The technology itself is fascinating, but part of what makes ChatGPT uniquely interesting is the fact that essentially overnight, most of the world gained access to a powerful generative artificial intelligence that they could use for their own purposes. In this episode of The Conversation Weekly, we speak with researchers who study computer science, technology and economics to explore how the rapid adoption of technologies has, for the most part, failed to change social and economic systems in the past – but why AI might be different, despite its weaknesses. Spending just a few minutes playing with new, generative AI algorithms can show you just how powerful they are. You can open up Dall-E, type in a phrase like "dinosaur riding motorcycle across a bridge," and seconds later, the algorithm will produce multiple images more or less depicting what you asked for. ChatGPT does much the same, just with text as its output.

Earlier this year Microsoft announced that it was introducing AI in its ubiquitous spreadsheet application Excel. Specifically what it said it would do -- the features are still in beta -- is add new AI-powered data types that will allow users to access deeper and more extensive information about a company or a place by pulling the information from the Microsoft Knowledge Group. "It recognizes, in context, what is meant by your text and converts that to the right type of data," Microsoft writes in a post. It's not just states or countries or companies either -- the new feature supports zip codes, cities, and other types of financial data like stocks and index funds, Microsoft noted. What's more Microsoft wrote, "as you try this feature, you may notice the intelligent conversions sometimes aren't sure what to convert to. In those cases, Excel will ask you to specify which data type should be returned from the service. For example, the city Portland works fine when it's a list of other cities that are nearby, but when it's in a blank grid, with no other textual context, then Excel will ask you which Portland you meant."

Advances in computer technology are one of many factors that have led to the decline of certain types of jobs. To some extent, technology has always played a role in changing how people work and live: think of the internal combustion engine or factory mechanization. But today's guest on The Next Idea wonders if advances in artificial intelligence could be a tipping point into societal unrest, even revolt, because of loss of jobs. Kentaro Toyama, the W.K. Kellogg Associate Professor of Community Information at the University of Michigan School of Information, joined The Next Idea to discuss the future of artificial intelligence and his recent article in The Conversation. Listen below for the entire conversation.

Techno-optimism is defined as the belief that technology can improve the lives of people. It was famously satired in the U.S. television comedy series "Silicon Valley," with a startup-company's founders pledging to "make the world a better place through Paxos algorithms for consensus protocols." But some people take techno-optimism very seriously. Ray Kurzweil, an accomplished tech innovator, described his techno-optimistic vision in his books: The Age of Spiritual Machines, How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed, and The Singularity Is Near. In a keynote address (see https://goo.gl/RwkwK1) at the 2016 meeting of the Computing Research Association, Kentaro Toyama argued that "In spite of the do-gooder rhetoric of Silicon Valley, it is no secret that computing technology in and of itself cannot solve systemic social problems."

With advancements in technology, smartphones can already serve as memory aids. Electronic calendars are of great use in time-based memory tasks. In this project, we enter the mixed reality realm for helping dementia patients. Dementia is a general term for a decline in mental ability severe enough to interfere with daily life. Memory loss is an example. Here, mixed reality refers to the merging of real and virtual worlds to produce new episodic memory visualisations where physical and digital objects co-exist and interact in real-time. Cognitive models are approximations of a patient's mental abilities and limitations involving conscious mental activities (such as thinking, understanding, learning, and remembering). External representations of episodic memory help patients and caregivers coordinate their actions with one another. We advocate distributed cognition, which involves the coordination between individuals, artefacts and the environment, in four main implementations of artificial intelligence technology in the Kognit storyboard: (1) speech dialogue and episodic memory retrieval; (2) monitoring medication management and tracking an elder's behaviour (e.g., drinking water); (3) eye tracking and modelling cognitive abilities; and (4) serious game development towards active memory training. We discuss the storyboard, use cases and usage scenarios, and some implementation details of cognitive models and mixed reality hardware for the patient. The purpose of future studies is to determine the extent to which cognitive enhancement technology can be used to decrease caregiver burden.