We Need to Talk About AI for Common Folks

I’ll start with, I am not a “bot” and this is not being written by “AI.” That said, it is highly unlikely that you would know if I generated this with some form of AI. Unless you know me well enough, you may not be familiar with any kind of nuisances I have in my writing. I suppose the fact that I am terrible with grammar could be a giveaway unless I instructed the AI to make subtle grammatical errors with intent.

I keep writing about this subject because I still find people who are not aware of what is going on with AI in the world right now. Chat GPT made the nightly news a few months ago and that is great, but I don’t believe the news media understands what the heck is going on here. These new technologies are present and emerging. They are in plain sight and becoming part of business and your personal life. You may not even have awareness.

I believe that we are in a situation where there will be people that know and people that don’t know about this technology and that if you aren’t into technology, you will not understand the scope and scale of what this means to you. Why is it important for you to understand?

I can’t think of any historical precedent for what we are experiencing today. The way that I think about this technology is similar to a tool that can be weaponized. Thing about it like this, what if North Korea, Iran and other smaller countries with extreme perspectives all had nuclear weapons ready to strike anywhere in the world right now and because some of them are extremists are willing to lose everything while using these weapons.

We are in a similar situation to this with the advancement of prolific AI. The world was ready for a lot of things but this kind of technology out in the wild was not the first thing that comes to mind. What are some of the risks? What is happening today? What will happen tomorrow?

First, I’ll start with something obvious. Before YouTube and some of the other social media platforms, it would have been very difficult or practically impossible for people to make millions of dollars by licking a fake ear into a microphone. Well, magically, millions of people like listening to weird things like this or are just curiosity seekers. Regardless, there are people on social media who have made millions of dollars doing things and expressing these on technology which has global reach. They are one event away from being a public figure. If we step back even further, we can acknowledge that Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, and other tech companies weren’t making money at the start of their existence. They had so much potential, that people poured money into them.

What this means is that the potential for making money here is extremely high. OpenAI has a recent valuation of somewhere near 29BN (with a B for Billion). There are so very many opportunities for “first things” that it goes beyond imagination.

I’ll give you a few examples just to put things into perspective.

1. Skin cancer detection as you walk onto a beach or a pool. (just runs as a service on your current camera equipment)
2. Health monitoring services which track you by your phone but run through an AI network with microservices integrated into current camera and audio systems all throughout the world.
3. Auto generate applications for use and publishing on any platform. (currently available)
4. Replacement of actors, actresses, musicians with indistinguishable digital people (available today)
5. Automate automatically almost anything that is process driven with high accuracy. This could apply to practically any industry. Anything where people needed to make decisions but are no longer required.

The list goes on and on. Today, you can clone people (digitally) with very good accuracy, but we are just getting started with this technology, it is in the model T phase which means, at some point, we will not be able to tell the difference between humans and digital people.

Fact is, it is highly likely that your 12-year-old knows more about this then you do.

Let’s go to it again just to provide a bit more context and comprehension:

• ”’Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs)”’: GANs are used for generating realistic images, videos, and audio. They have applications in art, design, gaming, and deepfake detection.
• ”’Reinforcement Learning (RL)”’: RL is used for training AI agents to make decisions in complex environments. Applications include robotics, autonomous vehicles, finance, and game playing.
• ”’Natural Language Processing (NLP)”’: NLP focuses on understanding and generating human language. Applications include chatbots, sentiment analysis, machine translation, and content generation.
• ”’Computer Vision”’: Computer vision enables machines to interpret and understand visual information. Applications include facial recognition, object detection, medical imaging, and autonomous vehicles.
• ”’Edge AI”’: Edge AI brings AI processing to edge devices, reducing latency and improving privacy. Applications include IoT devices, smart homes, and wearable technology.
• ”’AI in Healthcare”’: AI-driven technologies are revolutionizing healthcare, with applications in diagnostics, drug discovery, personalized medicine, and patient monitoring.
• ”’AI in Cybersecurity”’: AI is used to detect and prevent cyber threats, including malware, phishing, and intrusion detection.
• ”’AI in Finance”’: AI-driven technologies are transforming the finance industry, with applications in fraud detection, risk management, trading, and customer service.
• ”’AI in Agriculture”’: AI is being used to optimize crop yields, monitor soil health, and predict weather patterns, improving overall agricultural efficiency.
• ”’AI in Manufacturing”’: AI-driven technologies are streamlining manufacturing processes, including predictive maintenance, quality control, and supply chain optimization.

Let me remind you, that we do NOT have a right to privacy. Law makers are currently more concerned about issues which distract them from these very important topics. The most valuable and important asset outside of health and wellbeing is “knowledge.” For many years, third party companies have been capturing information about us and now with the technology available to everyone, this data and information collected can inform government and organizations right or wrong about every aspect of our lives. The limitless nature of this is mind blowing.

A bit more perspective. Let’s look at this with a little more pragmatism. Regardless of whether Covid was a lab accident or not, the people of the world allowed it to spread knowingly. We didn’t shut down borders, we didn’t stop flights or global movement and we didn’t go on lock down until it was too late. While AI itself isn’t a virus, as it is unregulated and uncontrolled, it is exponentially expanding and anyone with a bit of knowledge and technology can be a “creator.” Unfortunately, in our world, there are people who want to harm us.

https://mad.firstmark.com/ <– take a look at the companies involved here. Look at all the new ones.

I’ll break this up into a few posts, but I’d like you to start asking questions out loud. Let’s talk about the implications of this technology. Let’s talk about the risk.

Let’s seek to understand what the heck is going on here.