Just as food has warnings (too much sugar, too much salt, etc), so electronics should be labelled: "requires online registration" and "captures conversations" and "scans your network".
That's not enough. We don't allow food companies to just slap on "contains lead" and keep selling poison. And if every device has this label it just becomes useless.
Someone at work said something along the lines of "so AI is going to write the documents and then people will use AI to summarise them". I think this is a good opportunity to rationalise bureaucracy but I fear we will only mindlessly automate it.
With many bureaucratic systems AI seems to be used to build a better horse when cars and tractors already exist. Everything was built for a paper based world and was never designed with data or automation in mind.
I see it as the first step towards removing entire workflows like this.
Once the humans are removed, there is far less motivated reasoning to keep that process alive if it’s just robots burning tokens passing paper back and forth.
I will likely somehow be proven wrong, but it is one of the main uses I am optimistic for in the AI space.
Yes that is a good point and AI also gives us tools to make traditional systems more quickly. It could actually deliver on some of the original benefit promised by computing.
It's not only that it was text based, but that it failed in all sorts of ways.
I had a particularly bad afternoon in early 2000s when I tried to install Linux on various machines (4 or 5, each one with different hardware) and failed with all of them. Of course, I wasn't as savvy as I am now, but it's been years since I've seen an issue with a Linux install; although I might have to download and compile a driver for one thing or another, the install itself doesn't fail.
Same with me - late 90s. Celeron 366Mz, 64 MB RAM, 4.3 GB HDD. Don't remember the video card and the sound card. Used to stay up all night to try and fix X11. And once you got it running - victory !!!
For what's worth my father's old apartment somewhere in central europe has this inside of the apartment as well, common in older buildings, my 60s built Prague residential building already have them in basement, we have also (central) heating meters outside the apartment measuring the supplied hot water, same with electricity/power meters (with online readings over fiber).
Only thing inside my apartment (well technically it's vertical shaft going through whole building, but there is small access door to meter in every apartment in case you wanna stop the water in the apartment) is remotely read cold/hot water meters with antenna.
Presumably because it's cheaper. Ours was also originally in home; the utility recently came through and replaced all of ours with exterior units, likely at great cost (horizontal drilling machines aren't cheap)
I suspect the tragedy in Pennsylvania [1] was the catalyst. There are lots of potential issues with keeping these things indoors.
You've got the nostalgia and the technical limitations which are always an interesting challenge. It's no wonder some people who grew on these things and went on to have IT careers want to play with them.
Just as food has warnings (too much sugar, too much salt, etc), so electronics should be labelled: "requires online registration" and "captures conversations" and "scans your network".
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