In a June 2022 article[1] by Nitasha Tiku at the Washington Post, Google engineer Blake Lemoyne believes the company’s AI (artificial intelligence) has come to life. I shared the article title with my wife, and her initial reaction was to be suspicious. “That doesn’t sound reassuring. Haven’t they read Asimov? Or seen the movie? Trouble.”
The article balances Lemoyne’s claim with Google’s Responsible AI team leaders, who investigated and dismissed it[2]. Other engineers believe they have seen similar conscious behavior in the AI or that it is not far from happening. The June 11th edition of the Economist magazine, known for being a center-right publication, covers AI as the week’s main topic. The various articles discuss the advances and challenges of deep learning and emergent behavior, such as understanding why a joke is funny. While the actual coding is relatively simple and short, the amount of data and parameters used to create sentences and understand sequences is vast – nearly 137 billion parameters, for example. This help the AI take a jumble of words and put it into a coherent sentence in response to a question you might ask, such as asking if a character in a story is jealous or being a bully – a query you wouldn’t get a likely result from Google Search. Google’s LAMDA (Language Model for Dialog Applications) is showing great promise in advancing the order of social modeling by predicting someone’s behavior or ‘feeling’ empathy in a situation.
Hearing about these advancements excites me for the world of people with dementia and the elderly in general. My mother is in her late 80s, with several health issues, including vascular dementia. While she can still remember my name and knows what year it is, her capacity to understand space and time is deteriorating quickly. Even though she knows it is 2022, and her parents passed away more than 25 years ago, she believes she recently saw them after walking down the street to have afternoon coffee and sweets with them. She lives in Southern California, and her parents lived in San Jose, Costa Rica, nearly 3,700 miles away – a six-hour plane ride. In addition, even though she lives with my family, including my wife, two kids, and four dogs, she is terribly lonely. Who wouldn’t be after losing a spouse of 53 years? With these advances in AI, someone suffering from that same loneliness and anxiety can interact with an AI to have those repetitive conversations with data inputs the family can share to help the person with dementia. They can be at ease and enjoy a memorable time and space as they live out their sunset years.
As an exit planning advisor, I help business owners prepare for the unexpected. It is a strategic way to ensure you meet you and your family’s personal, business, and financial goals? Are you ready?
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