IEEE Consultants' Network of Long Island

A Tale from Long Ago and Just Yesterday - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

Forty-nine years ago (This is the long ago part.), I was walking through Macy's department store in Roosevelt Field here on Long Island. I was going through the cosmetics section on my way toward the store's escalator.

In those days, the cosmetics section was always filled with the strong odors of a baziliion different perfumes, all of which I found repulsive so I was trying pretty hard to hold my breath for a while. Being all of thirty years old at the time, I could manage that.

There was another young man walking ahead of me in the same direction. He was maybe ten or fifteen paces ahead of me when one of the store clerks, a young woman who was carrying a spray bottle of something, intercepted him and used that bottle to catch this poor guy off guard and spritz him.

He flew into a genuine rage. Nothing physical happened but the sound of his voice taking that young woman  to task could be heard all over the place. She kind of backed away and then this fellow strode off and away at what looked like an accelerated pace.

Guess what happened next.

That same young woman holding that same spray bottle turned in my direction and raised the bottle as if to give me a dose of that stuff. I saw that coming and in an attempted basso profundo, I said to her:

Don’t – you -  dare!!

She got this strange look on her face, then she spun around and scrammed out of sight.

Fast forward to just yesterday.

I was walking though that same section of the same Macy’s while my wife was doing some shopping and along came a young woman with a small bottle of something with a nozzle on top and I thought “Oh-oh!”.

We live under different rules now though. That cosmetics section doesn’t have the same overwhelming collection of perfume odors it once had and it is now recognized that some people have allergy issues that can be quite dangerous.

I didn’t have to say anything.

An Alarming AI Concept - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

There was a GZero television broadcast recently where the host interviewed author Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjee about his most recent book, “The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human”, copyright 2022. During the course of the interview, the author offered some visions of the future use of artificial intelligence (AI), one of which was very disturbing, at least to myself.

I will try to put this in my simplistic layman’s terms.

Implanted electical/electronic interfaces have recently been in the news. An extension of the present day stimulus and measurement technologies would be interpretive technologies via which it could be possible to interpret brain activity, even including the reading of thoughts.

If it were possible to construct some kind of “entity” (I’m reaching for the proper word here.) that would exist in some computational structure and in AI fashion, to give that “entity” all of the mental data that comprised the mind of someone deceased (Dr. Mukherjee envisions that person as being his own late father.), with whom he would then be able to communicate. This sounds like the stuff of far-out science fiction, but listening to Dr. Mukherjee’s rumination, I started to feel a sense of horror.

Imagine that all of the preparatory steps for such a project were taken and then when everything was ready, there would be activation. Think of that as a boot-up. If everything worked according to plan, all of those components of thought and feeling would come up active. That composite “entity” would then have memories recreated from the deceased person’s mind and suddenly, that “entity” would find itself denied all sensory normalcy. There would be no sense of sight, no sense of hearing, no sense of taste, no sense of smell and no mobility. There would be total sensory deprivation except perhaps for some kind of information flow from an utterly unfamiliar and perhaps incomprehensible source.

I cannot imagine the fear, the panic, the terrifying consequences of the “entity’s” subjectively sudden emergence into such an existence. If that “entity” were in some way a recreation of the mind of the deceased person, emergence into such a circumstance could constitute extreme cruelty.

Dr. Mukherjee is someone new to me although I understand that he is a well respected and highly accomplished scientist. However, that does not preclude his being drastically wrong about something.

There have been predecessors.

Linus Pauling was a brilliant physical chemist who later asserted that mega-doses of Vitamin C would prevent disease and he was wrong. William Shockley was a brilliant solid-state physicist who later asserted the concept of racial bell curves as descriptive of human intelligence and he was wrong. Edwin Teller was a brilliant atomic physicist who later assured President Reagan that x-ray lasers would shortly be available for the Star Wars defense satellites and he was wrong.

Past results are no guarantee of future outcomes.

Predictive Text and Help - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

Every now and then, a software update comes along which seems truly harmful. One such is the introduction of word suggestions that appear in a document while it is being typed. I don’t recall this happening in the past, but recently, it had started to be active in my Word files and in Outlook. One phrase I’ve seen for this so-called feature is “predictive text”. I have since disabled it, but there is a tale to be told about that.

After I had typed something, I would sometimes discover that words had been placed in my document in substitution, in place of, the words I actually wanted to use. Often, those substitutions made no sense. Instead of the ideas I had tried to express, I found myself staring at gibberish. Doing a spelling check didn’t help because the automatically placed words were correctly spelled. I therefore had to visually scour my work to find and correct all of the word errors that the predictive text feature had led to.

This was a nightmare. Therefore, I started looking for a way to disable predictive text and that was a challenge.

I came across one “Help” page that said to first click on “Settings”, then to click on “Mail”, then to click on “Show suggested replies” and then to turn that function off. This was of no help. Nowhere was there anything on screen called “Settings”.  There was an icon labeled “Settings xxx”, but after clicking on that, there was nothing labeled “Mail”. In short, these instructions were useless.

A few days later, I went looking again for some way to disable predictive text and on a different “Help” page, I found instructions to first click on “Files”, then to click on “Options”, then to click on “Mail”, then to click on “Replies and forwards”, then to click on “Show suggested replies” and then to turn that function off. This was a whole different set of prompts and guess what! This worked. I was no longer beset by spurious words, even as I typed this page.

A different feature which I also dislike is a text editor that tells me this page has an Editor Score of 96%. The text editor doesn’t like something I’ve done, but I couldn’t care less what that something or that number might be. As long as my document has only the words of my own choosing and organization, that’s all I care about. If someone finds a typo in something I’ve typed, I guess I can live with that.

One of my more frequently encountered peeves is that when I’m trying to find advice via some “Help” resource, the instructions I find tell me to do such-and-such where I will supposedly see this-or-that icon or link and then I discover that the cited this-or-that doesn’t exist, the above scenario being just one such example.

It would be nice if Microsoft, Optimum and other providers were to make sure that their “Help” resources were actually helpful. Too often, they are not just unhelpful, they are obstacles to problem resolutions.

Cashiers - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

When I go to buy groceries, there are these thin plastic bags in the fruits and vegetables section in which one can place such and so many items of this or that. When I do so, I try to tie a slip knot in the bag to close it up in such a way that when I get home, I can simply pull the bag’s end to undo my slip knot and then put the fruits or vegetables away. Then I put the bag  itself away for later use.

Sometimes though, the checkout cashier will undo my slip knot and retie the bag tight shut thus rendering the bag impossible to open without damage when I get home and further, rendering the bag useless for any later service.

My request to the cashier: Stop messing around with my stuff!!

While I’m waiting my turn on the checkout line, I take out several plastic carrying bags that I keep in a tote so that I can efficiently pack the rung-up items. As I start doing that, the cashier starts moving things around at the end of the checkout counter. I find myself putting away a box of eggs and then I reach for the loaf of bread I saw a moment ago near my right arm only to discover that the loaf has been moved by the cashier “over there” where it is now out of my reach and that a bottle of milk has been moved “over here” where it is now an obstruction to my reaching out for that bread and the cashier is still moving other stuff around, seemingly at random. Chaos!!

When I have to tell the cashier to stop doing that, I get this look of bewilderment that somehow I ought to appreciate the assistance. What I don’t appreciate is the interference.

My request to the cashier: Stop messing around with my stuff!!

We often buy a chicken but even with modern day packaging, the cold outside surface of the chicken’s wrapper is moist. I always separate wet items on the checkout counter from the dry, but now and then, a cashier will start undoing that separation. One cashier placed two newspapers into a carrying bag and then picked up a wet chicken to put into that same bag. I was quick enough to yell STOP which kept that from happening, but it was a close call.

My request to the cashier: Stop messing around with my stuff!!