Extended Intelligences¶
Lots to take in¶
The extended intelligence seminar started with 2 days of condensed knowledge that took us from Aristotle all the way to AI ethics. It was a lot to take in, but I guess, if you only have 2 days, that’s probably the only way to cover so much information. By introducing the ideas briefly and opening new windows in our minds that we can follow later if we prefer to.
Artistic Explorations¶
After the initial 2 days, our seminar continued with the assistance of Estampa. One of their first sessions was to go through some artistic explorations, which was eye-opening. It was refreshing to see some alternative ways of utilising AI beyond the regular high-tech usages we see in the media; which is always concerning in some way or another. I enjoyed seeing uses of AI that don’t ring an alarm bell but inpires your imagination.
Getting Hands-on¶
The rest of the seminar was more hands-on; we first learned to use Google Colab. I greatly enjoyed it as I wasn’t aware of these technologies before. I found it almost magical to start running such complex code without even touching your local system. There’re no risks, you cannot break your system, it’s just a free laboratory you can experiment with in minutes. The possibilities we have today are incredible, even compared to 5 years ago when you had to sort out lots of system level installations, packages, dependencies, etc. before you could get started with a first line of code. Now even the code is there to start with and you only need to press play if you fancy playing with it.
The other thing I find truly impressive is the amount of open libraries, models, datasets, scientific papers you can find online. Our instructors showed us a few resources, and basically all the resources that all the teams in our class required were accessible within those websites. The only thing we had to do was to try different options and see what works.
Without even writing a single line of code, our team was able to try out face recognition, speech-to-text conversation, emotion detection, emotionally intelligent chat bot conversation, and text to speech generation technologies which I find amazing.
Concluding Reflections¶
The seminar left me thinking of the conundrum in this field: While many are worried about AI and the unknowns of what’s being developed in this technical space, and the ethics of these black boxes; in my experience, it’s also the most open, accessible, and technically advanced field that welcomes newcomers with open arms. So instead of being worried passive followers of this field, one can actually decide to jump in and take part in even without any technical orientation.