When you read the reference to an “AICompanion” in this blog’s title, you may have instantly jumped to the idea of some platform or device that you can make into a digitalized bestie. You know, an AI construct that you can wile away the hours chatting with online or making romantic overtures to. Hey, you can even wear pendant-sized AI buds like a necklace these days.
You haven’t heard of those? Yeah, it’s a new AI-powered necklace that listens in on your interactions with others and then tosses in comments to you through text messages. (Some people don’t find that creepy at all.)
But digital hearts and eves-dropping chatbots aren’t what I’m really here to talk about.
For a minute, I want us to think about the idea of artificial intelligence. I mean, how do we want to relate to it today and tomorrow? Will we make it a welcome companion and helper, will we steel ourselves for a fight, or are we just going to pretend we can ignore it?
Oh, and yes, I used the word “pretend” on purpose. After all, at this point AI is all around us and in everything we work with. So, outside ditching your phone and setting up a tent in the middle of nowhere, there’s really no way to give it the cold shoulder. You may have this false sense that artificial intelligence is a relatively new thing that really doesn’t concern you. But it’s been around since it took its first baby steps as Arthur Samuel’s checkers-playing program way back in the early 1950s. And it’s been reaching out with an open hand ever since.
Why does AI seem so new? Well, as AI has grown and gotten more powerful and influential, it has also become more invisible. Not only is it now making our phones more helpful and getting Amazon to push us sales on our favorite dog sweaters, it’s controlling far more than we recognize with far more acumen than we give it credit for.
For instance, when you call your credit card company and that pleasant AI assistant helps you out, do you consider everything that’s going on? As you speak into your phone, that company AI has to perceive speech patterns, nuances, accents, and intonations. It must match your start-stop-mumble of a request against massive amounts of sample data in an attempt to give you a usable answer or send you in the right direction.
AI also performs data mining through vast reference sets for us and other heavy lifting duties every day. For example, have you ever tried watching Netflix with spotty WiFi? Of course you have. As you watch, there are times when the picture gets all fuzzy as the data stream thins out. Did you know that Netflix’s AI tries to identify how important a scene you’re watching is as it divvies up the bandwidth for a given stream? So the big melting face scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark will be given more bandwidth than, say, the opening credits of a She-Ra episode. And you didn’t even know AI was hard at work to make that runny goo crystal clear.
And there’s more. Much more. Self-driving cars; spam-filtering on emails; opening doors for the disabled; fraud detection on your credit card account; robotic vacuum cleaners; video and image creation; music writing and audio tools; simple medical advice; grammatically corrected rewrites. The list of ways that AI is helping us stretches on and on.
On the other hand, your AI companion isn’t necessarily your best friend. If you’ve been paying attention to our quickly moving world, you’ve seen how incredibly open we humans can be to a well-tailored influencer. And AI is as smartly groomed as it gets because, well, its approach to you is all based on what you and those around you give it.
So, if you’re not paying close attention, AI can deftly change your purchasing decisions, your social values and your political views with just the right social media feed and just the right messaging. For that matter, what happens if over time we start to prefer the consistent and tailored responses of our trusted AI friend over the unpredictable and messy stuff of a real, live human conversation? Will we be sharp enough to see the problem?
We shouldn’t close our eyes to either the potentially good side or the potentially not-so-great side of our AI chum. As Proverbs 4:7 declares: “Get wisdom. Though it costs you all you have, get understanding.” So read about how AI impacts your life. Listen to podcasts and other sources of information on the topic. Pay attention and make wise choices. Realize that even a family dog—mankind’s oldest companion—can sometimes bite.
And let’s face it, AI has sharper teeth. I mean, have you ever played it in a game of checkers?
