In a world dominated by rapidly appearing technological progression, its easy to see many technologies as nothing more than gimmicks.
Indeed, it is difficult to look past the likes of autonomous vehicles, ‘metaverse’ and virtual reality, interconnected smart homes, to see the applications of these advancements. When so many of the biggest breakthroughs seem like short term fads, overpriced tat or just plain wasteful, uses of these technologies can be missed.
When it comes to Folk Evidence, one of the greatest limiters of its potential success is whether the integrated AI engine can scour forums in a safe, unbiased way. Yet with so many stories in the media in recent months of AI integrations leading to unexpected or harmful results, it is difficult to see how this could be guaranteed, in a volatile task that is reliant on system stability.
This was a major concern for me and for the project, but it is becoming more and more apparent that these emerging technologies, however trivial they may seem with their commercial intent and apparent unimportance, can be used to do great things.
In an article for The Times this month, journalist Tom Whipple described an unexpected success of one such emergent technology. Where Meta had designed Meta glasses with a goal “for people to use the £300 specs to update their Instagram pages”, they were bringing unexpected benefits to a particular group of users: the visually impaired.
“Hey Meta, what number bus is approaching?”
Whipple describes the glasses as being “magical” for those with partially or totally lost vision, as they are able to convert inputs from their cameras into audio, which is then played to the wearer.
All it takes is a question, for instance “Hey Meta, what number bus is approaching?”, to which the AI would reply with a description of what the glasses could see, focussing on nearby buses. This has allowed many visually impaired users to operate far more autonomously, giving them independence to see through description what their eyes can’t show them.
When glasses like these, designed specifically for social networking, become more useful and appreciated in a totally different context, technology has functioned properly. Rather than creating a product to sell, tech companies are able to push a technology or an idea to help make life better for anyone who could benefit from the advancements it brings.
In the face of such an unexpectedly life-changing use of AI based video to audio technology, the question begs to be asked: what other technological developments could thrive in unexpected ways in the face of this insurgence of technological development?
I believe that while artificial intelligence has its flaws, its applications in summarising, collating and analysing data are its greatest strength. Even so, it is through the reassurance of success stories like this one that its use in the development Folk Evidence becomes more and more realistic.