Posted by The hype of AI is well and truly on its way which, for me, is reminiscent of the hype surrounding the unveiling of the first artificial neural network (ANN) Perceptron, in 1958.
It only had one neuron or brain cell, but that didn’t stop the New York Times from declaring that it was:
The embryo of an electronic computer that [the Navy] expects will be able to walk, talk, see, write, reproduce itself and be conscious of its existence.”
The New York Times on Perceptron (1958) processing visual data to recognise objects
And, everyday we hear something similar.
Just this week I had to buy a new phone as society now dictates I need one so that I can be on standby 24/7 whilst I receive endless messages from schools, sixth forms, hospitals, jobs, organisations and so on, saying things that either:
a) Are already marked in my calendar and seared on my brain as they are so important, or
b) Something that is automatically generated, not relevant, often inaccurate and always really, really irritating.
But, apparently that is my job now. I am on constant standby, full-alert, because as a woman, I am on the triple shift, managing all my family’s business. And, for the record, I did not sign up for this.
Incredibly, my new whizzy phone asked me if I wanted to use AI to tell me what the weather was this morning. No, I do not. I can just look out of the window (it is foggy this morning) and make my own mind up. I don’t need Google’s weather sensors reading data points from somewhere around here, sending the data via the ‘cloud’ aka massive cables under the sea, to their massive software servers which are probably in some data centre city to chunk through some endless calculations to send back to my phone here.
Is this progress? I ask myself and anyone who is listening.
Refreshingly, there is one story which stands out in and amongst the hype and that is:
Last summer the fast-food chain McDonald’s withdrew its AI from the drive-thru after a whole stream of viral TikTok movies showed the McDonald’s ‘robot’s wild’ behaviour, putting bacon on ice-cream and adding 200 McNuggets to customers’ orders, in a less than positive light.
So, I am giving a talk on the WI Learning Hub on Wednesday 5th March 2025 at 7.30pm GMT to investigate further.
In the talk, we will explore the history of the American drive-thru, how bacon on ice-cream was a thing invented by The Two Ronnies, long before Heston Blumenthal got in on the act; how speech recognition has been in our psyche since storytelling began, just think Open Sesame for getting access to the treasure and; how speech recognition is different from voice recognition.
Spoiler alert: Speech recognition is one input for everyone, rather like people taking turns on a McDonald’s kiosk to order a burger. Voice recognition is for identification purposes. Think Tom Cruise making fake retinas, fingers and other villain’s body parts to break into some secure facility in one of his sci-fi movies. A person’s voice is the unique to them, moreorless.
Once speech recognition gets our command into system, natural language processing (NLP) takes it from there. So, in the talk we whizz through the history of NLP from linguistics and wave forms to deep learning and large language models (LLMs), made famous by that most famous of all LLMs, ChatGPT. And, I’ll talk about what happens when I talk Dutch to Duolingo including how it remembers which bits of Dutch I am good at speaking.
In this way, we will be able to see what happened at McDonald’s drive-thru as we (and ChatGPT) try to imagine how McGoogle: McDonald’s new NLP collaboration with Google Cloud will work. Because like our favourite terminator, McDonald’s drive-thru AI promises that it will be back.
I am very excited to be giving this talk and I hope to see you there.
Also, check out my Talks page to see future talks from yours truly as I go about demystifying AI .
