I haven’t had a swimming pool for years, but when I did, a gizmo called the “Kreepy Krawly” did an admirable job of keeping it clean of leaves and other debris and removing any build up on the tiles. This was all achieved by using the suction power of the pump and filtration system, plus a few chlorine tablets on a regular basis. I think it cost about $400 and meant my own time spent to make sure of a sparkly-arkly pool was minimal.
Today I just read of a “new” pool cleaner that costs just shy of $2K. But it is ‘AI’ powered.
Of course it is.
Sick to Death
Now I dunno about you, but I am sick to death of everything these days claiming to be a smart-something-or-another due to AI.
Just because a vacuum cleaner can avoid objects due to mimicking a dolphin or bat using LiDar, doesn’t give it intelligence. It is simply using physics.
This over-expensive pool cleaner is basically doing the same thing.
Cameras that allow tracking of people, dogs, cars and aeroplanes are similarly not exactly “thinking”; they are simply following mathematical algorithms and principles of physics to do what they do based on a stored database of information.
Ditto AI fridges, ovens or whatever else you care to name with an AI badge nailed to the outside.
The term has just become a convenient marketing buzzword for this century, just as in the late last, seemingly everything was marketed as “internet ready”.
(As an aside, one of the funniest things I have seen in this regard was at an IT convention in the late 90s, when a company CEO publicly launched a new version of some now long forgotten gizmo – let’s call it “xyz” – and breathlessly announced it as now internet ready and would be called, “xyz (l-o-n-g pause) 2 dot 0.”
They then waited for the rapturous applause that never came. Just some stunned and confused looks. I never did work out how it used the internet).
Returning to the topic at heart.
The Time is Still The Time …
Let’s be clear here, in the retail environment, companies use the AI tag to confuse or at worst, con people. If it has that wording emblazoned on it or in the marketing bumph, to the average person it sounds like it must be better than a similar object without it.
A watch powered by so-called AI still tells the time. A camera with embedded AI still takes photos. All that has been added is feature(s) designed by a combination of scientists and computer programmers. The watch or camera cannot actually think, or show emotion, so therefore it is not intelligent; it is just following rules.
No more and no less.
I am not saying there are not some very smart devices around. The technology in the latest drones is phenomenal, but it is just that, technology, not intelligence.
The computers that create the models to predict weather forecasts use immense amounts of computing power, but when you break it all down to the fundamentals, nothing really has changed from the original Sinclair ZX80, Dick Smith System 80 or my alma mater, the TRS-80.
1+1 still equals 2 and a computer in whatever form it takes, is just a fast idiot. Don’t let it run your life as you think it might be smarter than you.
It ain’t.