What Artificial Intelligence Has Been Succeeding At – II

Got three new articles possibly pertinent to this topic this week – two were negative or sort of, so will set them aside and add only the last to my pile.

According to Eric Revell in “Goldman Sachs announces firmwide launch of AI assistant” (Fox Business, June 23^rd), this generative AI tool, “tailored to meet the needs of workers in various specialties across the firm,” is intended to “positively impact” their “daily tasks.”  The piece doesn’t get any more specific than that, so we’ll hold off on praising it more.

Also too general, but firmer in the present tense, is “Salesforce boss reveals the stunning amount of work now handled by AI” (Aislinn Murphy, Fox Business, June 26^th).  Salesforce’s CEO “revealed the software company uses artificial intelligence (AI) technology to perform a good deal of its work,” in fact “30% to 50% of” it.  He said the company “has experienced roughly 93% accuracy in its own technology and its work with customers,” but he seems happy with that.  Can his workers catch that 7%, and, including that, how much time and money does the company save?

As I am sure applicants have suspected for a while, “Welcome to Your Job Interview.  Your Interviewer Is A.I.” (Natalie Rocha, The New York Times, July 7^th).  It does telephone screenings, and in one recent example, after admitting it was “not a human,” it could pose questions about qualifications but “could not answer most of (the interviewee’s) questions about the job.”  Its efforts, despite “a friendly tone,” “felt hollow.”  Nothing deceptive here, as other employment-search tasks such as assessing resumes, have long been done by software.  Interview-giving capability “started taking off last year,” and can customize, based on the answers it gets.  Perhaps AI can also do something decades neglected – telling candidates without being asked when they have been dropped from consideration.

How about “Effortless golf with AI smart caddie that follows you” (Kurt Knutsson, Fox News, June 26^th)?  Yes, it’s a robot, the Robera Neo, “designed to follow you around the course, carrying your clubs effortlessly and freeing you up to concentrate on your swing.”  Having used “GPS to map out the course,” it requires only sporadic efforts to guide it, and looks like little more than a golf bag on a manual cart.  It costs only about $2,000, and shipping is supposed to start this month.

On the medical front, a “Paralyzed man speaks and sings with AI brain-computer interface” (Kurt Knutsson, Fox News, July 1^st).  “It translates the brain signals that would normally control the muscles used for speech, allowing users to “talk” and even “sing” through a computer, almost instantly.”  It requires “four microelectronic arrays, surgically implanted in the part of the brain responsible for producing speech,” which “pick up the neural activity that happens when someone tries to speak.”  It can also “recreate the user’s own voice, thanks to a voice cloning algorithm trained on recordings made before the onset” of the patient’s medical condition.  “So far, it’s only been tested with one participant,” so it will not be available soon.

Finally, we saw “How A.I. Is Transforming Wedding Planning” (Alix Strauss, The New York Times, July 12^th).  Instead of using new technology, this ChatGPT technique seems to coordinate and focus existing capabilities by determining what weddings would need, starting with “an Excel document listing 200 suggestions, including ideas from blog posts, Reddit and Google Crowdsource.”  It does a wide range of work on this project, including choosing and communicating with vendors, creating a seating chart “taking into account guests’ commonalities and family dynamics (!),” and providing ideas for the likes of “designs, layouts, and types of tables.”  This is all sort of a combination of a good wedding-planning book and ability to do individual tasks, with more sophistication than a program could have done, say, ten years ago.  And it will only get better.

What can we say about these 11 AI accomplishments?  They are a mixture of solid proofs of concept needing fleshing out, in-progress functionalities, and groupings of previously known skills.  They are heaviest in the medical field, and close in other technical areas.  Interestingly, as AI has been thought of primarily as an office and writing tool, it has had the least unqualified success with that.  We should all hope that its penchants for deceit and hallucinations will not find their ways into the likes of the brain-to-speech application above.  Maybe when it creates ideas, instead of implementing them, it is at its best.  Some smart people are like that, so it is fitting that this artificial but sometimes massively strong intelligence, the most extreme form of idiot-savantism we have seen, is that way too.  We still know precious little about how AI will turn out for humanity, and in which ways.  All we can do is to keep working and, with open minds, keep understanding.

What Artificial Intelligence Has Been Succeeding At – I

Unlike how AI has been floundering in offices, it’s been doing well elsewhere.  In Part I of this three-month rundown, you may wish to take note of the fields in which it has been triumphant and perhaps wonder how its threats and hallucinations don’t seem to be a factor there. 

First, “Artificial intelligence transforms patient care and reduces burnout, physician says” (Kennedy Hayes, Fox News, April 13^th).  The AI variety is “called ambient listening,” which “surveys show” “thousands of physicians across the country are using.”  This technology is like an enhanced transcriptionist, doing that with patient conversations in any of various languages, and adding a summary, with “a system of checks and balances” between doctors and software.  Hundreds of physician-employing organizations now use it, and it may soon be employed for other health professionals as well.

In another victory, “AI system restores speech for paralyzed patients using own voice” (Kurt Knutsson, Fox News, April 16^th).  Though not yet in production, in research “an AI-powered system… restores natural speech to paralyzed individuals in real time,” using “brain-computer interfaces.”  It uses electrodes and “electromyography sensors” on surfaces of the brain and face, and “learns to transform (mental activity) into the sounds of the patient’s voice.”  The author said it represents “key advancements” in “real-time speech synthesis,” “naturalistic speech,” and “personalized voice.”

As opposed to what many people thought, “Your A.I. Radiologist Will Not Be With You Soon” (Steve Lohr, The New York Times, May 14^th).  It seemed a good forecast that AI’s algorithmic abilities would far surpass human radiologists’, but “in recent years” at the Mayo Clinic, the technology has been used instead “to sharpen images, automate routine tasks, identify medical abnormalities and predict disease,” and “can also serve as “a second set of eyes.””  It has not been good enough to “advise other doctors and surgeons, talk to patients, write reports and analyze medical records,” or assess what results “might mean for an individual patient with a particular medical history, tapping years of experience.”  As a result, “a recent study from the American College of Radiology projected a steadily growing work force through 2055.”

Onto the more controversial area of education, we saw “How Miami Schools Are Leading 100,000 Students Into the A.I. Future” (Natasha Singer, The New York Times, May 19^th).  One way was to have them critique the tool’s requested “Kennedyesque text” using the students’ knowledge from studying that president’s speeches.  Another was for them to train AI models themselves on specific topics, something also requiring understanding they had acquired in the class.  A third was having students try “to break A.I.,” by posing “the most inappropriate questions you can imagine,” and hoping to “prompt the chatbots to produce racist, violent or sexually explicit responses.”  Perhaps that’s the way for people to learn to understand how AI functions, and with it, its limitations, while gaining true experience working with it.

On scholarship, “A.I. Is Poised to Rewrite History.  Literally.” (Bill Wasik, The New York Times, June 16^th).  With its penchant for making up facts, unchecked AI could pollute the stream of historical records.  Yet here, historians have found ways it could help without going too far, such as by identifying formerly obscure participants and by summarizing works in ways provoking new insights.  A research assistant with a good if strange mind can be plenty useful – if nothing it writes ends up in final versions unverified. 

That brings us back to how artificial intelligence is serving in offices.  It can be beneficial, if its shortcomings are known and minimized.  That may be the answer there.  See at least five more of its recent achievements next week.

This Morning’s Jobs Report and AJSN: Some Readjustment, A Chunk of Seasonality, More Latent Demand, and Real Progress

The latest Bureau of Labor Statistics Employment Situation Summary was supposed to feature 100,000 to 110,000 net new nonfarm payroll positions, a higher unemployment rate, and possibly some real tariff effects.  None of those things happened.  The new jobs once more far exceeded estimates with 147,000.  Seasonally adjusted joblessness dropped 0.1% to 4.1%.  The rest of the numbers looked for all the world like an ordinary good month, with the usual differences between May and June being dominant.

With that, unadjusted unemployment rose from 4.0% to 4.4%.  The count of adjusted unemployment fell 200,000 to 7.0 million, with those out long-term, or for 27 weeks or longer, up 100,000 to 1.6 million.  There were 100,000 fewer people working part-time for economic reasons, or maintaining short-hours arrangements while looking for longer ones, reaching 4.5 million.  The two measures of how common it is for Americans to be working or officially jobless, the labor force participation rate and the employment-population ratio, lost 0.1% and held to get to 62.3% and 59.7%.  Average hourly private nonfarm payroll earnings tacked on 6 cents, a bit less than inflation, to $36.30. 

The American Job Shortage Number or AJSN, the measure showing how many new jobs could be quickly filled if we knew they would be easy to get, rose 650,000:

The largest changes were from unemployment, which almost covered the difference, from the number of discouraged, up a way-high 302,000, and from a reversal of last month’s jump in those not available to work now, which lost 332,000.  Compared with a year before, the AJSN gained 255,000, with the shrunken count of American expatriates more than offset by additional people wanting work but not looking for it for a year or more, discouraged, and unemployed.  The share of the AJSN from official joblessness gained 1.9% to 38.3%. 

How can I summarize this month’s data?  It was better than the usual seasonal worsening, with 482,000 more employed unadjusted, 927,000 fewer out of the labor force, and 815,000 fewer not interested.  Tariffs are still not clearly causing any disruption, and, with our president’s emphasis on making trade deals, may never.  Once again, the number of net new positions was far higher than we have any right to expect.  The turtle took a substantial step forward.