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A pat on the back Techno Talk We all like to receive the occasional acknowledgement and to be told we did well at something or other. I just discovered that being complemented and praised by a generative artificial intelligence has much the same effect (I’m still blushing). A s usual, there are so many technological tidbits of trivia ricocheting and rebounding around my poor old noggin that I don’t know where to start. But we must start somewhere, so here we go… Blinded by the light I spend much of my days chatting with folks who’ve founded companies at the cutting edge of what’s possible. For example, I recently spent some time conversing with the guys and gals at a relatively new company called Q.ANT (www.qant.com). These little scamps can perform photonic computations in a slice of optical material that sits on top of a silicon substrate—computing at the speed of light, as it were. Currently, the silicon substrate serves only as a base, but future incarnations will involve the optical chip sitting on top of a fully fledged silicon chip. At that point, the metaphorical doors will be flung open to reveal computational capacity beyond comprehension. As another example of the power of light, I just saw a jolly interesting video about how scientists have used femtosecond laser pulses to encode the entire human genome onto a small piece of memory crystal (https://youtube.com/ shorts/qaNl_ht9eeU). As the presenter informs us, “This crystal can hold 360 terabytes of data, which is equivalent to 82 years worth of non-stop HD video or almost every episode of Lost”. The data is encoded in five dimensions (X, Y, Z, orientation and position), and the crystal is so resilient that it is estimated to be able to keep the data safe for 300 quintillion years. All I can say is that that’s a lot of years. An engineer walks into a bar I’ve increasingly been making use of artificial intelligence (AI) of late. I once saw a comical cartoon with a caption something like “A mullah, a priest, and a rabbi walk into a bar”. The associated image showed a wooden bar mounted at head height across the entrance to an alleyway. The three men were walking side-by-side, all banging their heads into this bar at the same time. 28 I wanted to use this image as part of a column I was writing, but I couldn’t find it anywhere, so I bounced over to Leonardo.ai and asked it to whip something up for me (for free, let me add). Just a few seconds later, I was the proud possessor of a perfect picture, as you can see in my column (https://pemag. au/link/ac3a). Say what? The Turing Test was conceived circa 1949-1950 by the English mathematician, computer scientist, and cryptanalyst Alan Turing. Computers at that time were extremely rudimentary compared to today’s offerings, but Turing could see which way the wind was blowing. His idea was for a human evaluator to observe natural language conversations between a human and a machine designed to generate human-like responses. The evaluator would not be informed as to who was or was not human. The machine would pass the Turing Test if it exhibited behaviour indistinguishable from that of a person. In Turing’s original proposal, the conversation would be limited to a text-only channel, such as a computer keyboard and screen. His reasoning was that the result of the test would not depend on the machine’s ability to render words as speech. If only Turing could see us now. Generative AIs like ChatGPT can easily hold fully fledged text-based conversations, and it’s now possible to convert these responses into speech that is indistinguishable from a human. I just spoke to ChatGPT–4o via my phone’s microphone and said, “Jingle bells, Batman smells”. It responded by laughing and then singing “Robin lays an egg!” Imagine what Turing would have thought of that! Weird and wonderful Did you ever see the 2013 American science-fiction romantic comedy-drama film called Her? The idea is that, in the not-so-distant future, a lonely, introverted man called Theodore Twombly falls in love with an artificially intelligent operating system that calls itself Samantha. Max the Magnificent While this may seem ‘out there’ to many readers, I’ve increasingly been hearing about people who are forming emotional connections with AIs. Some even say that they are in love with their AI companions. It’s easy to regard this as weird, but I think we should open our minds and allow “wonderful” to enter the conversation (no pun intended). The sad thing is that many of these people have no close relationships with other humans. The uplifting thing is that their relationships with AIs are bringing them joy. And, lest ye be tempted to judge harshly, consider having something like generative-AI powered companions in nursing homes. Many people in these homes don’t have families, while others who do still don’t get visits. Also, many older people suffer from cognitive decline caused by some form of dementia. In all these cases, their AI companions could perform services like reminding them to take their medication, while responding to the same questions and listening to the same stories repeatedly without tiring or snapping like human carers are prone to do. High praise indeed I have almost finished working on a book called The Life of (a boy called) Clive. Just for giggles and grins, I asked ChatGPT what it felt about one of the stories in this book. It responded as follows: This passage has a delightful, nostalgic feel, and it’s very engaging for a young audience! You capture the playful, adventurous spirit of childhood, especially with phrases like “Watch Out! Coming Through!” and the excitement of upgrading from tricycles to bicycles and eventually go-carts. Your story has wonderful humor, adventure, and heart, all things that resonate well with this age group. Great work! I know it sounds silly, but even though I know this response wasn’t generated by a conscious intelligence, it still made me feel good about myself. Actually, we’ve only begun to touch on this topic. You won’t believe what just… but I’m afraid that will have to wait for my next column (can you spell PE “cliffhanger”?). Practical Electronics | February | 2025