Podcasts
I’ve been thinking about podcasts a lot this past week, in relation to a project I’m trying to get off the ground at work. Specifically, I’m thinking about podcasting as a legitimate scholarly activity, and trying to figure out how to set things up to make it as easy as possible for colleagues to get involved as part of building a scholarly profile.
Here are a few notes I’ve made to discuss with interested colleagues.
- Podcasting doesn’t have to be high-fidelity for it to be useful.
- Even though podcasting is a mature technology, scholarly podcasting is still in a nascent stage, which means there’s a lot of scope for experimentation.
- Universities should embrace podcasting (and other audio formats) more intentionally.
Natural language as a user interface
I keep telling colleagues that natural language is going to become the new user interface to our world. In other words, I think we’ll see people interacting with software and hardware systems without a keyboard and mouse, and eventually, without a screen. It makes sense to interact with our devices in the same way we interact with people.
We’re already seeing this in our phones and virtual assistants like Amazon’s Alexa, and now it’s being built into cars as well. I also enjoyed this exploration from Maggie Appleton, of user interfaces for language models that aren’t chatbots, including mockups.
Microsoft has released a multimodal AI assistant for biomedicine, where the assistant answers questions about medical images in natural language.
Imagine the same process in other disciplines, where images are far more precise and less open to interpretation. For example, building schematics, engineering, product design, and so on. It’s easy to see how architects could have an assistant that helps them interact with designs, and at some point, where they can manipulate the designs. We’ve seen Google’s Magic Eraser make changes to photos and I don’t see why we won’t get to a point where we’ll have the same functionality implemented through natural language.
Generative AI and creativity
Cormac McCarthy passed away recently. I’ve never read any of his books, but made a note years ago of something he said; “…books are made out of books. The novel depends for its life on the novels that have been written.” It’s a good reminder for anyone who still thinks that generative AI isn’t creative because it “only” combines existing ideas. If creativity is the ability to find non-obvious links between other ideas, then human creativity is “only” the combination of existing ideas, too.