I have seen the results of AI on everything from animating photos to have people waving, changing old black and white photos to colour to make them look like they were just taken yesterday and a host of other things.    I had never really used it as a tool myself until yesterday and to say I was absolutely amazed is an understatement!

I had a simple access database that had a field with a yes/no input.   If you ticked the box, it meant yes, and that used to tell us how many people were going to attend a function.    It worked well, but meant you had to trawl through over a 1000 entries to untick each one.   Not an onerous task but it got me thinking how great it would be to automate it.

So, I entered a simple statement into my browser about what I wanted to do and in seconds, I had a script - what it did - how to install it and ways to improve it.    After 1/2 hour, I had a fully functioning VBA script that had pre action warnings, ran the script when I pushed a button and then gave a success message.   All from a Bot somewhere on the web. 

I can only guess how long this would take an experienced programmer to formulate, debug and install it on my machine and how much it would cost.    It was - to me - one of those life experiences that really made me think about how this AI is going to impact as it becomes more and more embedded in our lives

I started to think about the future for my Grandkids where a lot of the "braincell" jobs will no longer exist because AI will have amassed so much knowledge that humans won't be needed to do it.

At least the black trades cannot be replaced - yet

Yuval Noah Harari's last 3 books have been at least partly about this. He has some interesting insights and predictions.

I think the rise of AI is rather disturbing. My son in law is a web designer and we had a discussion about this on the weekend. The rapid advances and the almost 'human' interaction with things like Chat GPT and Siri remind me uncomfortably of HAL 9000 and SKYNET. These things are works of science fiction, but so were the computers we are using now not so long ago.

Already Azimov's Laws of Robotics are out the widow with the rise of drones in warfare, AI is being used by students to do their work instead of them thinking for themselves, so what does the future hold? A dumbing down of the human race so we become the slaves and the machines the masters? Do we put a limit on the development of AI so it does not become 'self aware' ? I think we need to look at this issue sooner rather than later.

I, Robot could become aye, robot...

freediver wrote on Oct 15^th, 2025 at 1:03pm:



"I think, therefore I am"  Rene Descartes.

freediver wrote on Oct 15^th, 2025 at 4:34pm:


Cogitando pro multis aequatur summa omnium timorum nostrorum

Dezi Cartes transposed reason with 'thinking'... likely in the translation.. I REASON therefore I am... reason (thoughtful thought) and unreason (pure thinking is isolation) can equally impact on the natural environment of life..... not equally in the sense of the actual impact though... for example your Hamas running dogs mistake the thought of peace and love for Gaza with the unreason that created the  unpeace...    that is one serious failing of the current Western approach to 'education'.... the soul must be educated at the same time as the mind....

Gordon wrote on Oct 15^th, 2025 at 5:53pm:



Famous quote -

"when the shoeshine boy tells you to buy stocks - it's time to sell stocks."

Baronvonrort wrote on Oct 16^th, 2025 at 12:37am:



Thanks for the info Baron.  I just signed up and will have a look over the next few days.   I am retired electrical engineer so it will be of great interest if it does what I hope it will do!   I still like to keep up to date with what is happening in my sparky world even though retired.