“You’re touching too much”

#coronavirus #techhacks

Touching is tangency. We didn’t realize how much we touched stuff until health and life demanded you pay attention. Realizing how much you touch stuff other people touched is really creepy.

There can be an app for that – touching too much. Your phone’s sensitivity can pick up how much you touch things – door handles, drinking & eating, your wallet, private/public transportation/buildings. It knows your meeting sked. It can remind you to wash hands or wipe down surfaces. At given intervals too, it politely says, “You need to wipe me down too; I’m getting kinda funky.”

There’s also already an app for one of the dominant touch activities – paying for stuff. ApplePay and GooglePay (did you know you can add money as an attachment with gmail??) already provide touchless options for transactions from your phone. Even before the outbreak, I cringed whenever I pulled out a credit card for payment. Either the cashier is touching it (who touched a hundred before) or I’m touching a kiosk innumerable people before me have. Contactless is exactly that – no touching! Although quite prolific in Europe, many kiosks in the US have the symbol but it isn’t active. Having universal contactless transactions would hack a major TOUCH vulnerability.

Up next: Your health record: you can take it with you

#igotnothing

Rule #4 of Artificial Intelligence: no context.

#AIbots have been trained to do many mundane, repetitive jobs. Training involves utilizing data sets with often millions of data points. Without enthusiasm or angst, the AI ingests these volumes of data and returns outcomes by direction of its creator. Given x-ray images of healthy and diseased lungs, we have to tell the AI which is good and bad. AIs are “rewarded” for correctly identifying the difference.

But an AI doesn’t know what a lung is, how it works, that it actually exists inside a person or what a person is.

#Google was the first major developer in #recognition when it looped together 16,000 computer processors with one billion connections in order for it to watch #YouTube and find . . . cats. This was a tremendous breakthrough for 2012, but isn’t this what a 5 year old understands without seeing millions of videos?

And a toddler knows colors and textures and if the cat is missing an eye or leg or tail. He or she knows cats are pets and most are found in or around homes. Cats walk on four legs; they don’t swim. Not everyone likes cats but they are loveable.

This is context and the richness of a five year old’s perception outweighs a million data points.

The Dark Side of AI

#superbowlcommercials2020

WARNING! ALL #AI IS NOT GOOD. FOR YOU. For anyone.

I would have lead with #youhadmeathello but that’s too benign a lead in for the #darkside of #artificialintelligence . Yes, you’ve heard #AI is not all good and the commercial tearjerker #googleAI shows us why by consoling a widower. Emotions are the most dangerous drug. Addiction becomes an inability to resist the high whether it is good or bad for the host.

Kudos to #Google marketing though for getting me to hold my breath from the first second to finish of the vignette. I thought perhaps they were solutioning #alzheimers and I still think they left that innuendo lingering on the table with the photographs.

But that’s the issue.

Using human emotion so intensely is a very slippery slope. We’d do anything to assuage the pain and keep his memories fresh and tender – but perhaps at what cost? Linger in the good feelings too much and you fail to live the life in front of you. #AI needs humans to teach it. Follow that trail long enough and perhaps you’d see how possibly Loretta was actually only the #aibot of his dreams. Reality was never that pleasant and painless.

AI let’s you live a life that never was.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6xSxXiHwMrg