In 2001, Steven Spielberg produced and directed a movie titled, believe it or not, "AI: Artificial Intelligence". I don't know how it did in the box-office but I will have to surmise that it probably didn't do very well, if one were expecting a summer blockbuster as it was released in June of that year. Perhaps, it was much too futuristic or much too fantastically unrelatable (then, anyhow) and not in the same genre of entertainment as Star Wars (that did very well as to have several successful sequels).
Like me, perhaps, you have watched that AI movie and had forgotten about it. Likewise, if you had watched it again recently, you may have a different appreciation for it now. Positively or negatively, you may indeed have a different attitude towards the message or meaning of the same movie; which is not really surprising since you are a different person now, in terms of attitude and points of view. Furthermore, it is because today you are thrust, whether you like it or not, into a world that is not just constantly talking about artificial intelligence but how in many ways it is already affecting your daily life. Trust me, aware of it or not, your daily activities are now watched, monitored and affected by AI. In fact, some of the ways that you do business or interact with mundane and recurring facets of daily life are touched by AI, in one form or another. Unless, you are one of the untouched tribes in the interiors of the Amazon rainforest. You see, even the nomads of Mongolia are not exempt from it.
From the above title of this musing, "mecha" is how an AI humanoid was called in the movie. "Mecha" was short for mechanical; "orgs" meant biological people - short for organism. Little did Spielberg realize then that the "mecha" he created has now not only become a reality, perhaps differently from how it was depicted in the movie, but that it is here to stay and directly or indirectly affecting our lives.
Let's first deal with the dark side of "mecha" but not dwell too much on it because we hope that the brighter sides will in the end far outweigh the bad as most innovations often do. For example, auto accidents are responsible for the loss of nearly 50,000 lives annually in the U.S. alone, but we will not ban the production and use of motor vehicles. The benefits far outweigh the dark side in many ways.
AI is also responsible for all kinds of economic/financial cyber crimes. Young minds, children and young people not properly supervised, have fallen prey to or were adversely affected by cyber bullying and sexual predators that continue to this day. It is not quite well established whether future learning and academic achievements will be adversely affected by too much dependence on AI in the educational system; although the same was said about hand-held calculators and computers decades ago.
Back to the movie for just a bit. Early in the movie as the lead scientist introduced the production of the latest "mecha" he explained that for the first time they were creating a mechanical child (a robot nonetheless) that had the capacity to love its adoptive human parent or whoever was going to be its surrogate parent who initiates the imprinting protocol. Then a question was raised by one of those in attendance listening to the presentation. She asked, "But will a human be able to love the mechanical child/robot in return for the algorithmic love the child/robot will have of the adoptive parent"?
Today, in a perverse way, some young people are so completely immersed in their interaction with a chatbot that they develop a crush or in some cases real love for the entity that they are interacting with on the web. Worse ...
--- 37% of cyberbullying victims who report suicidal thoughts attempt suicide within 6 months, per a 2021 Lancet Psychiatry study.
--- Cyberbullying-related suicide attempts are 4 times more likely to be fatal than those from offline bullying, per a 2019 study in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.
There are a lot more negative data like those dark sides of AI but it is also necessary to see the brighter sides of AI.
AI is here despite earlier warnings from several people in the technology field, including Elon Musk. However, in the end, he launched his own AI company.
On the bright side AI has opened up all kinds of possibilities and benefits that are being embraced today. It is now an invaluable tool in helping doctors make better and quicker diagnosis based on blood work and urinalysis and enhanced reading of radiology results and better disease detections, like cancer, through other imaging data that humans sometimes miss that AI does not. It is estimated that perhaps AI could shorten trials and approvals of new drugs.
Setting aside those high levels of aspirations for what AI is capable of, there are already a number of ways AI is changing our lives positively. There are several AI "assistants" now but let's talk about just one - Amazon's Alexa. You see Alexa is primarily an order taker, processor of the ordered merchandise from the moment of transaction to taking payment to keeping track and notification of completed deliveries. It will also tell the customer who checks an order on the promised day of delivery with, "Your order is the 9th stop away from your home". It has a link to the delivery truck and driver and it is aware of delivery time for each order. All done through voice commands and responsive interactions with it into a device smaller than a toaster sitting on the kitchen table (in most homes that have it).
Alexa keeps track of previous orders so that when the user orders another bulk of bath tissues, paper towels, cooking oil, etc. it will remind you of them for easier processing if the customer prefers the same brand and package. If there is a coupon (usually a price discount) Alexa will "gladly" put it on the order. All of these are done in mere seconds, although Alexa will say, to fill milliseconds before it responds with, "Let me check" in well cadenced manner of speaking.
One day on a whim, I asked Alexa for a recipe for a Filipino dish, "Paksiw ng pata ng baboy". Alexa without missing a beat not only gave me the recipe and pronounced it in Filipino (pronouncing "paksiw" is very challenging for most non-Filipino speakers) and e-mailed me the recipe and wished me to enjoy the dish. Also, in mere seconds, it will give you an answer to how to make juice from Kalamansi, or Calamansi, a tropical but primarily a Filipino citrus tree. By the way, Calamansi juice is now a popular refreshment drink in Singapore. I'm sure Alexa will know of a dish if the customer longs for a Polish or Norwegian recipe.
Aside from all of these practical and mundane chores Alexa is capable of, it has other surprises besides keeping a reminder for you to take your medication, sets timers and appointments, and literally talks about the weather but wishes you to be careful if there is heavy rain, flooding or strong winds in the forecast. Other AI assistants, like SIRI, have about the same capabilities, except as order takers of goods and merchandise.
But there is more. Alexa has an opinion on "quantum entanglement", hardly a simple physics phenomenon but it will further explain what Schrodinger meant by his uncertainty principle behind "Schrodinger's cat". That had to be mentioned to show the depth of Alexa's capability beyond being just an order taker and dispatcher of weather reports.
Alexa is not without a sense of humor either. Asked whether it is really super smart, Alexa says, "Guilty as charged".
That is AI.
The big brouhaha today is about data centers and power plants that are needed to support the gargantuan consumers of energy that they've become. A simple explanation by way of an analogy is this. The human brain is maybe only 2% of our entire body weight but it consumes 25% of the total energy the body needs. The brain is our data center. It is to be expected that data centers will require oodles and oodles of electrical power. So, instead of adding additional load to the present power demands it was proposed that data centers build their own power source. It means, of course, building new power plants nearby. It infuriates environmental groups because data centers alone will add to demands for all other resources, like water, space and overcrowding.
Well, there is no such thing as a free lunch, however we slice it. That is the conundrum. I leave with this. Alexa and other delivery businesses actually save fuel and congestion by this one phenomenon. You see, when one household orders just one or two items, it is all bundled together with other 1 or 2 items ordered by one other household in the same neighborhood. Many households in that one day's route did not go out to drive their cars to the store. Multiply that several folds everyday and we realize that savings on fuel can be substantial, generally speaking.
Not to be minimized is the fact that as more and more people are advancing in years, baby boomers and all, Alexa does indeed perform some incredible service - just one "mecha" serving multiple "orgs", everyday, including Sundays.
This is not the first time I've mused about A.I. I wrote one on 3/1/2020, another on 4/19/2023.
The latest was last year - "Once A.I. Becomes Self Aware, Humans Beware"
Copy and paste the link below to your search bar and click. Of course, they are Blog Archive as well.
https://abreloth.blogspot.com/2025/04/once-ai-becomes-self-aware-humans-beware.html
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