If AI is so great, when will it come to my girlfriend’s car? The Volvo UI sucks. The AC is not cooling. Can’t the system in the car tell me the coolant is low? Or the oil is full but needs changing? The instrument cluster above the stickshift is ridiculous. And I can’t tell you why I won’t change her clock to the correct time, except to say, the UI of the onboard electronics is repellant. I seriously want her to get rid of this Volvo because the instruments and onboard settings are so awful. (I whine a bit. I don’t mean it, literally.)

AI is indeed coming to take a lot of middle-skilled jobs. If your kids are making Cs and Ds in school, you’d better hip to the issue. The job market is about to be upended by LLMs like ChatGPT and Google’s BARD. Heck, there’s an AI for everything.

I want a car that will tell me what’s wrong, tell me how to fix it, and even fix things I don’t ever need to know about, without telling me. Just a “log file” of the repairs completed while your car rested in the garage overnight. I knew a woman who had an Audi eTron of some sort and apparently the car would phone home at night while it was charging. It updated software, fixed bugs, and JFF (just for fun) gave my friend different running sounds for the car. So, in the morning she would start her car and it would sound like a freight train. On other mornings it would sound like a starship going into warp drive.

I want AI to be friendly and helpful. So far, today, I used AI to read a PDF of a long technical nature that I wasn’t that interested in. I needed to write a summary. Even more, I needed to understand what the report said without reading it. AI to the rescue. ChatPDF.com is a cool tool. You feed it a PDF of anything. Then, according to their site, you have a conversation with the document.

It worked well enough. I sent the transcript along to a co-worker who was actually needing to write something about this report.

Anyway, I’m hopeful that the AI shepherds of the world don’t release SkyNet. It would be really sad to see us destroy humankind with robots. At the moment we’re doing a bang-up job of it with fossil fuels and dumb politicians. Mother Earth is unhappy. She’s starting the purge. I guess the cockroaches will survive, though.

This marks the first post in my *If AI Is So Great* Series.

John McElhenney —  LinkedIn

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