There’s been a lot posted about artificial intelligence since I last wrote about it, but some of it was just hype and marketing whereas the really cool stuff tends to sit well. There’s two main topics that I’ll get out of the way with this post – more verbose topics coming this week.

Talking To Myself…

There’s been some thought about the ‘inner monologue’ that some of us have. Not all of us do have that inner monologue, and we don’t have a reason why yet, but apparently people who do have an inner monologue think that artificial intelligences can benefit from it.

They are finding ways that an inner monologue is beneficial for artificial intelligences, which may oddly help us understand our own inner monologues and lack of it.

If you want to read a bit more deeply into it, “Thought Cloning: Learning to Think while Acting by Imitating Human Thinking” is an interesting paper.

Having spoken to myself now and then over the years, I’m not sure it’s as productive as some think, but I’m not an expert and only have my own experience to base that off of. I do know from my own experience that it’s very easy to reinforce biases that way.

I do some thinking with language, but mainly my thinking is what I would best describe as ‘visually kinetic’, so I am pretty interested in this.

Reviewing Body Cams

One of the problems with any sort of camera system is reviewing it. It takes a long time to review footage, and an experienced eye to do it.

Police departments are turning to artificial intelligence to help with this. Given there is already real time facial recognition, on the surface this seems like a good use of it. However, there are problems with it as there are realistic concerns for communities of color, as well as related to data privacy. A running body cam collects every interaction, sure, but it also collects information on everybody involved in these interactions as well as the person accidentally getting into the frame.

With everything increasingly connected, watching the watchmen through body cams means watching the watchers of the body cam footage.

I wonder what their inner monologue will be like while reviewing hours and hours of boring footage.