The new Artificial Intelligence
AI is the new hotness. And the noise from it being the new fad makes it hard to have adult conversations around it. In many ways, good and bad, I think AI is a larger ground-shift than most people realize. At the same time, “no, it doesn’t do that.”
A lot of what composes AI is not remotely new. And the term is being applied very broadly. The image algorithms in current AI were around to make OCR work on your mail sotring in the 1980s. Multi-dimensional search and matching? We had that in commerce search engines almost before there was HTML in the 1990s.
It’s the application of this collection of tech that is the new part. Both the ability to apply it easily. And also the problem of applying it indiscriminately and without oversight.
I’ve struggled for a while to come up with a metaphor or comparison. Something that underscores it’s potentials and problems at the same time.
I think I finally found one:
Radithore
Radiation medicine is an absolutely inarguable advance for our society. I personally would not be alive today were it not for technology born out of the advances provided by radiological medicine. And that would be multiple-times over it has saved my life.
But in the decades it was new, people had no clue how to use it. Radiation seemed this magical thing. And so they applied it to anything remotely interesting.
Radioactive patent medicine became a thing. There was radioactive creams, toothpaste, suppositories, make-up, you name it!
Radithore was probably one of the more-popular brands of drinkable radiation. It was advertised as “A Cure for the Living Dead” as well as “Perpetual Sunshine”. It was supposed to cure everything from impotence to a cold.
A fairly wealthy patron of this medicine drank enough to not only give himself cancer, but had to have his jaw removed. And more than 30 years after being buried, his body still registered as radioactive.
Oh. And his death, a rich well-known socialite, is what finally gave the FDA enforcement powers. They had been saying that drinking radium was bad. But after this, they could pull products.
You can have a nice summary read over at wikipedia.
Today’s Snake Oil
It’s easy to chortle at patent medicines as a thing of the past. We don’t have that now, do we?
Oh we do. It’s around us, every day. Today’s NFT is yesterday’s snake oil.
There’s a lot of potential in AI. Especially if we use it smartly and with full understanding of its limitations.
We’ve got a chance to build radiological medicine here.
I just worry that I see a lot of people around me guzzling down radium-water. And they do not want to hear anything other than how it’s going to cure-all the world.