The Lounge 2

[Grier]

I guess we're all hearing about these AI Chat-bots. They're being developed at a rate of knots.
Listening to a radio discussion about Health one of our Aussie Doctor Celebrities got talking about Health Bots. The shows Presenter got our Doctor and a health-bot competing to diagnose a medical condition with vague details. That ended up being quite funny.

I later googled Health bots and got a list of the top twelve Health bots available as per the link here:

The Top 10 Healthcare Chatbots - The Medical Futurist

The Top 10 Healthcare Chatbots: OneRemission, Ada Health, Florence, Babylon Health. Check out the most helpful medical chatbots in healthcare.

medicalfuturist.com

I was stunned at how many there are already.
Could this be the beginning of the end for human doctors?

 

[Richie]

Could this be the beginning of the end for human doctors?

Surely not. Only a robot could ever replace a human doctor surely. And that wont happen as people wont allow it.

 

[looker-on]

There's no way around them. I'm all in favour of telemedicine, too. For routine checkups there's no need to see a doctor. Right now the older generations can't handle the equipment needed but future generations will naturally accept that. My MIL would have benefited from telemedicine since she couldn't cover the distance to the specialist who can't see her either for she is overworked.

 

[Richie]

If you want to see a fine piece of television watch Ten Pound Poms, the story of the 1950s migration of hundreds of thousands of Brits lured to Australia for the price of only 10 British pounds to boost our post WW2 population.

 

[Grier]

If you want to see a fine piece of television watch Ten Pound Poms, the story of the 1950s migration of hundreds of thousands of Brits lured to Australia for the price of only 10 British pounds to boost our post WW2 population.

Why would anyone want to leave the paradise of Britain?

 

[Jessica.]

If you want to see a fine piece of television watch Ten Pound Poms, the story of the 1950s migration of hundreds of thousands of Brits lured to Australia for the price of only 10 British pounds to boost our post WW2 population.

My uncle and his friend were Ten Pound Poms. They both left England for Australia and never regretted a thing. Both worked as builders and then in later life my uncle worked as a janitor.

 

[Jessica.]

Why would anyone want to leave the paradise of Britain?

View attachment 1974

View attachment 1976

These look like the 'jiggers', aka dirty alleyways in-between houses that were popular with people making a quick getaway.

 

[looker-on]

Why would anyone want to leave the paradise of Britain?

View attachment 1974

View attachment 1976

How old would you say are these pics? The building in the background looks more modern?

 

[Jessica.]

Shocking news coming to us from Australia about the elderly lady who lives in a care home and is on a zimmer frame, she was tasered twice by the police because she had a knife. Surely she could've been disarmed more safely as she's now sustained serious head injuries and broken ribs from hitting the ground.

 

[looker-on]

How old would you say are these pics? The building in the background looks more modern?

Any idea, Terry?

 

[Grier]

Shocking news coming to us from Australia about the elderly lady who lives in a care home and is on a zimmer frame, she was tasered twice by the police because she had a knife. Surely she could've been disarmed more safely as she's now sustained serious head injuries and broken ribs from hitting the ground.

The senior constable who tasered the old lady has now been stood down, but on full pay while the investigation is being carried out. The old lady looks very poorly now and is receiving palliative care.
Surely the police officer could have contained her without recourse to using his taser on her. A poor old demented 95 yo lady using a zimmer frame would have very little strength to cause a threat even with the steak knife she was brandising.
At least the officer didn't shoot her, God forbid.

 

[Grier]

Any idea, Terry?

Hi Thomas, I thought they were about 100 years old, between the wars. I agree that tower block in the background suggested later.
I just stumbled across them doing a search. I love looking at such old and nostalgic photos.
Here's the rest I saved:



All gone now no doubt.

Here's one from a Stonemason's strike in Melbourne Australia.


All tough hard men... I assume the Moustaches were their style.

 

[looker-on]

I love looking at such old and nostalgic photos.

So do I. Fantastic photos. Would be good to provide the little info available such as time/year and location. So I take it that they were taken in London with the exception of the last ones. The moustache was not just a personal style but also a symbol of masculinity as it still is in parts of Eastern Europe and the Arab world no matter how out it is in Western Europe.

What misery, what poverty is shown and they had to come to terms with it. And they , too, had one short life only which had to be spent in those conditions. Look at that well-dressed little girl who seems to be forlorn in that environment.

 

[Grier]

There's no way around them. I'm all in favour of telemedicine, too. For routine checkups there's no need to see a doctor. Right now the older generations can't handle the equipment needed but future generations will naturally accept that. My MIL would have benefited from telemedicine since she couldn't cover the distance to the specialist who can't see her either for she is overworked.

I tend to agree Thomas, AI is on the rise, too fast even. Even some of its architects are warning of its possible misuses, like election fraud.
Also Chinese intellectual theft that we all know happens a lot. A lot despite them constantly crying foul. I like the West's current candid frankness with China, calling a spade a spade. Cultural differences do not excuse their behaviour.
God forbid any Society be ruled by AI's. That's unconscionable to me. I totally concur such AI be treated with caution. A lot of caution.

Geoffrey Hinton, a seminal figure in the development of artificial intelligence, recently painted a frightening picture of the technology he helped create where he stunned the scientific community with his abrupt about face on the threat posed by AI. Even asking the US government to regulate its use. Something I doubt rogue states would worry much about.

Isaac Asimov, a brilliant Science Fiction writer once wrote out his rules for AI and Robots:

A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

His book "I Robot" was turned into a movie starring Will Smith, before he did his face slapping thing.
Robin Williams starred in "Bicentennial Man" that follows the life and times of Andrew, a robot purchased as a household appliance programmed to perform menial tasks. Three stars.

To throw a spanner in the works, imagine in say a thousand years, if we survive that long, if we could upload a digitised quantum entangled copy of our minds to some sort of Cyber brain, in the body of an enhanced Robot. Would that 'being' then be subject to existing laws of Robotics, ...?
Even stranger, what if one's mind is uploaded to a biological super body with a mish-mash of hi-tech enhancements.... a cyborg?
In one Sci Fi book series I read some fellow had his mind transferred to the main computer of a Starship. Another made two dozen copies of himself... Serious SciFi author and Astro Physicist Alistair Reynolds came up with these highly speculative ideas....
Why not speculate, despite Futurists often being light years off the mark? It gets quite silly at times looking back as to what our forebears thought the future might be. I've watched a satire movie on that, with Jude Law I think.

Remember Nostradamus and all the tea cup gazers. '..tall dark strangers...' mostly silliness imho. Not quite though as we easily predict the clock work mechanisms of our Solar System, and inner timings of many things, like radioactive decay, half lives, .... even considering the very slow and gradual permutations of the ~25,000 year spin of Earth's rotational axis, likewise that our own Moon came from an epic clash with our Earth and thanks to Earth's gravity debris from that titanic clash slowly coalesced into our "one and only very big moon". In its early days our moon once roughly formed was much closer to our then firey Earth. Slowly interacting forces of gravity and centrifugal forces sought a kind of a balance, with the result being our Moon is very slowly but surely moving away from us, seeking a dream of a cosmic slingshot perhaps. Jupiter would welcome such a rare feast if it could be so lucky... ?
I even acknowledge the seeming luck of Earth's current Lunar eclipses with our Moon and our Sun having the same angular diameter allowing our eclipses being just right, not too big, nor too small.
As our semi gravitational locked Moon gets further away from our Earth Lunar eclipses will be just a spot on the sun.
We live in the cusp of our local cosmic times...

Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 hits Jupiter
This spectacular event was the first real-time observation of an extraterrestrial collision in our solar system. People around the world followed it. Scientists later learned that the comet supplied water to Jupiter's atmosphere.15 July 2022

Entropy rules! But in measured and glacial slow ways quite often.

So, aspects of Futurism can range from the precise to totally psychological make-believe. Yung n Freud would have loved to jump into that swamp I bet.

I'd hate being bossed about by a machine and it's already happening with multi choice phone answering menus, "press 4 then hash..."
which is a bit dehumanizing, but worse than that are our voice recognition services that are about 93% unreliable for me. Even shouting my reply didn't help.....

I bet Turning's test to exhibit intelligent behaviour is under the microscope now. Alan Turning was a brilliant man and sublime hero of WWII saving many tens of thousands, yet afterwards hounded to his suicide for his homosexuality.
The main focus of Turing's work at Bletchley was in cracking the 'Enigma' code. The Enigma was a type of enciphering machine used by the German armed forces to send messages securely.

The Turing test, originally called the imitation game by Alan Turing in 1950, is a test of a machine's ability to exhibit intelligent behaviour equivalent ...
We're close to it I think,

sorry to waffle on so much , Terry

 

[Jessica.]

I'll be posting again soon guys, hopefully tomorrow, just been extremely busy

 

[looker-on]

I tend to agree Thomas, AI is on the rise, too fast even. Even some of its architects are warning of its possible misuses, like election fraud.
Also Chinese intellectual theft that we all know happens a lot. A lot despite them constantly crying foul. I like the West's current candid frankness with China, calling a spade a spade. Cultural differences do not excuse their behaviour.
God forbid any Society be ruled by AI's. That's unconscionable to me. I totally concur such AI be treated with caution. A lot of caution.

Geoffrey Hinton, a seminal figure in the development of artificial intelligence, recently painted a frightening picture of the technology he helped create where he stunned the scientific community with his abrupt about face on the threat posed by AI. Even asking the US government to regulate its use. Something I doubt rogue states would worry much about.

Isaac Asimov, a brilliant Science Fiction writer once wrote out his rules for AI and Robots:

A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

His book "I Robot" was turned into a movie starring Will Smith, before he did his face slapping thing.
Robin Williams starred in "Bicentennial Man" that follows the life and times of Andrew, a robot purchased as a household appliance programmed to perform menial tasks. Three stars.

To throw a spanner in the works, imagine in say a thousand years, if we survive that long, if we could upload a digitised quantum entangled copy of our minds to some sort of Cyber brain, in the body of an enhanced Robot. Would that 'being' then be subject to existing laws of Robotics, ...?
Even stranger, what if one's mind is uploaded to a biological super body with a mish-mash of hi-tech enhancements.... a cyborg?
In one Sci Fi book series I read some fellow had his mind transferred to the main computer of a Starship. Another made two dozen copies of himself... Serious SciFi author and Astro Physicist Alistair Reynolds came up with these highly speculative ideas....
Why not speculate, despite Futurists often being light years off the mark? It gets quite silly at times looking back as to what our forebears thought the future might be. I've watched a satire movie on that, with Jude Law I think.

Remember Nostradamus and all the tea cup gazers. '..tall dark strangers...' mostly silliness imho. Not quite though as we easily predict the clock work mechanisms of our Solar System, and inner timings of many things, like radioactive decay, half lives, .... even considering the very slow and gradual permutations of the ~25,000 year spin of Earth's rotational axis, likewise that our own Moon came from an epic clash with our Earth and thanks to Earth's gravity debris from that titanic clash slowly coalesced into our "one and only very big moon". In its early days our moon once roughly formed was much closer to our then firey Earth. Slowly interacting forces of gravity and centrifugal forces sought a kind of a balance, with the result being our Moon is very slowly but surely moving away from us, seeking a dream of a cosmic slingshot perhaps. Jupiter would welcome such a rare feast if it could be so lucky... ?
I even acknowledge the seeming luck of Earth's current Lunar eclipses with our Moon and our Sun having the same angular diameter allowing our eclipses being just right, not too big, nor too small.
As our semi gravitational locked Moon gets further away from our Earth Lunar eclipses will be just a spot on the sun.
We live in the cusp of our local cosmic times...

Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 hits Jupiter
This spectacular event was the first real-time observation of an extraterrestrial collision in our solar system. People around the world followed it. Scientists later learned that the comet supplied water to Jupiter's atmosphere.15 July 2022

Entropy rules! But in measured and glacial slow ways quite often.

So, aspects of Futurism can range from the precise to totally psychological make-believe. Yung n Freud would have loved to jump into that swamp I bet.

I'd hate being bossed about by a machine and it's already happening with multi choice phone answering menus, "press 4 then hash..."
which is a bit dehumanizing, but worse than that are our voice recognition services that are about 93% unreliable for me. Even shouting my reply didn't help.....

I bet Turning's test to exhibit intelligent behaviour is under the microscope now. Alan Turning was a brilliant man and sublime hero of WWII saving many tens of thousands, yet afterwards hounded to his suicide for his homosexuality.
The main focus of Turing's work at Bletchley was in cracking the 'Enigma' code. The Enigma was a type of enciphering machine used by the German armed forces to send messages securely.

The Turing test, originally called the imitation game by Alan Turing in 1950, is a test of a machine's ability to exhibit intelligent behaviour equivalent ...
We're close to it I think,

sorry to waffle on so much , Terry

No waffle at all, Terry. Thanks for your thoughts on the subject and for expanding on it. I agree that there ought to be regulations and limitations on AI for ethical reasons. It's saying something if leading experts warn against possible uncontrollable consequences.

Not long ago I read the rather thickish (The) Imitation Game by Andrew Hodges and was baffled by his lengthy excursions on maths which he as a lecturer in maths obviously couldn't resist enlarging on which is not everyone's alley. It made me wish I'd have read the thriller Enigma by Robert Harris instead, although it was more fictitious than Hodges' book that is based on letters and other original sources.

What struck me was that Turing and his mates had a rather narrow understanding of education in public schools. He came across as nerdy , almost blinkered if you like, which I thought should not be generalised. His focus was helpful, no doubt, in decoding Enigma after the Germans had cracked the Syko code of the RAF as early as in 1940.

 

[Grier]

So do I. Fantastic photos. Would be good to provide the little info available such as time/year and location. So I take it that they were taken in London with the exception of the last ones. The moustache was not just a personal style but also a symbol of masculinity as it still is in parts of Eastern Europe and the Arab world no matter how out it is in Western Europe.

What misery, what poverty is shown and they had to come to terms with it. And they , too, had one short life only which had to be spent in those conditions. Look at that well-dressed little girl who seems to be forlorn in that environment.

Good point Thomas about noting where and when the photos were taken. I was hunting around for pictures for our Story Telling group.
It could be just possible that that little girl is a very old woman now. The times she lived through would have seen many changes.
My old Irish Mother was born in 1915 and I often wonder what she would have thought to see how the world is nowadays. For example, carrying around a little computer in our pockets that does so much. She died aged only 66.

 

[Richie]

My uncle and his friend were Ten Pound Poms.

Really Jess. There were some 1m Ten Pound Poms between 1945 and 1972. Had no idea the scheme lasted that long.. probably because for much of that time only white caucasians were allowed into this country.

 

[Richie]

Terry compare your pics to these taken in 1950/60s Sydney.
Below is Coogee Beach where I lived for 20 years. The rest are self explained.

 

[Kram81]

The senior constable who tasered the old lady has now been stood down, but on full pay while the investigation is being carried out. The old lady looks very poorly now and is receiving palliative care.
Surely the police officer could have contained her without recourse to using his taser on her. A poor old demented 95 yo lady using a zimmer frame would have very little strength to cause a threat even with the steak knife she was brandising.
At least the officer didn't shoot her, God forbid.

She passed away yesterday I think.