I don’t want to
be a Norbert...
Techno Talk
Max the Magnificent
Things are getting complicated and my head is starting to hurt. Artificial intelligences (AIs) are appearing
everywhere. Sometimes they lie to us; now they can detect if we are lying to them! And I just heard
about something called “prompt engineering”.
W
ay back in the mists of time
(July 2024), I mentioned the
1899 publication of “A Story
of the Days to Come” by H. G. Wells.
Set in a dystopian future London of
the 22nd century, it’s amazing how
many of the technology-related concepts described in that book have
already come into being. For example, its ‘intelligent loudspeakers’ are
strangely reminiscent (or should we
say prescient?) of the Amazon Echo,
Google Next or Apple HomePod.
I rarely have a clue what’s heading my
way until after it has passed by, so I’m
always impressed by others who appear
to be much better at predictions. Take
E. M. Forster, for example. Although he
inflicted us with some tortuous tales
that make me want to gnash my teeth
and rend my garb, he also wrote “The
Machine Stops”, which was published
in 1909. In this tome, Forster predicted globalisation, something we would
recognise as the internet, video conferencing and many other aspects of
our 21st-century reality.
I have another example that is closer
to home for those of us who are bedazzled and beguiled by the combination
of artificial intelligence (AI) and mixed
reality (MR). The latter encompasses
augmented reality (AR), diminished
reality (DR), virtual reality (VR) and
augmented virtuality (AV).
I’m referring to the short story titled
“Norbert and the System” by Timons
Esaias. This is a tricky one to track
down, but I located it lurking in a secondhand copy of The Best of Interzone
from 1997, which I snapped up for only
1¢ (plus $3.99 shipping and handling)!
In a crunchy nutshell, our hero
Norbert hails from a not-so-distant
future in which everyone wears AIaugmented MR headsets. When Norbert
starts chatting with a young lady, his AI
suggests conversation topics, analyses
her reactions and suggests appropriate responses to whatever she says.
Meanwhile, her headset is doing the
same thing. One way to think about this
is that the AIs are having a conversation using their humans as intelligent
loudspeakers.
4
All this makes me think of the reports
I’ve been reading recently about things
like researchers in China using AI to
monitor people’s faces while they are
being questioned to determine their
level of loyalty to the ruling Chinese
Communist Party (CCP). Also, I ran
across a paper describing how AI can
be used to determine someone’s emotional state in around 1.5 seconds by
listening to them talk.
It gets better (or worse, depending
on your point of view). By observing
nonverbal ‘tells’ like facial expressions,
gestures and body posture or position,
AI can determine if someone is lying.
This is less than good news for certain
members of our society, such as politicians, for example.
Interacting with computers
As a research field, human-computer
interaction (HCI) focuses on the ways
in which people interface with computers. This will become increasingly
important when we start to interact
with AI-powered robots and the like.
In fact, I’m seeing increasing activity in the field of “social robots”. Their
task is to provide cognitive stimulation
and offer companionship to older citizens who are lonely or in care facilities,
especially those with dementia, who
keep on asking the same questions
and repeatedly saying the same things.
Most of us already have some experience navigating our way through the
HCI waters. When we enter a query into
an internet search engine like Google,
Bing, Ask, or DuckDuckGo, for example,
if the results are not what we expect or
what we were looking for, we modify
our query accordingly.
One of my favorite science fiction
authors was Isaac Asimov. Several of
Asimov’s short stories featured a humongous computer called Multivac.
How humongous? Well, in a couple of
these tales, we are talking about a machine described in terms of miles, with
scientists and technicians scampering
through a three-dimensional maze of
corridors inside the beast.
We must remember that Asimov
wrote these stories at a time when very
few people had any idea about computers. All most people knew was that
computers were difficult to work with
(they didn’t have the spiffy voice and
graphical interfaces we enjoy today).
This explains why Asimov envisaged
a future in which specialists were required to pose questions to Multivac
in such a way as to obtain meaningful
and useful responses. In fact, several
of these stories involve a small cadre
of recognised geniuses called “Grand
Masters”, who have the special insight
required to determine the right questions to ask.
Don’t prompt me!
Until recently, I thought of Asimov’s
“Grand Masters” as the stuff of science
fiction; then generative AI (GenAI)
appeared on the scene. Although its
introduction to the public was less
than two years ago, almost everyone
on the planet is now aware of this technology. Even my 94-year-old mother
is conversant with the concept of Chat
GPT (which was but the first of many
such mega-models), for goodness’ sake.
Do you remember the science fiction disaster movie “The Day After
Tomorrow”? After it came out, a friend
asked, “Have you seen The Day After
Tomorrow?” I was honestly able to
reply, “Yes, I saw it the day before yesterday” (I’m still chuckling to myself).
I mention this because I recently heard from some folks in Dubai.
Referring to themselves as “the metropolis of the day after tomorrow”,
it seems the folks who don the undergarments of authority there have
pledged to train one million people in
AI prompting over the next three years.
“What’s AI prompting?”, I hear you
cry. It turns out this really is a thing.
Prompts are natural language requests
that cause GenAIs to perform specific
tasks. Prompt engineering refers to the
process by which more meaningful results are achieved by using appropriate
formats, phrases, words, and symbols.
Hmmm. Will we eventually require
university degrees in prompt engineering to communicate with our AIs?
PE
Shades of a Multivac future!
Practical Electronics | September | 2024
