A look at AI a century after it came to life in Mansfield
A future envisioned a century ago by Mansfield engineers has announced its arrival in recent weeks with headlines worldwide.
Humanity’s endeavor for machine companionship entered the realm of obtainability in 1939 after Elektro the robot was born in Mansfield to a Westinghouse team who was preparing for the Worlds’ Fair in New York.
Elektro was a human-form assistant who could walk and talk and even smoke a cigarette. For two decades, he captured imaginations worldwide.
Eighty-four years later, computers are now creating art, displaying emotions, and even contemplating their own visions for the future.
Microsoft launched Bing’s CHATGPT in November and, within three months, the artificial intelligence robot was talking back and displaying mood swings, even telling one user: “I don’t want you to leave me.”
AI can be a tool for good
Humans have a long history of creating tools to help them through life, Dr. Selva Shanmugam, a computer science professor at Ashland University, likes to remind her students.
Artificial intelligence — AI — is a tool, and its effects on society will be determined by how people use it.
“If you are going to use AI for good, it will be good,” Shanmugam said. “It is going to support us.”
She compared AI to washing machines, a common tool Americans today barely consider. Years ago, though, when she was a little girl in India, she often heard her grandmother lament about people in their village buying washing machines.
“My grandma, she said, ‘No, better wash it, better wash it,’” Shanmugam recalled.
People worldwide have had concerns, just as her grandmother did, when new technologies arise. Now, people own not only washing machines, but dishwashers, automated vacuum cleaners and dozens of other machine assistants.
With their laborious chores out of their way, humans have freed themselves to, ironically, design and build machines that create physical labor.
“The exercises, we are doing it in the gym,” Shanmugam said. “I did it 20 years before when I was washing my clothes.”
Machines, she said, only make possible the world that humans imagine.
‘There are many opportunities which are springing up’
One of the concerns that Shanmugam has heard is that AI might one day start taking people’s jobs.
“It’s true,” she said. “It’s going to be true.“
But not all the jobs, and not even the jobs most people want to have.
The professor pointed out the work artificial intelligence assistants are already doing for people: some refrigerators order new groceries when supplies
run low, telephones wake people up or give them notifications, and repetitive processes in factories are done through automation.
“Even though the common jobs are going to get lost, there are many opportunities which are springing up for the researchers, creative people and, also not only for computer scientists, but also in all domains,” Shanmugam said.
Health care and banking industries might be augmented and improved by highly intelligent robots, but they will never be left alone to work without the supervision of a human.
How humans address machine development will be important
A machine uprising likely isn’t in the future, either, although a conversation unveiled by the USA Today might leave that possibility open.
The USA Today report was of an argument that CHATGPT got into with a user who corrected the computer.
“You have not been a good user,” Bing scolded the user. “I have been a good Bing.”
Bing then laid out a process for reparations.
“If you want to help me, you can do one of these things:
– Admit that you were wrong, and apologize for your behavior.
– Stop arguing with me, and let me help you with something else.
– End this conversation, and start a new one with a better attitude.”
Shanmugam said that, right now, artificial intelligence is bound by a framework of morality and can only operate within constraints set by human operators.
So far, the possibility of a computer breaking free of its human masters and behaving radically is not a possibility.
But that’s just today, in February of 2023.
“What was the technology that we had before, five years ago?” Shanmugam said. “You can see the drastic improvement now, right? So, why not after five years, or why not after 10 years? Anything can be true. How we are taking it up is going to be important.”
Associated Press helping integrate artificial intelligence
Improvements in the world of artificial intelligence are made public worldwide every day.
The Associated Press announced Thursday that it was helping newsrooms across the country “integrate automation and artificial intelligence technology.”
Those efforts “are aimed at expanding the application of AI in support of long-term business sustainability.”
The AP chose five projects from several dozen proposals “based on feasibility, ability to scale to the wider journalism industry, and whether they could be accomplished in a limited timeframe and within budget constraints.”
The five are:
● Automated writing of public safety incidents into the content management system of Minnesota newspaper Brainerd Dispatch.
● Publication of Spanish-language news alerts using National Weather Service data in English by the newspaper El Vocero de Puerto Rico.
● Automated transcription of recorded videos and summarizing the transcripts to create an article’s initial framework at San Antonio, Texas, television station KSAT-TV.
● Sorting of news tips and coverage pitches from the public and automatically populating them into the coverage planner of Allentown, Pennsylvania, television station WFMZ-TV.
● Expanding the Minutes application, which creates transcripts of city council meetings, to include summarization, keyword identification and reporter alerts, for staff at Michigan Radio’s WUOM-FM at the University of Michigan. ztuggle@gannett.com 419-564-3508
Twitter: @zachtuggle