, in those accounts. there was a dominant recurring theme around personal agency. This is the sense that you are the subject influencing your own actions and life circumstances just like the hero in pretty much any story you've ever come across.  

So how can we do this for ourselves?

Tip number one is to practice self-distancing, which is a simple act of viewing yourself from the outside in. It allows you to take a calmer, more objective view on the events of your life.

Tip number two is to focus on building your sense of personal agency. My recommendation is to start by practicing your ability to take intentional action. The capacity to intentionally set and achieve goals is widely considered a cornerstone of self-agency.

Hazel Gale

Empathy is a Choice

Empathy isn’t just something that happens to us — a meteor shower of synapses firing across the brain — it’s also a choice we make: to pay attention, to extend ourselves. It’s made of exertion, that dowdier cousin of impulse. … This confession of effort chafes against the notion that empathy should always rise unbidden, that genuine means the same thing as unwilled, that intentionality is the enemy of love. But I believe in intention and I believe in work. I believe in waking up in the middle of the night and packing our bags and leaving our worst selves for our better ones.

Leslie Jamison, The Empathy Exams 

Success

He has achieved success who has lived well, laughed often, and loved much;

who has enjoyed the trust of pure women, the respect of intelligent men and the love of little children;

who has filled his niche and accomplished his task;

who has left the world better than he found it whether by an improved poppy, a perfect poem or a rescued soul;

who has never lacked appreciation of Earth's beauty or failed to express it;

who has always looked for the best in others and given them the best he had;whose life was an inspiration;

whose memory a benediction.

 

Bessie Anderson Stanley

 

Wait! You Didn’t Use the Proper Lingo

Once introduced, a prescriptive rule about terminology in a particular profession or field of study is hard to eradicate, no matter how ridiculous. Steven Pinker writes in The Language Instinct:

The rules survive by the same dynamic that perpetuates ritual genital mutilations and college fraternity hazing: I had to go through it and am none the worse, so why should you have it any easier? Anyone daring to overturn a rule by example must always worry that readers will think he or she is ignorant of the rule, rather than challenging it. Since perspective rules are so psychologically unnatural that only those with access to the right schooling can abide by them, they serve as shibboleths, differentiating the elite from the rabble.

The Flip Side

Most people are aware of their own strengths and weaknesses but miss the flip side. If your weakness is confrontation, the flip side is that you are probably good at finding creative ways to get along with others and create harmony. Someone else might be prone to make rash decisions, and yet that same quality makes them ideal in times of emergency when quick action is critical. Those who are slow to act will likely be thorough and reliable. Whenever you spot your own (or someone else's) weaknesses—don't forget the flip side.

Stephen Goforth