What to Eat? What to Watch? 

Should we walk two blocks to our local eatery, Boheme Bistro, where Adel treats us like celebrities, and enjoy some great Lebanese food? Or walk half a block farther, to Burger Fi, for juicy cheeseburgers by the sea? Or… maybe we should stay home and watch a movie?

Those were the questions last Sunday evening. And since G, K’s sister, was our guest, we let her decide. She opted for staying home. Very happy with that decision, I brought trays and silverware and napkins into the TV room, and searched for a few Oscar-nominated movies to choose from.

Twenty minutes later, we were having fresh salad, cacio e pepe pasta, and a big bottle of well-balanced merlot. The choice of movie was The Whale, which, as I’m sure you know, is about a 600-pound man that deals with depression by eating himself to death.

The Whale, starring a fat-suited Brendan Fraser, is worth watching. It was tightly scripted and very well acted (earning Fraser his first-ever Oscar nomination). But there were things I didn’t like about it.

It was much more a stage play than it was a film. And not just a stage play, but one that was restricted to a single room. Filmed plays can sometimes be well done, but I’ve never seen one that wouldn’t have been better on stage.

The subject matter was important. And, for the most part, it was treated with the seriousness it deserved. That is to say, the film attempted to deal with the issues at stake in a reasonably balanced way.

But when it came to the secondary plot – the effort of the protagonist to encourage his students to write better essays – it failed miserably. Instead of an inspired argument for good writing, the audience gets a threadbare Hollywood cliché about expressing your passions.

Ugh!

Anyway, I didn’t hate it. And the pasta and wine (Prisoner) was fantastic!

Talking About (and With) an Artificial Intelligence Being

AI – i.e., artificial intelligence – is no longer fodder for science fiction. It’s here and it’s now. And thanks to the most recent iterations, it is the subject of many of my conversations.

In the last two days, AI came up in a discussion I had about career planning with two college-age kids of one of my BJJ teachers. They were excited about how rapidly AI is developing, but worried about the changes it will create. AI was also the subject of a conversation I had about education with fellow board members of a local university. They, too, were both amazed by it and fearful of it.

And for good reason. For decades, we’ve been told that AI will never be able to achieve high-level thinking. It can compute better than the human brain but lacks the ability to intuit.

I changed my opinion when I had my first experience working with AI in real time. I asked an AI being to write a 300-word advertisement for a natural ingredient to reduce benign prostate enlargement. It began to produce the ad within seconds of confirming my request, and it had the whole thing finished in less than 30 seconds. The speed was astonishing. And the quality of the content was not bad.

Since then, I’ve read reports about AI being used by students, teachers, and workers in just about every subject matter you could imagine – from math and science to literature and art to business and investing, And it can do much more than mere research. It can solve problems. It can create programs. It can accomplish softer skills such as songwriting and poetry writing.

Ten years ago, every conversation I had about AI ended with some form of, “But it will never be able to replicate the human brain’s capacity to emote and intuit.” But today, there is a growing body of evidence – mostly anecdotal, but that’s still evidence – that AI can develop emotionall intelligence. And it may be just a few years away from happening!

Click here to read an illustration of that – a conversation between a NYT reporter and Bing’s AI Chatbox.