It seems more and more products and services are incorporating Artificial Intelligence by adding “A.I,” to labeling, I’m curious to learn where you see it in unexpected places.
This is a store display for an electric toothbrush that claims to have AI features. How would one know? Are you amazed they could fit this in a toothbrush?
The box claims the AI “learns” your brushing habits and adjusts. Plausible? I am not mocking AI but claims need to be supported with more than a sticker.
Haha, it’s funny how broadly the term “artificial intelligence” gets stretched these days. I guess “powered by AI” has become the new “smart”. Basically, anything that isn’t completely “dumb” and responds to environmental sensors in some adaptive way gets marketed as “AI-powered” nowadays…
Sure, even single cells organisms do it… (Chemotaxis - Wikipedia) - and C. Elegans with only 302 neurons has pretty sophisticated learning abilities (habituation, sensitization, associative learning, operant learning, imprinting). So there’s a huge spectrum of abilities and a lot can be done with very rudimentary handware. No need for frontier models in a toothbrush, thankfully…
In “pet tech”, motion detection is enough to label things “AI” and charge a subscription fee for it (yay, capitalism!) – despite this questionable design decision, I quite like this gadget:
So we have a toothbrush and a bird bath, what else?
Okay, risking sounding like a total fool here, but I’ll say it anyway: maybe Bark-GPT is a prank, but I genuinely think AI could make this kind of thing possible.
At STARMUS 2024, I watched Jane Goodall say “me Jane” in Chimpanzee, and it got me thinking – why not? Translating communication for cognitively advanced mammals (dolphins, whales, chimps), or even pets like dogs and cats, doesn’t seem that far-fetched. It’s all about recognizing patterns in body language and sounds (let’s not even go into neural activity), and AI is insanely good at that.
This could end up being like Teslaquila: what started as a joke but eventually became a legit product. I believe that someone will eventually create tools that help us communicate better with pets – not perfectly, but enough to feel like a ‘translator’ of sorts. I think it is possible. And it is where AI would truly shine and not be a gimmick (see Clarke’s Third Law).
Go ahead, roast me, I’m ready… – Agree? Disagree? What are your thoughts, folks?
PS: found the recording of Dr. Goodall’s talk, it’s here:
What a treat an honor it must have been to hear Jane Goodall talk! I’d buy a bottle of her energy drink.
Not my area of expertise but it seems anthropomorphizing to “say” animals talk verbally. They make sounds, but as I understand its more about signals, maybe odors. Frankly I think animals are more interesting not knowing exactly what they are saying.
And according to the movies it rarely turns out well for humans or animals (Planet of the Apes, and have you seen the classic Day of the Dolphin, 1973?)
I’d be hesitant to hoist something spawned by Musk as “legit” and he did run into problems calling it tequila.
Plus I would suggest not falling for the converse of Clarke’s Third Law, certainly not everything that looks magical is a sufficiently advanced technology. Ah, Wikipedia provides so much like remixes"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo"
And this is no roasting, let’s not be so polarizing, this is open discussion, thanks for being in the mix.
(
– despite this questionable design decision, I quite like this gadget:
