I have a Fairphone 4 and the battery is now at seventy six percent or so. I’ve been trying to have a conversation with Gemini about the state of the battery. In so doing I started with the question about replacing the battery but I soon moved on but AI, due to me mentioning a battery replacement is now object fixated.
I see that the drop was quite drastic, all of a sudden, after the battery dischanrged yet again to zero percent. It’s worth highlighting that this is a spare phone, just to experiment and stay familiar with the OS. As a result the battery regularly discharges completely if I leave it too long.
If AI was intelligent, rather than superficial, it would realise that I see the battery is stable rather than failing catastrophically and that I have chosen not to swap it yet. It would realise that the degradation is remaining consistent, and thus replacing it is not urgent.
In another case I was trying to decide which of two groups to run with, and which of two groups cycling would be more rewarding, and here again AI demonstrated superficial intelligence rather than human and emotional intelligence.
Ai assumed that my goal was purely to do with fitness, and fixated on that, when the decision help I required was to decide whether to ride with a group. or run with another, with fitness being a minor factor, rather than the driving factor. In the end AI doesn’t provide the sounding board that I was looking for.
When I was playing with the Google Fitbit Air, once again I hit another wall. It didn’t grasp the appeal of the social aspect of a social run, or bike ride, as opposed to the physiological challenges of keeping up with a group. For AI it’s either A or B, but AI has no emotional intelligence. It doesn’t understand the human need for company, and social experiences. It sees training as training, rest as rest, but it doesn’t have that human connection.
That human connection is AI isn’t an artist, isn’t a writer, isn’t a film maker. We can get AI to create images, and sounds and more, but AI is just a glorified photocopier, or as Douglas Adams said “an improbability engine”.
Audible and various newspapers and magazines have AI readeers to read their books and articles and whilst they work they often misread words, or mispronounce things. They also add the emphasis in the wrong place. Google news has an AI news summary that you can listen to. It’s eight minutes in duration, so instead of skimming headlines, and newspapers you get a summary, automatically.
Through my experiments with AI I believe that it is being oversold. It might be good for summarising an article, and it might be good for generating kitschy images and fliers, but it lacks emotional intelligence and contextual understanding. AI doesn’t understand context. It sees tokens and probabilities. Tokens and probabilities can emulate human writing, but without the depth and warmth that a human being would add. A human writer, photographer, or editor feels and uses intuition. AI, like Number Five (Short Circuit) just runs programmed.
AI is being oversold. It doesn’t deliver on the promises made by its evangelists. AI is still very far from having human understanding.
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