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:
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– despite this questionable design decision, I quite like this gadget:
