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24 March 2023 - Podcast #824 - (20:06)
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Depending on who's talking about it, artificial intelligence is the savior of human kind, the destroyer of all society, or no big deal.
We see artificial intelligence in systems used by banks to determine who will be given a loan, in photo processing software where the application automatically makes corrections to improve images, and in automated chat-bots designed to help customers.
I asked the ChatGPT chat-bot several questions and here are the responses.
Explain public and private keys as used for security.
Public and private keys are a fundamental part of public key cryptography, a security system that is used to secure data transmission over the internet. The basic idea is that each user has two keys, a public key and a private key, and they use these keys in combination to encrypt and decrypt messages.
A public key is intended to be shared widely, while a private key must be kept secret. When Alice wants to send an encrypted message to Bob, she uses Bob's public key to encrypt the message. Only Bob, who has the matching private key, can decrypt and read the message. This allows for secure communication because even if an attacker intercepts the encrypted message, they cannot read it without the private key.
In summary, public keys are used for encryption, while private keys are used for decryption and signing digital transactions.
How are the public and private keys created?
Public and private keys are typically generated using an algorithm known as a key pair generator. This algorithm uses mathematical calculations to create two keys that are mathematically linked, but distinct. One of the keys is designated as the private key and is kept secret, while the other is the public key and can be freely shared with others.
The exact details of how the key pair generator works can vary depending on the specific algorithm used, but it typically involves the generation of large prime numbers, the application of mathematical operations to those numbers, and the creation of the keys from the results.
It is important to note that the security of the keys is dependent on the strength of the algorithm used to generate them, as well as the length of the keys. Longer keys provide stronger security, but also require more computational resources to use.
How safe are programs such as PGP?
PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) is a widely used encryption program that uses public-key cryptography to provide secure communication. The safety and security of PGP depend on several factors, including the quality of the encryption algorithm, the strength of the keys used, and the proper implementation of the software.
In general, PGP is considered to be a very secure encryption program and has been widely used for many years. However, like all software, it is not foolproof and has had some vulnerabilities discovered over time. It is important to always keep software up-to-date and to follow best practices for security, such as using strong passwords and keeping software and systems patched.
Ultimately, the safety and security of PGP, and any encryption program, can only be as good as the underlying security of the system it is running on, the security of the keys used, and the trust in the parties involved in the communication.
What caused the Challenger crash?
The Challenger Space Shuttle disaster was caused by the failure of a seal on one of the solid rocket boosters, which allowed hot gases to escape and ignite the main fuel tank, leading to the explosion of the shuttle shortly after takeoff on January 28, 1986. The failure of the O-ring seals was due to a combination of design flaws and cold weather conditions on the day of the launch.
Explain the underlying causes of World War One.
The underlying causes of World War One were a combination of long-term and short-term factors including political, economic, military, and social tensions. The main long-term causes were imperialism, nationalism, and alliances between countries. Short-term causes included the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary, which triggered a chain of events that eventually led to the start of the war.
What were the political, economic, military, and social tensions?
Political tensions:
Economic tensions:
Military tensions:
Social tensions:
AI systems used in banking often codify biases that are tied to attitudes and beliefs not necessarily based in fact; those used in photo applications have advanced so far they usually do improve photographs; and those in chat-bots sometimes generate rage from mistreated customers.
Here's an example from UserLike that features a question to a performance venue's chatbot.
Chatbot: How may I help you today?
Human: Hi, are you able to take refillable water bottles into the venue?
We don't have any events at the moment.
Can I help you with anything else?
Can you take water bottles in?
Sorry, we don't accept take away requests.
Can I help you with anything else?
Can I bring my reusable water bottle?
We don't allow dogs on the premises.
What else can I help you with?
This is useless.
Chat-bots can be useful, though. When Amazon customers need to return something, a chat-bot starts the conversation and often can complete the process successfully. The programming is sufficiently intelligent to recognize when it can't solve the problem and immediately switches the chat to a real person.
In most cases, the real person is able to resolve the problem, but I've encountered two instances in the past six months when the human did little more than transmit prepared comments and then failed utterly to solve the problem. That's the exception, though.
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Lately, ChatGPT has gotten a lot of attention. It able to answer questions, compose emails and reports, and even write computer code. OpenAI released ChatGPT in November 2022 and anyone can use the free version. For a monthly $20 fee, users get better performance.
It's necessary to create an account to use ChatGPT and it may frequently report that it is beyond capacity when the servers are under heavy load. Usually waiting a few minutes and submitting the request again is sufficient. I tried asking a relatively simple question:
Why can nothing exceed the speed of light? According to the theory of special relativity, the speed of light is considered to be an absolute cosmic speed limit. This is because as an object approaches the speed of light, its mass increases infinitely and it requires an infinite amount of energy to reach that speed. This means that it is impossible for any object with mass to reach or exceed the speed of light.
I also asked ChatGPT to describe the underlying causes of World War One and the response covered most of the primary causes. It would be easy to think of the AI technology as a kind of search engine, but this wouldn't be accurate because it's essentially a language model that's intended to have a conversation with the user. ChatGPT has no ability to search the internet for information. Additionally, it has limited knowledge of events after 2021.
If you ask How many days is it until summer arrives? you may not be satisfied with the answer: "The exact number of days until summer depends on your location and the definition of summer you are using. Summer solstice, the longest day of the year, occurs around June 20th or 21st in the Northern Hemisphere and December 20th or 21st in the Southern Hemisphere. So, you can count the days until then if you are using the astronomical definition of summer. However, the exact date and length of summer can vary depending on cultural, meteorological or regional definitions."
But you can ask a follow-up question, which I did on 4 February: How many days is it until June 21, 2023? The response: "As of February 4, 2023, there are approximately 156 days until June 21, 2023."
Artificial intelligence can be used for mundane tasks that require no insights or creativity. One of the rules of writing a computer program is that there will always be errors, no matter how simple the aplication is.
I asked ChatGPT to create a random number generator using Python. This is a trivial two-line bit of code that the app handled with ease. The output explained how to use the code and even documented Python's random.randint() method.
Then I tried something a bit more complex: Using PHP, create a web form to collect a name and email address and insert them into a MySQL database.
The result was workable code, but it was far from complete. ChatGPT cautioned me: "This is just a basic example. You should add error handling, validation, and security measures to your code before using it in a real-world scenario."
We have progressed from coding in ones and zeros to machine language and then to high-level languages. The next logical step is for computer programs to create computer programs. Human developers will still be needed for innovation, but routine work will probably be turned over to applications that can read plain English requests and return code that needs little or no additional work.
There is concern that students may use ChatGPT to write reports for classes they're enrolled in instead of doing the work themselves. OpenAI has developed a applet that's intended to be used by teachers to detect text that appears to have been written by an artificial intelligence system. Unfortunately, it's currently not accurate or reliable.
Instead, there's GPTZero, which is being developed by Princeton undergraduate student Edward Tian, who is studying both computer science and journalism. GPTZero can currently be used for free.
I gave GPTZero five chunks of text from this article and five chunks of text written by ChatGPT. The five segments of text I wrote were all reported as "Your text is likely to be written entirely by a human" and four of the five bits of text written by ChatGPT were reported as "Your text is likely to be written entirely by AI." The fifth returned a result that said "Your text is most likely human written but there are some sentences with low perplexities."
The test is based on what Tian calls "perplexity", a measurement of how random or how familiar text is to a language model. Something that has a low perplexity score is likely to have been written by an AI system. The lowest score my text received was 77 and none of the ChatGPT results exceeded 40.
CNET tried using an AI application to write news stories in January and the experiment wasn't exactly a success. More than half of the stories written by the AI application contained errors that had to be corrected later. That doesn't mean AI is unsuited to the job. Instead, it means that more work is required and that reports assigned to the bot need to be chosen with care, just as no news director would send a rookie to cover a presidential news conference.
Other concerns are that chat-bots will replace humans. Chat-bots are fast. When I asked for a written summary of the underlying causes of the First World War, ChatGPT wrote it in less than a minute, and that included the time I used in asking follow-up questions.
So both ChatGPT and GPTZero are just tools, and tools can be used for good and for bad. The same hammer that can be used to build a house can also be used to kill someone. The trouble is less with the tools than with we humans who use them.
In the far distant past (maybe the late 1960s) getting a copy of a new record you liked was difficult. Maybe you remember calling the local radio station, requesting the record, preparing your recorder, and waiting until the song you wanted to hear came up. Naturally, the cat yowelled at a space alien or the dog barked while the record was on and that ruined your recording.
It's a lot easier now with streaming services and download options. Some terrestrial radio stations, and particularly internet radio stations, specialize. You can find stations that play nothing but organ music, acid jazz, polka, or tango in addition to offerings that appeal to larger audiences: Jazz, classical, rock, electronic, folk, and dozens of others.
If you listen to over-the-air radio, you might not be able to find what you want. Ohio has, for example, just one full-time jazz station and it's in Columbus. Someone in Zanesville, Toledo, or Dayton won't be able to hear it. Listening may be difficult even in central Ohio because it's a low-power FM station. LPFM licenses are available to noncommercial educational entities and public safety and transportation organizations, but not to individuals or for commercial operations. The station's power is just 100 Watts, which is the maximum power allowed. One of the commercial radio stations in Columbus operates with an effective radiated power of 175,000 Watts.
Many radio stations have an option on their website to listen live, but you first have to find the station, locate its website, and create a bookmark. There's an easier way.
The free StreamWriter app has links for thousands of radio stations and has a recording function for those who may want to listen later. The default is to record any station's streaming audio when you're listening to it. I turned that feature off because I don't want the recordings. StreamWriter can capture individual selections, name them, and save them automatically, but I have plenty of audio recordings that are almost always higher quality than what you'll find with streaming services.
If you live far from your hometown but would like to listen to its radio station, StreamWriter may make it possible. Not all stations are available. IHeart stations appear to be unavailable and not all stations have streaming services. My favorite music types are classical and jazz. Plenty of those are in the StreamWriter listings. WQXR became one of my favorite stations when I was in New York City and I enjoy being able to listen to it on the computer.
Have I mentioned that I went to Columbia University? It's true. I got on the 1 train and rode uptown to 116th Street and there it was. Well, I did say that I went to Columbia, not that I attended Columbia. Sorry. Moving on.
The installation process is easy, so I won't get into that. When you open the application, check Settings under the File menu. You can set StreamWriter to start with Windows, which I didn't do, but I did specify that the app should move to the Notification area on close so that I don't accidentally terminate it. On the Recordings tab, I turned off the option to save stream files. There are 13 tabs in Settings to explore and another five in Settings for Automatic Recordings. Most of these can be ignored if you just want to play music. By default, the action for double-clicking is to record a stream. If you prefer to just play the stream when you double-click it, change the action on the first Settings tab.
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If you know the name or call letters of the station you want to listen to, type it in the (1) Search field. Or if you're looking for a particular type of music, leave Search blank and choose a (2) Genre from the drop-down list. You can narrow the search by specifying a minimum bitrate in the (3) Kbps field. Higher numbers indicate better quality. It's better to leave the (4) Type field set to -no type- unless you want to limit the results to MP3 or AAC streams.
When you find a station you try, double-click it in the (5) list and it will appear in the (6) left panel and will be reported as Connected. When a new selection is about to start, you'll see (7) an alert near the Notification area in the lower right corner of the screen.
When an audio stream is playing, the user can use a (1) 10-band equalizer to adjust the sound and there's a built-in (2) volume control. If your keyboard doesn't have built-in audio functions, you can use the (3) Hotkeys tab to define actions to play, pause, or stop a stream, to move between streams, and to control the volume. This is one place where the application's German origin slips through even if you've changed the interface to English, Dutch, Finnish, Russian, Spanish, French, or Polish.
You may find some surprising stations. Here's one: Melodies Web Radio plays jazz, ambient, and relaxation music 24 hours a day. Nothing odd there, but the station is located in Athens. Not Athens, Ohio; not Athens, Georgia; not the Athens in California, Illinois, Indiana, Oregon, Pennsylvania, or Wisconsin either. Or the two dozen or so other towns around the US. It's from the one in Greece and the spoken bits can be in any number of languages.
You can download the free application from the StreamWriter website.
Running Android apps on a Windows computer isn't new, but previously it wasn't easy. Starting with the October 2021 version of Windows, it's an option available for all computers that meet a few basic requirements:
Open Settings > System > About and confirm that the OS build is at least 22000.282, that the computer has at least 8GB of RAM (more is better), and that virtualization is enabled. You can check virtualization by opening the Task Manager (Windows Key + X, then choose Task Manager). Open the (1) Performance tab, then click the (2) CPU component, and examine Virtualization. If it's activated, continue.
You'll need the Amazon Appstore, which can be installed from the Windows Store, so open the Windows Store and search for Amazon Appstore or use this link. Install the appstore.
When the installation is complete, click the Open Amazon Appstore button. If you're already an Amazon customer, sign in with your existing credentials. Otherwise, create an account. When you've signed in, you can find and install apps.
Many of the apps are "free" but offer in-app purchases, which means that the developer will want to sell you upgrades from the free version.
Once upon a time, all the way back in the 1970s, a small company in Orem, Utah, created a word processing program. Eventually Satellite Software International's WordPerfect program all but owned the word processing market. Then Microsoft noticed the market segment, hoodwinked SSI into developing for OS/2 and then went all-in on Windows, and nearly overnight stole the office suite market.
In 2003, Microsoft had all but won, but there was still hope for WordPerfect:
Microsoft and Corel are racing to release the next versions of their office suites. Microsoft will probably be first, but Corel has some features that might be worth waiting for.
The next version of Microsoft's Office suite (Office 11) is expected to begin shipping within the next few months. Things have been relatively quiet up north, but from Ottawa comes word that Corel's first beta of WordPerfect Office 11 is out. No expected shipping date has been announced, but it will probably be 3rd quarter.
XML will be big players for both. Corel has put itself in a good position to pursue the XML market which, for one thing, will allow people to more easily move text between applications and to use it in print and on a website without the usual formatting headaches involved.
One thing Corel has done that has made it popular with users it to maintain the same file format from version 6 through version 10. That will continue with version 11. A user will be able to write a document in version 11, hand it to someone who uses version 6 or 7, and expect it to work. Try that with Word!
Microsoft is aiming Word at developers and promising them the ability to create XML templates in Word.
In pricing WordPerfect Office has the advantage. The standard edition's suggested retail price is $300 and it will probably be available for far less. The upgrade from a previous version will be $150 and educational users (students and teachers) will have a $100 version.
Microsoft hasn't released any prices yet.
Microsoft Office 2003 will not run on Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows Me, or Windows 2000 if Service Pack 3 isn't installed. Some feel that this is an attempt to push them to newer operating systems (and it probably is) but anyone who is still running Windows 9x, Me, or a pre-SP3 version of Windows 2000 probably isn't too likely to upgrade the word processor anyway.