Living in the Age of AI

This was one of the most interesting and informative videos about A.I. I did not know much about artificial intelligence until the recently popular "Chat gpt" came out. "Chat gpt" is an A.I. platform that answers anything you ask; I only know about it from how popular it is for college kids to use. I have used "Chat gpt" not to write my essays but to help me brainstorm or develop a better outline. It is a helpful tool, but I can see how it could easily be abused. Even though "Chat gpt" was released in November of 2022, there are many more A.I. platforms just like it that came before it, and other platforms can do many different things.

The video showed me behind the scenes of the A.I. and how it could affect the future for better or worse. They mention that we are just in the early decades of A.I. and that it will be a multi-decade adjustment period to get used to A.I. and its capabilities. A.I. is creating automation which is a substitution for capital for labor. A.I. is swaying towards all of the jobs that have a routine that will get automated, and only the people at the top will be making money. For example, "A.I. is the ultimate tool of wealth creation." Something interesting is that women primarily represent the routinely based jobs or transfer data etc., meaning women would be out of a job a lot faster than a man due to A.I.

Another thing that they mentioned was "surveillance capitalism," which is when the private human experience is called a free source of raw material that can be fabricated into predictions about human behavior. There was a story about a man with a friend who worked at Google. They casually talked about him asking the Google employee how much they know about him, and he replied, "You would be surprised how much we know about you.” They can tell your thoughts, desires, dreams, friends, wants, and much more. This is called "digital exhaust," which means wherever you search, it leaves digital traces so that it can know your behavior. Spoken interfaces like "Google Home" and "Alexa" are consistently among the most significant A.I. breakthroughs. As one of these devices is always listening in your house, it gets smarter every day to cater to you. While this might seem reasonable at the time, they are always trying to target you. One of the most significant moments of "surveillance capitalism" was Cambridge Analytica. Cambridge Analytica was a scandal in 2018 that tried to sway people to vote one way and manipulate voters. They obtained data from millions of Facebook users without consent through third-party apps, and used their data for their political benefit. This caused a massive conference for Facebook and changed how they sell people's data. This made people feel like their privacy was not protected.

One of the most concerning things in this video was when it talked about all of the surveillance in China. The government installs cameras on every major street they say is used for jaywalking, but it is a reminder that the state is always watching. They can identify people and stalk them through their daily life. It keeps data from everyone and has so much information, even about how you walk.

Lastly, some positive benefits of A. I. are that there is no human error. These machines can not make mistakes and lessen the chance of error by so much while also doing it faster. A.I. is also beneficial for humans. While I know many people who use it to cheat, you can use it to shorten your workload. It can help you come up with ideas or help you plan something out; it makes people more confident in their work. If A.I. is used properly to help humans, instead of taking over humans, I think that artificial intelligence will be very beneficial to our world.

Reflection on EOTC #1

I loved listening to my classmates teach the class about groundbreaking technologies. Learning about technologies I know were essential to me yet had such a complex history was fascinating. Learning about these critical technologies gave me a broad overview of the greatest inventions. Some of my favorite ones I knew about were emojis, the radio, and the telephone. I use these three things every day without hesitation, and I have no idea what it is like to live without these inventions. 

Ben was the first presenter in the class, and he, by far, had one of the best presentations. You could see he had a lot of knowledge and passion for this topic, which is one reason why I was so interested in it. Emojis were first used in 1862 by President Lincoln when he was giving a speech. He used the emotion “;),” yet it is still heavily debated if he meant to put that in his speech transcript. 

Later in 1999, a Japanese artist named Shigetaka Kurita created the first one hundred seventy-six emojis as an easy way to communicate emotions. After Kurita, many companies tried to copy them, the most famous in the United States being Google and Apple. Emojis have forever changed communication because of how much an emoji can say without words. A fun fact is that a whole book was written in emojis by Moby Dick!

The radio, known as “wireless telegraphy,” was invented by Guglielmo Marconi in 1895. It changed the way communication and entertainment would be in America forever. The radio allowed for the transmissions of news, media, politics, etc., to be committed over long distances, letting people get the latest news in real time. It allowed people to listen to music anytime they wanted to and could travel with music. Without the radio, the public was never in the know until days later, when it would appear in the newspaper. If the radio was never invented it would have taken much longer for the television, mobile phones, internet, social media etc. to be invented, if at all. The radio impacted American society in every way it could and transformed how people communicate. 

Lastly, I enjoyed the presentation on the first-ever telephone. Alexander Graham Bell made the first telephone call on March 10, 1876. Before the first phone call, Bell got the patent for the telephone on March 7,1876. He then went on to created the Bell Telephone Company, which is now known as AT&T. I learned that Bell was heavily involved in the deaf community, which was one of the main reasons he created the telephone while getting his ideas from Samuel Morse’s telegraph. At first, Bell tried improving the telegraph with his knowledgeable background in sound and music. He was able to create “multiple telegraphs.” Which could send multiple signal and sounds at the same time over the same wire. It changed America for the better and revolutionized communication. It opened up a whole new world of communication. It had a significant impact on the way the world lived every day and most people in the world reply on telephones for their jobs, communication, news, politics, business opportunities and much more.