Seeing Stars - Or Diamonds and Sparkles, Anyway.

What's up with all these star symbols floating around these days?

I first noticed these "diamonds" as the AI-bros like to call them, being used as sort of a watermark on AI-generated content, or as some sort of trademark used in conjunction with AI services.  OK, I thought, well, at least it helps us identify AI content without having to scan an image or product with some sort of AI-identifying software.

But in typical monkey-see, monkey-do fashion, I have noticed people using these stars as decoration on documents or even e-mails or texts - as some sort of emoticon.  And no, not for AI-generated content, either.

Sometimes, they appear in clusters, usually with a large diamond (stretched vertically) with one or more smaller ones.  Some folks call these "sparkles" and yes, there is an emoji ✨for them.  So, they mean more than just AI.  According to Google AI (ahem!) they stand for magic, cleanliness, special features, and of course, AI.  So maybe the icon (which is very mid-century modern) existed first, and was appropriated by the AI-bros.  Shocking, I know.

Speaking of AI art, it has been proposed that we allow AI art in the Arts Association.  One member (non-artist) argues that since a gallery in Tampa had a successful AI art show, we are somehow obligated to follow suit.  Precedent, I guess.  The problem is, the issue is blindsiding the members and board, as people think AI is something other people do, and slowly it is working its way into daily life without being noticed.  It is already too late to formulate a policy on it, it seems.

And what policy to use?  There are photographers who use Photoshop (or similar software) to "pop" the colors on their photos.  Others edit photos or create art using Photoshop (in the pre-AI era).  Is using AI to edit an existing photo the same thing, or something different?  And if that is allowed, can you also allow an image created entirely from an AI prompt?

I have no answers, just a lot of messy questions.

Another member insists that we reject any art with trademarked or copyrighted content in it.  So, if Andy Warhol brought us one of his Campbell's soup can images, we would have to reject it.   Or, if a painter or photographer presented a landscape of an abandoned gas station, we would have to reject it because of the faded "Sunoco" sign in the foreground.

Such nonsense.  The deal is, Andy Warhol didn't sell soup, but sold art.  In Trademark law, the issue is "likelihood of confusion" by the average consumer.  And the average consumer would realize that an art gallery is not a place to buy soup or gasoline.

The issue came to a head as one artist painstakingly crafted, from wood, a replica of the old Jekyll Island sign that was briefly out front back in the 1960s.  Think, Vegas neon.  Funny thing - when I first moved here, they had an image of it at the local museum, tucked away in the back.  When I mentioned it to a docent, they pooh-poohed it, claiming it didn't represent the vintage "Club era" of the island.

Well, new management dusted it off and made color copies of it - as signs, patches, stickers, posters, t-shirts, you-name-it.  The joke is, the authority originally put that sign out front in the 1960s, and quickly tore it down when they got the electric bill.  The actual sign is lost to the ages.  It was quickly forgotten, but now, is an icon.  And yes, I own a replica of the sign, a patch, a sticker, and a t-shirt.

Yes, this is "fair use" of the image for purposes of education and discussion.

Btw, the toll is now $10.

Anyway, the Authority objected to the woodworker's version of the sign being sold in the gallery, because the Authority was selling a similar version of the sign in their own gift shop. Granted, a one-off artisanal copy is hardly a threat to their sales, but here, at least, we have the same "goods and services" involved - the sign itself. This is not the same thing as an artwork that happens to include a Trademark in the background.

Copyright gets trickier. Some artists make collages from existing materials - texts, images, and the like. You might argue that a portion of a page torn from a magazine and pasted to a collage might be considered an act of infringement. In a way, it is akin to the use of snippets of music by DJs and rappers in their own creations. Without opening that can of worms, it should be noted that a collage that incorporates a snippet of copyrighted text or image is hardly an adequate substitute for the actual thing.  No one is saying, "Rather than buy this new bestseller, I'm going to buy this collage and read a snippet of the text from there!"

But then again, Copyright infringement is never a cut-and-dried thing.  Even "fair use" is only a defense you can raise in court - after you are sued.   But then again, it costs money to sue, so in most instances, de minimus amounts of infringement are ignored, while major acts of piracy are prosecuted.

No one is going to take you to court because back in 1980 you made a copy of Hotel California on a cassette tape and gave it to a friend - even if they gave you a couple of joints as payment.  Not only is it hard to detect such acts of infringement, the damages caused are minuscule and not worth litigating.  Don't confuse not getting caught with something being legal.  You might be able to drive 65 in a 60 zone, and never get a ticket - that doesn't mean the speed limit went up.

On the other hand, if you set up a "file sharing site" and call it Napster, and allow thousands, if not millions, of copies to be made and distributed, well, not only is that easy to detect, but represents a large amount of damages to go after.

This whole tempest-in-a-teapot reminds me of the Hymnal Copyright issue raised by my neighbor, when a friend at church got agitated when a letter arrived implying they would all go to jail unless they bought a license for "New Christian Music."  The short answer is, use of music in worship services is expressly exempt from Copyright infringement, and moreover, 150-year-old hymns are in the public domain, anyway (and their hymnal had a express grant of a license to use and make copies in the title page).  But LoL's (Little Old Ladies) need something to obsess about, so they go off the deep end.

And like the Hymnal Copyright controversy, I suspect this latest bru-ha-ha will blow over in short order, but not before a few people puff themselves up and make new rules and piss off a lot of members, before it is all forgotten over time.

In the meantime, more and more AI-slop will slip into the gallery and our lives, bit by bit, until we are almost unaware of it.   As it will likely be, in other areas of our lives.

AI - The Wave Of The Past

AI trains on data from the past - how can it be the wave of the future?

The scenario shown in the comic above sounds too dumb to be true, but I have recently seen it happen.  Well-meaning people use AI to create a poster, flyer, or web page for an artists group, failing to realize how tone-deaf it is to do so.  Sadly, this seems to be a trend.

Why is AI "art" a bad idea?  Well to understand why, you have to understand what AI is - or what the various forms of it are.  Generative AI, including LLM (large language models) are really the poor man's AI in that there is no real intelligence involved.  Rather, the neural network trains on millions of images and billions of pages of text and then tries to generate content based on a user prompt.  There is really no "intelligence" involved, just copying ideas from the past.

There are other forms of AI that require far more computing power, and perhaps these may have actual intelligence - but that's a scary thought for another day.

But one thing that all AI types have in common is a need to train their neural networks on a data set.  I wrote about neural networks back in 2010, and they were old hat even then.  What has changed since the early days is the increase in computing power available as well as the willingness of Billionaires to sink billions of dollars into data centers to create more powerful neural nets.

But regardless of the size or sophistication of the neural network, it still needs data to train on, just as our own neural networks (our brains, which AI was modeled after) require a couple of decades of training before they are suitable for real work.  And as we know, often this training goes off the rails, and the human brain is badly programmed, resulting in disastrous results.

But whether it is a human brain, a squirrel brain, or ChatGTP, all neural networks require training data, and such data comes from either historical data or from real-world experience.  There is no source of future data to tap into - the future doesn't exist, yet.

So AI tends to show us things that are from the past, particularly the cheaper forms of AI.  Tales of AI solving math puzzles or curing cancer are often just that - tales.  Often what these stories boil down to is the AI summarizing the results in the field, not generating new ideas.

If you take this to its logical conclusion, the result is bleak.  If more and more people use AI to generate documents, e-mails, artwork, movies, music, or whatever, the "content" that AI will "train" on will comprise little more that other AI-generated content.  It is an infinite DO loop, as we used to say in Fortran.  Innovation will not accelerate, but rather slow down, as AI agents spend more and more time naval-gazing and human beings spend less and less time innovating.

At least that is my take on it.

Sadly, the use of AI seems to be on the rise - it is hard to avoid as every tech platform defaults to AI-generating options, and many do not even have a means of disabling it.  Many folks I know just give up and use Google's AI search result summaries, rather than look at the source data.  I know, it is easier - like falling off a log. But in life, the easy answers are often the wrong answers, particularly when it comes to finances.

The use of AI in the arts is particularly troubling, as it directly puts artists of all sorts, out of a job*.  Painter, sculptor, musician, actor - all are being replaced with AI agents and "prompt engineers."  (Boy, being an Engineer used to mean something - but I digress).  The result is more enshittification of life.  Arts and Crafts shows devolve into AI-generated slop, with few real artists on display - much as "farmer's markets" have devolved from farmers selling their wares to people reselling food they bought wholesale, or just people selling junk made in China.

Sadly, we as humans are not entirely prepared for the changes wrought by AI.  For example, our arts association hasn't yet addressed the issue or formulated a policy.  What happens when a member brings in an artwork that is wholly or partially created using AI?  And how do you tell if it is AI unless it has a watermark?  Some uncomfortable conversations will ensue - but necessary conversations, nevertheless.

Sadly, this Pandora's box has already been opened and there is no going back.  And speaking of Pandora, have you noticed a lot of music these days sounds awfully generic?  I was at a resort recently and the "DJ" was playing tunes that had "lyrics" that sounded like English words, but were nonsense.  AI slop - for your ears.

* And it is not like most artists are making a lot of money to begin with.  Makes one wonder why tech bros seem obsessed with eliminating low-paying jobs, instead of the highest-paying jobs.  Couldn't an AI CEO save any company millions, if not billions of dollars?  Just a thought.

Is "AI" The Next "Blockchain"?

You can boost your share price by putting trendy buzzwords in press releases.

Meme stocks are stocks that are hyped heavily on the Internet, to the point where their share price makes no sense whatsoever  Young people - mostly young men - get duped into buying shares in these companies and are exhorted to "hold on" and "never sell" even as the share price tanks.  It becomes a form of social media, where the participants log on every day to swap stories, talk to each other in buzzwords, and call each other "apes" or other appellations.

Even when they lose huge amounts of money (usually by purchasing stock options at the urging of their peers) they seek out recognition and endorsement from their peers by posting pictures of their rapidly declining portfolios - often in the negative region, when options are involved.   In some cases, we are talking about six-figure sums, or more.  Oh, well, all in a day's fun

Of course, anyone with half a brain could figure out that the entire thing is being orchestrated by someone or a group of someones, to manipulate share prices.  Thinly-traded stocks are very vulnerable to sudden spikes in share price, as even a small increase in demand causes a huge increase in share price, as there are few shares for sale.

The old penny-stock scam is a case in point.  Most penny-stock companies are small businesses where family members own most shares and few are for sale. The con artist buys a few shares for pennies apiece and then hypes the stock using an e-mail blast to a million recipients.  Even if only one in a thousand buys the stock, the price can jump from mere pennies to dollars - showing that the predicted rise was as foretold in the e-mail blast!   But of course, nothing about the company actually changed.  The only change was a sudden and artificial increase in demand for shares.

The con artist then cashes out and the share price plummets back to pennies.  Those who bought for dollars lose 90% or more of their "investment."  But since each "investor" lost only a few hundred dollars, well, they just chalk it up to bad luck and move on.

This was all illegal when I was a lad, as was gambling in general.  Today, anything goes and the stock market is now a casino.  This will not end well - it never does  When the scam collapses, a lot of little people will get hurt and not just those who chose to gamble.  Crashes like this take down whole markets.  When over-inflated real estate collapsed in 2008, it brought down the whole real estate market - and the bond market and the stock market.

Sadly, surveys seem to indicate that the next generation of 20-something males is falling for the same old gags, this time dressed up as online casinos or sports betting or "prediction markets" - the last being a sure sign of compulsive gambling.  Of course, it is pathetically easy to rig these sort of bets, particularly when the betting parlor is based offshore.  Sports betting, I suspect, will result in some sort of game-fixing scandal in a matter of months (if not already).

Meme stocks are just another aspect of this - penny stock scams gone wild.  Companies such as Game Stop, which is a thing, just not "the next big thing!" saw its share price skyrocket for no reason at all, other than people on r/wallstreetbets or r/superstonk started buying and holding shares.  There is a reason why the operators of these schemes exhort their "apes" to HOLD the stock.   If no one is selling, the share price will spike.

The net result was that the share price spiked and fell for no apparent business reason.  An old-school brick-and-mortar business seemed like an odd thing to speculate on.  But then weird things started to happen.  Management of the company saw this happening and wanted in on the deal.  They talked about issuing new stock, but as I understand it, that fizzled.  Then they announced they were getting into crypto and blockchain and the share price spiked - for a time.  Put buzzwords in your press release and the share price will go up.

Recently, a similar thing happened with AI. An organic sneaker company whose "Market Cap" was at one time over two billion dollars, sold off all its IP to an overseas firm for a few million bucks.  The company had flown high, then crashed.  The next day, they announced they were going to get into AI - as if you could just dabble in this after selling sneakers.  The share price soared 600% and then tanked 30% the next day.  Still a nice gain for whoever was holding shares at the moment.

Of course, AI is a thing, just as GameStop was a thing.  But getting into AI requires more than a few million in investments.   Data centers are not cheap - on the order of billions of dollars, not mere millions.  And they are getting harder to build, as communities rail against increased utility and water bills.   Each data center uses enough resources to supply a small city of 100,000 people.  Famously, Iran targeted such data centers in the Middle East - where energy is cheap but water scarce.  They are a very vulnerable "soft target" to be sure.

To me, anyway, the idea that a niche sneaker company can just chuck it all and go all-in on AI for a lousy $25M seems laughable - and a sign the end times are nigh.  You can just say shit like this, watch your share price spike, and cash out your stock options the next day and no one says squat.  Well, maybe a few analysts cautiously remark that it seems implausible, but most are afraid of getting sued and perhaps there is an unspoken agreement among them not to rock the boat - lest all our 401(k)'s tank at once.

Blockchain was a thing, but it never really turned out to be as big a thing as people claimed it would be.  Crypto has hosted an innumerable number of scams and rug-pulls.  Some "coins" are still around and used still, for nefarious things, like money-laundering and illegal trafficking in drugs and people.  But as an "investment" it has never proven stable - although we little people are being exhorted to add it to our portfolio, mostly by sketchy financial sites (read: any financial site that suggest you buy crypto or provides a means of doing so) or even "legitimate" investment houses and banks.  It never took off at a currency, even after more than a decade.  And as an "investment" it only makes sense if you can time the market and buy low and sell high - which is nearly impossible to do, unless you are the one pulling the strings.

Blockchain really never found much other uses.  I read online, a discourse from some IT types who put blockchain into their company's financial networks ("fintech" I guess?) but noted it was little more than a hood ornament on a car - a part of the car, but not a necessary part of it.  They noted that the entire blockchain portion of their system could fail and no one would notice the difference, while the reverse was not true - the system could not operate on blockchain alone. I suspect that if the blockchain portion does fail, or undergoes maintenance and is taken offline for repair, no one will ever get around to fixing it.  Days, weeks, and months will go by and eventually it will be forgotten.

Similarly, AI is an interesting tool, but not a necessary one.  And often it is an intrusive one.  Want to search Google?  The first thing you have to do is bypass the AI response and go to "web" for real search results (but search results far shittier than five years ago).  AI is just a hindrance to real search results - it just keeps barfing up the same obvious answers and fails to dig deep into hard data.

But it is the buzzword of the day, so everyone wants to get in on it.  It gets mentioned in press releases and annual reports.  Investors want to see the company doing the latest-and-greatest thing, even if it is wildly unprofitable.  They give out AI for free to consumers, hoping we get hooked on it. Whether consumers are willing to pay subscription fees down the road for AI, remains to be seen.  And given the staggering cost of AI data centers, even subscription fees are not enough. ChatGTP makes millions in subscription fees from customers but costs billions to operate.  That's off by a factor of a thousand.

We'll see where this goes, of course.  And I doubt it will go away entirely.  But on the other hand, the fact that "AI" is being used to hype up stock prices tells me a bubble isn't that far from bursting.

Signs... of the Times

There are signs things are changing...

We saw this sign above while driving through Kentucky.  I didn't stop to take a photo, but I did find a copy online, as well as articles about it.  Are people turning away from Trump?  Or as his term winds down, maybe there is less demand for Trump merch.   I also noted a lack of Trump yard signs and flags, in Kentucky, Tennesee, Georgia, Virginia, the Carolinas, and Pennsylvania.

In Leheighton, PA, there used to be a big Trump billboard in front of this guy's house, right as you crossed the bridge, at the stoplight.  It was there for years - since before Trump's first term.  Today?  No more - replaced with a small sign promoting the county fair.  You just don't see Trump signs anymore - no flags flying from pickup trucks, no red hats, either.  The landfills must be full of the stuff!

Then again, the quality of Trump merch was so poor that the few Trump flags and signs you see are faded and tattered.  Maybe it all just composted like so much other bullshit.

But there are other, less hopeful signs out there, and I am not sure whether I am imagining them or not.  Every merchant I have ever done business with, seems to be SPAMming me with discount offers - coming across as nervous and desperate.  Campgrounds once full to capacity on holiday weekends are offering last-minute discounts to fill empty spaces.  And car dealer lots are overflowing with row upon row of unsold pickup trucks and SUVs.

Woody Folsom, in Western Georgia, has Ford, GMC, Ram, Dodge, and Jeep dealerships (and ag equipment and who knows what else?).  All are full of big, gas-guzzling trucks and SUVs - a far cry from the COVID days, when he had only four or five of each, on each lot.  Meanwhile, Ford exhorts me to buy a new $100,000 "Super duty" pickup, which is just not happening.

Did someone throw a switch?  What happened?  Before, the dealers acted like they were doing you a favor by selling you a truck.  Now, they advertise over $10,000 off on a new SUV.  Are people finally running out of money - and credit?

McDonald's replaced its CEO after disappointing revenue and earnings.  People are buying convenience foods less and less.  One wag argues online that the hamburger patties at Mickey-D's are thinner than the pickles.  Are they resorting to shrinkflation?

Maybe.  There seem to be signs.  Despite the rapid rise in housing prices, I hear from multiple people in my recent travels that sales are cooling off and in some markets, getting difficult.  Rising interest rates are obviously not helping.  But are there other factors?

Data from the government, once the standard of financial reporting, is now being tweaked to fit political narratives and is no longer trustworthy.  And it isn't just finances - our Secretary of HHS is under-reporting measles deaths, apparently on a regular basis.  And let's not forget the war dead - even if the administration would like to.

So it is hard to tell from "official" channels whether the economy is going like gangbusters or about to crater.  I see signs, but I am not sure whether they mean anything.

Yet.

Why Humanoid Robots Make No Sense At All

If my scan rate at UPS was this slow, I would have been fired.

A recent video online shows a humanoid robot sorting packages, mostly just flipping them label side up so they can be scanned.  It was painful to watch because the conveyor was slowed down to at least half normal speed and the "robot" was horrifically inefficient at its job.

Irony Alert:  Before I could play the linked video above, it asked me to "sign in to prove you're not a bot."   Rules for me, but not for thee, I guess.

Warehouse robots exist, but they don't look like ersatz humans.  Rather, they are machines optimized for handling, sorting, and stacking packages and retreiving and packing goods.  They look nothing like the "row-bots" of science fiction because doing so would be pointless.  Why give a package sorting robot legs and a torso and a head and human-like arms, when history has shown that human anatomy is ill-suited to repetitive motions.  Do you want these robots to have tendon and joint problems?  Backaches and arthritis?

But seriously, a humanoid robot might have some specialized uses, particularly when interfacing directly with humans, but for other purposes, it makes no sense.  Imagine an automated car wash that, instead of having rotating brushes and spray wands, had dozens of humanoid robots sloshing around in the suds, hand-wiping your car.   Maybe there is a kernel of an idea there, but why would you give them legs to walk around with, when stationary or wheeled robots would make more sense.  And why make them look like humans?

I suppose the idea of a "general purpose" humanoid robot might make some sense.  It could mow your lawn, wax your car, and then shake up a martini for you at five o'clock.  That seems to be a common fantasy with robot fans - that "Jeeves" the family robot will mix up that martini and light your cigar (and empty the ashtray) while you sit in your smoking jacket in the den and listen to Jazz music.

But as history has shown, it is a lot more effective to make a number of domestic robots, each specialized to a purpose.  Having a humanoid robot operate a vacuum cleaner is an expensive waste of machinery.  Having an automated vacuum cleaner makes more sense, as does an automated lawn mower.

With regard to the latter, such things exist, but never became popular.  I recall a few years back seeing a display at Lowe's of a robotic lawn mower.  The display was broken.  A neighbor actually bought one and I guess it worked for a while.  One day I saw them out on the lawn, looking at the inert machine and then poking it with a stick.  It sat there, motionless, for about a week and then disappeared never to be seen again.  It never pays to be an early adapter.

The problem with the automated lawn mower is obvious - suppose your pet is run over by it?  Or maybe a crawling infant?  The liability is huge and no matter how many sensors you put on it, it may be likely to fail.  For that reason, most automated lawn mowers used string trimmers, not whirling blades, so little junior won't be sliced to death, just slowly whipped to oblivion.  But I digress.

Another problem with humanoid robots is the power they require.  Humans are a fascinating machine - converting calories of food into energy every day for nearly a century before they wear out.  It is just a shame it takes 25 years or so to program their neural networks, and often that goes horribly wrong.

Companies like Boston Dynamics like to show off their robots dancing to music and doing amazing flips and stunts.  In most cases, they are tethered to a power cord, or in some cases, an IC engine powered electrical generator.  The actual ambient sound is rarely shown, as instead of music, you would hear the scream of a lawn mower engine or the sound of electrical or hydraulic actuators.  Lithium-Ion batteries are one solution, but of course add weight to the design and have a limited capacity.  I suspect many of these short videos are short because that is the extent of the battery life.

While Boston Dynamics claims that their robots are for sale, at the present time they are limited to enterprise customers and there is little or no word as to how many have been sold or are in use.  Have you seen one being used? Let me know.

Meanwhile, other more plebeian robots are already out on the streets - quite literally.  No doubt you've seen the food delivery robots on some city streets.  But again, they are not humanoid, but small boxes on wheels.  A humanoid delivery robot could do things like climb stairs and get around obstacles better, but the energy required would no doubt limit their range and the cost would be prohibitive.  Boxes on wheels are cheap - and get the job done.

And of course, robot taxis are a thing, at least on a trial basis in some cities - with mixed results.  When error-prone humans run over a small child, we chalk that up to the cost of doing business - and the driver gets a slap on the wrist.  If you want to get away with killing someone, use your car.  Ask Bruce Caitlyn Jenner.  She got away with it!

Sam's Club and Walmart have a floor cleaning robot that seems to work "OK" - although it has a seat and manual controls.  Not only does it wash floors, but it also takes inventory with a side-mounted scanner.  Again, it is on wheels,  not legs.   No one seriously suggested using a humanoid robot with a mop-and-bucket - it would make no sense whatsoever.

Getting back to UPS and other shipping companies, when I worked there as a nascent Teamster in the 1980s, we were basically human robots.  Bar codes were a thing of the future, and boxes came down a chute in pre-sort where four or five guys would sort each package by zip code.  These guys had the entire zip code structure of the greater Syracuse area memorized and I could not keep up at all.  I lasted a day in pre-sort.

The solution wasn't robots to "read" hand-written addresses and sort by zip code, but to put standardized labels and bar codes on each package.  Back in 1986, few had home computers and printers.  Today everyone does, and if they don't, the local UPS store will print the label for you.  Automation didn't mean creating mechanical men to mimic manual human labor, but to automate the process instead.

So bar codes are read by lasers and mechanical flaps divert packages to different conveyor belts - a much more efficient and cost-effective process than having humanoid robots pick up packages and look at them.  Humanoid robots are not an advancement, but a step backwards.

Similarly, when I worked at Domino's, we took orders over the phone and then hand-addressed each box of pizza using carbon-copy strips.  One went to the line cook to make the pizza (and make a record of the transaction), while two went on the box.  The driver would tear off the pink copy upon delivery.  It was a primitive system, but it worked.  I told my boss there that someday a computer would print out these labels and he laughed at me.  At the time, I had to deal with his shitty handwriting, which almost got me mugged.

Now, I suppose you could use a humanoid robot to pick up the receiver on a landline phone and take orders and write them down on slips of paper, but that would be dumb.  Instead of automating human actions, they automated the process.  Customers order online using an app and the pizzas are made after the labels were printed automatically.  Addresses can be verified (and customers tracked for loyalty rewards) and phone numbers confirmed through automated call-backs.  Automating the process makes much more sense than using a humanoid robot to mimic what was done before by humans.

In warfare, the same is true.  Much has been made of humanoid "soldiers" replacing men in the field. A bipedal robot can walk through ditches and climb over fences.  But what we are seeing in Ukraine is that flying robots (actually, remote controlled drones) are far more effective, efficient, and less costly than some clanking monstrosity from Boston Dynamics.  Seaborne and landborne drones also exist, the latter tending to be of the wheeled variety.

The idea of autonomous mechanical warriors, however, should give everyone pause.  Some drones are deemed "semi-autonomous" in that they can continue their mission even if cut off from their operator by jamming signals.  Even these are controversial, as without a human-in-the-loop, it would be all-too-easy to bomb a school or create a friendly fire situation.

But again, with drones, the idea of a walking humanoid fighting drone seems dead in the water, at least for now.  Masses of cheap and lightweight drones - often "suicide drones" - makes more sense than an expensive walking-talking doll.

Perhaps I am wrong about this, and instead, in a decade's time, my personal robot will clear the dishes after cooking my meal, mow the lawn and drive my car.  I kind of doubt it, only because I can't afford such nonsense.  I also wonder whether humanoid robots are really solving a problem that exists - is it really cost-effective to replace low-wage jobs with robots?  Or are we just chasing a tech dream?'

Already we are seeing incidents where "AI" ends up being more costly than replacing human workers.  And as a "tool" it seems highly flawed.  At least from a consumer standpoint, it is of limited use - and if you rely on AI answers to basic questions, you may end up in trouble.

For example, our van has a problem in that the switch or sensor that detects whether the sliding door is open, isn't working.  Not only doesn't the dome light come on (grammar?) but the "auto relock" feature kicks in, if you unlock the van with the remote and open the sliding door.  The system detects if a door has been opened after unlocking.  If no detection occurs within 30 seconds, it assumed you hit the button in error and re-locks the van.  Since the sliding door sensor is broken, it doesn't detect this as an opening and re-locks the van.  No big deal, unless you set the keys on the counter and then re-shut the door.  Congratulations, you just locked the keys in the van!

And no, there is no way to turn off auto re-lock.  :(

Anyway, Google AI keeps cheerfully informing me that a 2015 Mercedes Sprinter 3500 high-top has a simple plunger switch "on the B-pillar" and it costs only $4.95 on eBay.  No, it does not.  Mercedes chose instead to put a switch on the door latches (all doors) including the sliding door.  It is a PITA to get at and guess what?  It costs a lot more than $4.95!

I've tried rephrasing the question (the "prompt" I guess) many times, with the same result.  The information provided is clearly wrong, every time.  And sadly, this seems to be true of many technical questions, regarding cars, computers, or whatever.  AI merely skims the surface and provides the most facile responses.  Did you try unplugging it and then plugging it back in?  Gee, thanks, Sanjay!

I guess I take some comfort in this - that our robot overlords are as clueless as we are (indeed, we "trained" them, no?). In the future, there will be robot counterparts of all the inept and clueless people in the world, including robot Karens and robot BMW drivers who refuse to use turn signals.

Or, God forbid, Robo-Trump.  Maybe we are already there - after all, he died of rabies!