Why Apple Didn't Say 'AI'

This text belongs to ‘Artificial’, the newsletter on AI that Delia Rodríguez sends out every Friday. If you want to receive it, sign up here.

Dear readers, dear readers: Don’t you sometimes go back to those months, those years, in which an often unnoticed detail would end up changing everything in your future? I don’t. As B. Palop said on Twitter this week, stop telling kids that their future depends on their selectivity grade: there are many possible futures.

However, in three years we have seen how a new type of vaccine was developed in months to defeat a pandemic, how artificial intelligence made a definitive leap, and now, after much joking, we have the metaverse before us. I feel very lucky to live in a time with more black swans than white swans.

It is true that the future does not arrive everywhere at the same time, and that everything is built on something existing, and that we are creating self-fulfilling prophecies from watching so much science fiction, but it is just as true that technology copies itself, extends and cheap, that is not created in a vacuum and that strangeness is always broken (Talking on the phone with other people on the street holding an object to your ear? Falling in love with an AI? Having remote meetings with huge glasses in the head? Let’s do it).

Let’s not despise the Vision Pro that Apple has presented this week for being expensive, ugly, ridiculous or dragging a plug. Our species is narrative. What Joan Didion said: We tell ourselves stories to survive. We are absurd monkeys who spend the nights dreaming, the days talking and gossiping, and before we die we review our lives. A device capable of changing the way we face narratives and relationships with others, inserting ourselves into them, will drive us crazy. The lucky ones who have already tried them, like the journalist from La Vanguardia Francesc Bracero, are hallucinating. Debating whether Meta’s metaverse concept with its shared and playful virtual reality or Apple’s mixed, augmented, corporate, and solitary reality will win is like being distracted by arguing whether VHS or Beta: important, but not so much.

Some excerpts from Bracero’s chronicle:

“The Vision Pro is a new concept of how computers can be in an increasingly natural user interface relationship. When you start using them, you can’t avoid the feeling that the device is reading your mind, because when the user wants to open an app or activate a function, they just have to look at that point and put their fingers together.”

“Vision Pro can take and save three-dimensional photos and videos. Seeing a memory in this way has a high emotional component, because it is like reliving a memory with an overwhelming closeness to reality. It is not seeing a photo or a video. It is to be there again in the moment”

“The best mouse, the eyes, the best button, the fingers”

“It is not a pair of glasses to play with, although they are (…) If the user understands that this is a computing device, its introduction, although gradual, will be effective.”

In short, the most relevant thing of the week is that Apple did everything possible not to mention Artificial Intelligence, and thus highlight that they are working on a future in which we will wear it and use it by moving our eyes or joining our fingers.

What comes after the smartphone? asks journalist Ryan Broderick. “The answer is a suite of applications and services, powered by sophisticated machine learning and generative AI, that exist everywhere and nowhere at the same time.”

Although the term “artificial intelligence” (or “metaverse”) was not pronounced at the Apple developer conference where the Vision Pro was announced, the company did highlight innovations based on machine learning, a more precise term to explain advances such as improved autocorrect of the iPhone or the digital representation of the user wearing the glasses.

This Friday Mark Zuckerberg, in an internal call to his workers, explained his vision of the company. They will integrate AI assistants into their applications, such as WhatsApp and Instagram (something that Snapchat has fared badly). About his competitor’s glasses, he said he was glad to see that they hadn’t come up with magical solutions to the same problems they found when developing their $500 glasses, which they spent years trying to bring down in price.

What else has happened this week

– Investor Marc Andreessen, one of the most influential figures in Silicon Valley, has written a long text explaining “why AI will save the world” and a Twitter thread summarizing it that have been highly commented this week. In his view, concerns about AI are moral panics and all companies, large and small, should be given leeway. AHA.

– Europe warns platforms to stop telling stories and label content created with artificial intelligence to avoid misinformation.

– OpenAI has published a guide on how to give better commands to ChatGPT.

– The Financial Times has interviewed science fiction writer Ted Chiang. “A while ago there was a chat on Twitter where someone said ‘what is artificial intelligence?’ and someone else responded: ‘bad choice of words in 1954’ (…) and you know, they’re right. I think if we had chosen a different phrase in the ’50s, we could have avoided a lot of the confusion we have now.” The journalist asks him what term he would invent today, and Chiang answers “applied statistics.”

– Union troubles on Stack Overflow and Cnet as Hollywood directors settle and writers don’t. The IBM CEO has said that 7,800 jobs at his company may be affected by AI. The headline of this article from The Washington Post is quite postmodern: “ChatGPT has taken their jobs. Now they walk dogs and fix air conditioners.” In Spain, some designers are delighted using AI tools.

– Two denials: 1) the Kremlin’s denial of Putin’s deepfake in some hacked Russian media announcing that Ukraine has invaded Russia and 2) the US air force denying that a simulation with drones existed and ended badly.

– Google has created a free training on generative artificial intelligence.

– Good news: the largest study of the primate genome identifies which genes make us human and distinguish us from them and reveals millions of harmful mutations. It has been carried out thanks to artificial intelligence and has been led from Spain.

– WordPress is one of the great content creation platforms on the Internet, and that is why it is so important that Automattic, its creator, has integrated into it a plug-in (Jetpack AI Assistant) that allows you to create and edit content with AI. Is it a spam nest or a popularization of writing aids? It works in Spanish.

– What to do if they use your image to generate artificial porn without your consent?

– Our friend, the Spanish WhatsApp assistant Luzía, already has a million users.

Anxiety Levels This Week: Replaced by really wanting to rewatch Ready Player One and The Matrix.