Encouragement

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We appreciate what a person does, but we affirm who a person is. Appreciation comes and goes because it is usually related to something someone accomplishes. Affirmation goes deeper. It is directed to the person himself or herself. While encouragement would encompass both, the rarer of the two is affirmation. To be appreciated, we get the distinct impression that we must earn it by some accomplishment. But affirmation requires no such prerequisite. This mean that even when we don’t earn the right to be appreciated (because we failed to succeed or because we lacked the accomplishment of some goal), we can still be affirmed – indeed, we need it then more than ever. I do not care how influential or secure or mature a person may appear to be, genuine encouragement never fails to help. Most of us need massive doses as we slug it out in the trenches. 

Charles Swindoll, Strengthening Your Grip

AI Definitions: Facial recognition

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Facial recognition - This AI technology uses statistical measurements of a person’s face to identify them against a digital database of other faces. For instance, Clearview AI was trained on billions of images. These AI-powered systems are used to unlock phones, verify passports, and scan crowds at events for malicious actors. It’s used by many US agencies including the FBI and Department of Homeland Security. It has a serious problem with false positives and a history of unintended harms and intentional misuse based on racial and gender bias.

More AI definitions here

21 Recent Articles about AI & Robotics

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AI and digital twins to serve increasingly complex robot management – Computer Weekly

How robotics could turn e-waste into a tech goldmine – The Next Web

Amazon Testing New Warehouse Robots and AI Tools for Workers – Wall Street Journal 

Black Harvard alumni invent hair-braiding robot – The Grio

AI drones are America's newest cops – Axios

Chinese AI robotics tech outpaces U.S., rest of world - The Washington Post

Foundation models could revolutionize dexterity in robots - McKinsey

‘I love you too!’ My family’s creepy, unsettling week with an AI toy – The Guardian 

Humanoid robots were a sci-fi dream. Suddenly they’re everywhere. - The Washington Post

 

The future is bot versus bot - Axios 

AI helps traditional Japanese fish-killing method get a robotic upgrade – Semafor 

MIT's new AI can teach itself to control robots by watching the world through their eyes — it only needs a single camera – Live Science

I Pitted an AI Robot Massage Against the Real Thing – Wall Street Journal

Beijing hosts China’s first fully autonomous 3-on-3 AI robot soccer match – Associated Press

New tiny robots promise to fix underground water pipe leakage without excavation – Interesting Engineering

Robot industry split over that humanoid look - Axios 

Amazon is reportedly training humanoid robots to deliver packages – The Verge

‘Nobody wants a robot to read them a story!’ The creatives and academics rejecting AI – at work and at home – The Guardian

I Tried the Robot That’s Coming to Live With You - Wall Street Journal

America's manufacturing future still needs foreign robots - Axios

Using generative AI to diversify virtual training grounds for robots – MIT News

The Gradual Effect of AI on Creativity

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"When people use A.I. in the creative process they tend to gradually cede their original thinking. At first, users tend to present their own wide range of ideas, but as ChatGPT continues to instantly spit out high volumes of acceptable-looking text users tend to go into a 'curationist mode.' The influence is unidirectional, and not in the direction you’d hope: 'Human ideas don’t tend to influence what the machine is generating all that strongly,' Nataliya Kosmyna, a research scientist at M.I.T. Media Lab, said. ChatGPT pulls the user 'toward the center of mass for all of the different users that it’s interacted with in the past.'" - Kyle Chayka writing in the New Yorker

AI Definitions: Deep Learning

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Deep Learning – A popular type of machine learning that’s especially useful when the data is a mess—such as with natural language processing. This method of training computers uses neural networks. The word “deep” means that the composition has many “blocks” of neural networks stacked on top of each other, and the trick is adjusting the blocks that are far from the output, since a small change there can have outsized effects on the output. It is the dominant way to help machines sense and perceive the world around them. It powers the image-processing operations of firms like Facebook and Google, self-driving cars, and Google’s on-the-fly language translations. Deep learning algorithms need vast amounts of data to perform tasks that humans learn easily with a few examples. 

More AI definitions here

Résumé virtues & Eulogy virtues

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Résumé virtues are professional and oriented toward earthly success. They require comparison with others. Eulogy virtues are ethical and spiritual, and require no comparison. Your eulogy virtues are what you would want people to talk about at your funeral.

Time is limited, and professional ambition crowds out things that ultimately matter more. To move from résumé virtues to eulogy virtues is to move from activities focused on the self to activities focused on others. 

Arthur C. Brooks writing in The Atlantic

19 Articles about AI & Coding

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Addicted to Love

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Breaking up is hard to do. Literally. A Rutgers brain study shows getting over romantic rejection is similar to kicking an addiction. One of the study authors says, "When you've been rejected in love, you have lost life's greatest prize, a mating partner." Researchers examined the brains of more than a dozen volunteers who had each recently been dumped but still loved the person who had rejected them. It turned out that reminders of the beloved activated brain regions in the lover associated with addiction to cocaine and cigarettes. These same areas affect emotional control, rewards, addiction cravings, a sense of attachment, pain and distress. This brain system becomes activated in an attempt to win the person's affections again, according to the researchers. Details are in the July 2010 issue of the Journal of Neurophysiology.

Perhaps the lesson here is that it's important to become addicted to someone who is good for you.

Stephen Goforth

Breaking up is hard to do

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The time immediately after a bad relationship is filled with promise. It's as if you've rid yourself of something that was weighing you down and keeping you from reaching your full potential. You fell light and clear and free. But this honeymoon with yourself is short-lived and you’re soon in a new relationship fraught with the same old problems. This pattern continues until you finally realize that most of the issues are your own, and that to be truly free, you must break up with yourself.

Andrew Boyd, Daily Afflictions

17 Recent Articles about Using AI

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Stop Deploying General-Purpose AI Models For Everything

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Ensuring safe A.I. is another reason developers should stop deploying general-purpose models for everything. To date, the industry has been unable to guarantee that generative A.I. systems will stick to their safety instructions. Studies have documented instances in which generative A.I. deceives its human operators, tries to use blackmail if its self-preservation is threatened and responds in a way that could lead to murder. More specialized systems like AlphaFold and Waymo’s driving systems won’t misbehave that way because their operating parameters are much narrower. - Gary Marcus writing in the New York Times

When we are most likely to do something regrettable

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Under the right circumstances, a subconscious neurobiological sequence in our brains causes us to perceive the world around us in ways that contradict objective reality, distorting what we see and hear. This powerful shift in perception is unrelated to our intelligence, morals, or past behaviors. In fact, we don’t even know it’s happening, nor can we control it. 

Researchers found that it happens in two distinct situations: those involving high anxiety and those associated with major reward. Under these conditions, all of us would do something just as regrettable as those headline-grabbing stories, contrary to what we tell ourselves. Phrased differently, we don’t consciously decide to act a fool. Rather, once our perception is distorted, we act in ways that seem reasonable to us but foolish to observers.

Robert Pearl writing in Vox