I think 3D printing is an incredibly useful technology, but it definitely went through a phase of being overly hyped by the professional technoenthusiasts – that is people trying to sell something.  As “technology” has come to dominate our economy in one form or another, something new is always being hyped to the moon and back.  A good example is Artificial Intelligence.   I’m sure AI is really useful somewhere, I’m just having a hard time identifying exactly where, there are some obvious places where it has flopped such as autonomous vehicles. Five years ago there was absolute certainty that we would, by now, have fleets of Ubers running around sans drivers.  Didn’t exactly work out.  I also really hope that Tesla will get in trouble with some government agency over their “Autopilot” feature which is in the I-can’t-believe-they-can-get-away-with-calling-it-that category.  I kind of wonder if truly autonomous vehicles will be like fusion power where it will be “20 years away” for 75 years.  Don’t get me wrong, it’s a really interesting problem to work on and lots of academics are having a great time with it, but the political and social issues are always going to be hard to surmount.  Mass transit anyone?

However, my real gripe with AI is with my Prime Music feed which I assume has some AI behind it.  I listen to a collection of what my daughter refers to as “Dad Music” – Mark Knopfler, Decemberists, Josh Ritter, Tim O’Brien, etc.. Now, some of this could be construed as country, but why on earth would Prime cough up Dwight Yoakam’s rendering of Prince’s song “Purple Rain”?  Coming of age in the Twin Cities in the early ’80’s, I can really appreciate Prince, but I don’t listen to standard country and the combination of the two just struck me as wrong.  To be fair, one colleague pointed out that Dwight Yoakam looks great in tight leather pants, an aspect that I hadn’t considered, and my friend DJ Jack Straw pointed out that song was from a pretty good bluegrass album of Yoakam’s.  Be that as it may, I still think this is, AD,  Artificial Dumbness.

Keep on Printing,

Dan

PS I just read this article from the Chronicle of Higher Education on cheating on writing assignments using AI.  I’m not impressed.  It shouldn’t take much imagination to create assignments that would foil the AI.  One obvious problem the author didn’t mention, for instance, is citing appropriate sources.  An AI that would automatically generate a correctly formatted footnote would actually be worth something!