How much has AI affected you personally so far?

[Robin GrahamParticipant @robingraham42208]

Being in my 70’s I’m well over the age when, according to Douglas Adams,  new technologies are “against the natural order of things”:

“I’ve come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies:
1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
2. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
3. Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.”

― Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time

I have been (and probably still am) agin this AI business partly because of personal experience and partly for what might be called ‘political’ reasons. I shan’t dwell on the ‘political’ because it would be inappropriate on this forum, but so far as personal experience of the technology goes it has mainly been woeful .  Pretty much every every service, from purchasing to banking to healthcare , seems to have a ‘bot’ to talk to if you have a problem.  These things can form meaningful sentences and come out with social  niceties but often seem to be willfully obtuse when it comes to the nitty-gritty of the question.   It can be frustrating.  Not actually a bot but I had cause to ring the NHS 111 helpline recently and the first question was ‘is the patient [me] conscious’. She did apologise (after asking if I was still breathing) saying she had to ask these questions because they were on her script. It’s the same sort of thing perhaps

On the other hand when I ask technical questions using my browser’s search bar (DuckDuckGo in my case) the AI feature which summarises results can be genuinely useful.  For example “Can a C #define macro redefine #define” yields “No” and a succinct   explanation of why not, rather than an impenetrable screed explaining the internal workings of the C preprocessor.

The purpose of this post is to ask about what actual changes forum members have  experienced personally  in their lives for good or for ill since the advent of AI – not to invite speculation about its future or its philosophical implications.

Robin

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