Touch, Feeling and Emotion in a World being Overpowered by AI

 Licensed from Pond5

This weekend, I attended the Bluegrass Meltdown in Durango. As I watched the excellent musicians play and put their hearts and souls out there, I thought about AI.

According to what I have read, AI can sing, create videos, appear in videos representing humans, write songs, write books and articles, write code, beat humans at chess and GO, and so on.

But can AI touch, feel, or have emotion? I don’t think so.

Here are my thoughts on what has a place for AI and what does not.

An AI beating a human at chess or GO:

A good friend of mine played GO every day. I would watch him hold the stone in his hand and move it around and around, thinking of his next move. I doubt that the AI is feeling any type of emotion or has any kind of ritual as humans do, as it plays board games.  Games like chess and GO are very mental, and that is why an AI beating them came to reality so quickly. Nothing earth-shattering here. The sad part is that many who were going to learn these types of games may not have bothered. Or, maybe I am wrong; it was an incentive, and the interest increased.

Songwriting:

Songwriting is a very personal and emotional action for many. (I moved to California when I was 17 to be a songwriter.) There is no place here, in my opinion, for anything AI. You write what you feel.

Music:

The pleasure of watching live performances for me is watching each musician and how they touch and move with their instruments. Some people are very animated, some more stoic. Every musician is different. Can you imagine if you went to a live concert and had a bunch of computers or robots playing and singing and looking all the same?

Writing:

Tools like Grammarly have been useful for spell-checking and grammar. However, newer tools that are appearing in office software, LinkedIn, etc., are disruptive and interrupt thought processes. “Rewrite with AI”—no thank you.

Art:

Art, like music, is very personal. We enjoy going to art festivals and supporting artists. I had seen computer art well before AI took over. I am sure there is some place for some of this new technology, but there is a lot to be figured out, like copyrights.

Security, Network Management, Identity Management and Privacy:

This area definitely needs AI assistance. The new tools that are coming out to help catch viruses and malware and relieve some of the load on IT management and security staff are very important.  The onslaught of deep fakes, phishing, and ransomware needs technology that can recognize these attacks and prevent further harm and impact.

Good AI is fighting bad AI.

Development:

There is a lot of information about coding and AI. Also prompt engineering. AI has moved so fast that it is unclear now if it will be adding jobs or taking away jobs in this area.

Office Automation:

My background is in document management/records management. Many valuable tools have been created over the years (not all of them are AI-related). Tools like document classification, OCR/ICR, imaging cleanup, and automatic indexing and filing have increased productivity immensely.

I haven’t seen anything yet to help with the actual paper scanning. Maybe a robot built with a scanner in its chest will go around and gobble up paper, index, and file it without any human intervention. I doubt that very much.

And when you look at document and data retention, humans have had trouble executing deletion/destruction even with records management solutions. I hope there will be some improvements here as this unnecessary storage of data creates risks and the money spent on storage and management could be used elsewhere.

Healthcare:

A lot of AI technology is being created to help with testing, analysis, and doctor and staff productivity. This area is ripe for innovation as long as data is kept private…which is questionable.

Data Management:

The emphasis now is all about these big companies collecting all the data possible (even the data that they shouldn’t have or isn’t theirs to use) and building these huge data centers.  Are they ensuring they don’t have duplicate data? Probably not, because they have so much money it is easier just to send everything to the centers.

And you have companies offering solutions and services to help organizations/agencies get their own data in order, before implementing some type of AI.

The issue is similar to what I have seen with documents. There is so much duplication. Everyone wants their own copy. This is where AI would be valuable. Find the duplicates, figure out a way to stop duplication, save once and destroy when no longer required.

Sales/Marketing:

Marketing automation tools have been around for a long time. Recently, I have seen many tools promising that they can know what we think and want and can focus your marketing accordingly. Personally, I haven’t seen much improvement in this area, but I will stay open-minded.

I recognize and appreciate innovation. Technology has brought us many good things. Over the last year, however, it feels like a small group of powerful companies, billionaire tech gurus, and Venture Capitalists have taken over the airwaves.

But we humans have our own power, and we can choose what/who is important to us. We may not have much control over what technology our employers choose to have us use for our jobs, but we have full control of our personal lives. (Why the employees, who do the job day in and day out, are rarely included in the selection of technology tools is a subject for another time.)

The one way to change this AI-driven trajectory is by supporting and contributing to the human world—art, books, music, sports, and the environment.

Additional information and resources:

Stanford University released its Artificial Intelligence Index Report 2024. The report is 502 pages. Here is the link:

HAI AI Index Report 2024

‘Welcome to the seventh edition of the AI Index report. The 2024 Index is our most comprehensive to date and arrives at an important moment when AI’s influence on society has never been more pronounced. This year, we have broadened our scope to more extensively cover essential trends such as technical advancements in AI, public perceptions of the technology, and the geopolitical dynamics surrounding its development.’

Here are a couple of articles that highlight specific points from the report.

VentureBeat - Stanford report: AI surpasses humans on several fronts, but costs are soaring

‘The AI Index 2024 annual report, a comprehensive look at global AI progress, finds that AI systems exceeded human performance on additional benchmarks in areas like image classification, visual reasoning, and English understanding. However, they continue to trail humans on more complex tasks like advanced mathematics, commonsense reasoning, and planning.’

New Atlas -The bad and the ugly: AI is harmful, unreliable, and running out of data

'Global Public Opinion on Artificial Intelligence (GPO-AI) data presented in the AI Impact report showed that 49% of global citizens were most concerned that, over the next few years, AI would be misused or used for nefarious purposes; 45% were concerned it would be used to violate an individual’s privacy. People were less concerned about unequal access to AI (26%) and its potential for bias and discrimination (24%).’

Thank you for reading.

I wrote this article in Microsoft Office and used Grammarly to check spelling and grammar.

Debby Kruzic, Teckedin.com