Ai for Business

  AI is a really powerful tool, but if not safeguarded can be misused causing serious damage. AI is as good as the knowledge it is fed with at the time of training and the intentions of the trainers. There have been a number of incidents when an AI tool had to be withdrawn because it was gullible to training at the hands of people with incorrect intentions.  Take for example Gallatica, the AI chatbot by Meta released in 2022. It was trained on 48 million scientific papers and designed to help researchers "organize science" and write scientific articles. Within two days, the demo was pulled offline because users found it easily generated highly authoritative-sounding, yet factually incorrect, biased, or racist "scientific" papers and misinformation (e.g., an authoritative-sounding article on "The benefits of eating crushed glass"). Galactica's failure highlighted the risk of LLM "hallucinations”, generating nonsensical or false information that sou...

I was reading about some recent advancements in AI, and I came across an article on how researchers are trying to measure pain using artificial intelligence. It immediately caught my attention. Pain is such a personal and complicated feeling, so the idea that AI could somehow understand or quantify it sounded very interesting. That curiosity made me read a few more papers and articles on the topic. It was only a cursory read, but even then I felt the work was interesting enough to share. Illustration by Rajashree Rajadhyax Why Pain Measurement Matters Pain may seem like something each of us simply feels and explains, but in healthcare it is one of the most difficult things to assess. Two people with the same issue can describe completely different levels of pain. Sometimes people under-report their discomfort because they do not want to bother anyone, and sometimes they simply cannot express it. This includes infants, patients in intensive care, people under anaesthesia, and those with...

  Imagine this: It's 1930 in London, and you need to wake up early for work. You’re not worried about missing your morning routine because, right on time, a knocker-upper arrives. Armed with a long stick, they tap persistently on your window until you're awake. For those on the upper floors, they might even shoot dried peas at the glass to make sure you’re roused! Strange as it sounds, this was a genuine profession before alarm clocks became affordable and reliable. Today, it’s almost laughable to think of hiring someone just to wake us up, but back then, it was indispensable. It’s a perfect reminder that many jobs we rely on today might one day seem just as unusual. Image coursey: Wikipedia. A knocker-up in Leeuwarden , 1947 The AI paradox When reliable alarm clocks came along, the job of the knocker-upper naturally faded away. Back in 1914, The Guardian even published a piece lamenting how “the cheap American clock” was “killing the industry” in London. Doesn’t that sound fa...