Trust the machines

“Trust the machines,” they said. “AI is wonderful,” they said.
For better or worse, I grew up reading Ray Bradbury, so I have a healthy wariness of AI. While in the hospital after stomach surgery, someone from Joslin came over to talk to me about Dexcom. Being incredibly high on painkillers, when she asked if I was interested, I just shook my head and mumbled, “Cylons”.

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Yes, this is probably one of many goofs that will be worked on. Thankfully I think my children are old enough not to listen to the AI challenges, but who knows.

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Cuz challenges from schoolmates and peers are always much safer! :rofl:

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I did that when I was maybe 8 or 9. My parents always insisted on pulling the plug of the television out of the socket to avoid the television catching fire and burning the house down, so, dutifully, I attempted to do the same thing after finishing watching something on my own. At that time the live and neutral prongs were not insulated, so I when I wrapped my hand round the 13 amp plug my fingers could touch the prongs and I got 240V.

Thankfully these days when a plug is pulled out of the socket the insulation on the prongs means that they are disconnected from the supply before even a pair of 8 year old fingers can get in there.

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I love this!!

I was a little tipsy at an air show party where the other party goers were discussing the “super fun” and “rewarding” incentives (i.e. movie ticket vouchers…woohoo) that their employer was giving them for allowing their employer to track all of their personal health habits: wearing pedometers that were checked weekly, proving your gym membership and number of workout sessions attended, smoking status, etc.

I may have said louder than I meant to, “It’s all fun and games until you end up with a barcode on your forehead…”

Most of them had known me since college, so it evidently wasn’t the most unusual or blunt thing I’d ever said. :woman_shrugging::woman_facepalming::rofl:

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My younger son is a senior AI researcher at Meta (his PhD dissertation was on Deep Reinforcement Machine Learning and, thank goodness, his ‘team’ survived the recent massive employment cuts). Trust me that true AI (as in self-aware technology) is both further away and closer than you think. Alexa is merely a sophisticated database searching algorithm with a very good voice interface. It is NOT true AI, no matter how it’s billed.

None of that should be interpreted to mean that I don’t love my Cylons; I do! :relaxed:

Just my $.03.

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