Month: August 2020

Here Are Five Reasons Consumers Won’t Buy Your Smart Home Device

/ Fiona J McEvoy / 1 Comment

This blog was originally posted on the Hill + Knowlton Strategies website.

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The Aware Home

In 2000, a group of researchers at Georgia Tech launched a project they called “The Aware Home.” The collective of computer scientists and engineers built a three-story experimental home with the intent of producing an environment that was “capable of knowing information about itself and the whereabouts and activities of its inhabitants.” The team installed a vast network of “context aware sensors” throughout the house and on wearable computers worn by the home’s occupants. The hope was to establish an entirely new domain of knowledge — one that would create efficiencies in home management, improve health and well-being, and provide support for groups like the elderly.

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GPT-3: What Is All the Fuss About?

/ Fiona J McEvoy / 37 Comments
Alan Turing statue, Manchester, UK

“GPT-3 is not a mind, but it is also not entirely a machine. It’s something else: a statistically abstracted representation of the contents of millions of minds, as expressed in their writing.”

Regini Rini, Philosopher 

In recent years, the AI circus really has come to town and we’ve been treated to a veritable parade of technical aberrations seeking to dazzle us with their human-like intelligence. Many of these sideshows have been “embodied” AI, where the physical form usually functions as a cunning disguise for a clunky, pre-programmed bot. Like the world’s first “AI anchor”, launched by a Chinese TV network and — how could we ever forget — Sophia, Saudi Arabia’s first robotic citizen. 

But last month there was a furore around something altogether more serious. A system The Verge called, “an invention that could end up defining the decade to come.” It’s name is GPT-3, and it could certainly make our future a lot more complicated. 

So, what is all the fuss about? And how might this supposed tectonic shift in technological development change the lives of the rest of us ?  

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