.A note on AI agents and tfhe need to move beyond them as Pope Leo XIV and some other ethical leaders have been urginng--focusing beyond mere productivity

[John Raymaker]

A.I. agents

 

A. I agents are computer systems that analyze data, consider scenarios and choose strategies to solve what can be complicated problems. They can be applied across a wide variety of issues with minimal human involvement.

 

 

Siri or Alexa — both reintroduced this year as A.I.-powered chatbots — can answer your weather forecast question. A more sophisticated agent could automate processes for the National Hurricane Center to predict extreme weather events far into the future, ensure vulnerable areas receive regular updates and alert officials on steps they should take. For companies pressured by antsy shareholders and boards to increase productivity, A.I. agents have been welcome news.

[Lowell Cochrane]

I'm jumping back in here not having read all the recent threads, so apologies if this comes out of left field.  

I am not sure that the utility of AI can be reduced to mere productivity.  I've been using AI over the last year, particularly the coding functions, in order to create custom software for museums and social organizations. I've done this sort of work for a couple of decades at least and the new AI tools create a different set of emergent probabilities when choosing what is possible in a project. Erstwhile, a lot of these projects, in the form they take, would have been extremely improbable for reasons of cost and time. 

But more fundamentally, the iterative (creative) way they can develop would have been very unlikely, where you can act on new ideas, redo something that isn't "quite right", create ways that users can truly interact and follow their inquiries into real data and useful tools, etc... When developing these things with only human coders and designers and researchers, you quickly arrive at a point where working that way becomes far too expensive, onerous, and interest wanes.  The project takes shortcuts, compromises and becomes much less than the initial vision.  While AI can only get you part way there, it opens up a world of possibilities that would simply not have happened otherwise.  

None of this exonerates AI or its corporations from all its troubling negatives, but I think that when we don't acknowledge the good that is mixed with the bad, we end up talking past each other into our own echo chambers. The question is what are we going to do with this technology, and how are we going to teach it to enforce both its possibilities and also its very real limitations.

_Lowell

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-Lowell

[John Raymaker]

Lowell, thank you for your clarification, John

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