Hello, and welcome to the Daily Grateful. My name is Michael Crows. Good morning, Americans. It's Friday.
It's been an interesting week. Some company, I don't know who they are. Their name was on their trucks or on their best or whatever. They came to our neighborhood this week and totally ripped the hell out of all of our lawns out and put fiber, some kind of fiber, underground.
And I couldn't get out of my driveway. They had things laying everywhere. And they just totally disrupted everything, everything. I'm going to tell you something.
They did a hell of a good job because today, there is absolutely no evidence whatsoever at all that they were here. So while they irritated me a little bit, holy cow, they put all the sod back, they put everything. I mean, you can't tell that they were on the street at all. And we're going to get some kind of a new service.
I don't know what it is if we want to buy it. Anyway, on today's edition of the Daily Grateful with Michael Crows, I thought it would be fun to go into an AI. And here is what I typed in. And then I have not read any of these yet.
We're going through these together. This is going to be fun. Okay. Give me seven talking points about how and why we should be grateful for how AI is intruding into just about every aspect of our lives.
Every aspect, not quite every aspect yet, but just about every aspect of our life. It's that way. So here's what they said. Here is what they said.
Oh, first they say, oh, that's a good one. It's easy to roll our eyes and AI showing up at everything from email to refrigerators. I'm not going to read it. Let's go down.
Number one, AI. Oh, God, I love this one. Gives us back time. Are you freaking kidding me?
Have you, do you have a Gmail account? Have you opened a, any email on Gmail lately? It's really interesting. Oh, let's see what it says.
If AI could draft emails, summarize documents, plan trips and help edit our audio for a podcast, it's time that has returned to us. Yeah, I guess, except they're analyzing my email. I'm old. I've been around a long time.
Long before there was email. And, you know, what was my first email? My first email was AOL email. I remember that.
Wow. And I was one of the early adapters of Gmail. As a matter of fact, I got my name, michael.cros, or michaelcros at gmail.com because I am a washed up former member of the National Broadcast Media. At the time the washed up part didn't exist.
I was like a big shot. So before, you know, Google put email out into the universe, they got a hold of all of us because they wanted us to use it. And they said, we're going to give you an account and you can have your name. I was okay.
That's good. Then wife, I got her her name too. Then she divorced me and remarried. You know, anyway, she didn't use that email anymore.
Although it's, you know, anyhow, I open up a, any Gmail and I did the top. I don't know if they're doing this to everybody. I think they're rolling this out. It says, it summarizes the email.
I am quite damn capable of reading my email and summarizing it myself. I think I can do it. I'm not positive. I think I can do it.
All right. What's number two? It levels the playing field. You no longer need a big staff to produce professional content.
A solo podcaster like me, a small business owner or a retiree with an idea can complete. Oh, so what does it do? Well, it's giving me the fodder for this podcast. I will say that.
But, you know, if I couldn't come up with ideas for podcasts and why am I a podcaster? If I was a radio broadcaster, if I could not or my producer could not come up with something I was going to talk about that day, then, you know, it's part of the job, Mon. It expands human creativity. AI isn't replacing creativity.
I think it is. It's amplifying it. It can brainstorm, outline, refine, and push your ideas further. Can it?
Okay. Perhaps I'm jaded. I don't know. Oh, here's what it says.
It's like having a creative partner. I'm called 24 is seven. Yeah, right. It makes learning instant.
Does it now? Because every time I go into it, I'm not going to name the AI that I've done this to. Because I asked some very specific things on an AI about something for my automobile the other day. And it gives me this long thing.
And then it says, oh, by the way, this may not be reliable. It's not right there. This may not be reliable. Well, thanks for taking my time.
All right, thanks. Damn it. All right. So I don't know.
Gives you ideas, maybe. Instead of digging through manuals or waiting on hold, you can ask a question and get explanations immediately. But then at the end it says, this might not be true. You might want to look it up.
Sure. Gotcha. Okay. It helps us stay independent longer.
How does it do that? Ah, smart health monitoring to adaptive tools. AI is helping older for us like me live independently and safely. How's it doing that?
I don't know. Number six, are you bored yet? I'm kind of bored. I mean, I'm really kind of bored.
It's really, really, really kind of bored. What should we talk about besides this? I'm not going to use AI. I'm going back to this, but I'm going to come into my own brain.
And I'm going to come up with something fun to talk about. All right, I'm on the board of directors of the Tampa Bay Technology Center. And we are questioning, or some of us are questioning, whether or not we need to exist anymore. Because essentially, we're at computer club.
I mean, that's what we started off. It started off 40 years ago as the Pinellas IBM users group. You have to be really old to know what that was all about. And now, we had 1,800 members at one time.
And now we have well under 200 members. We have like 180 members. So, you know, and we rent a facility and, you know, and it just kind of makes me wonder. But anyway, we had a meeting.
We brought in a wonderful consultant that a really big shot business consultant who decided for a pro bono, he was going to help us. I'm not going to name him, and I could name some of the things that he has done that you would recognize. I don't care where you live. I could name things that he has accomplished that you would recognize.
But anyway, we had him come in, and he's going to work with us every week. And we're going to try and make this thing better. Well, we'll see. Maybe you have ideas.
Maybe you do. Number six, it forces us to re-examine what makes us human. How does it do that? When machines can't write, paint, and compose, we are pushed to ask what's uniquely human.
You ever read, there's this woman that I follow on YouTube. I like her a lot, but she's into publishing, self-publishing. And that I like, and I bought several of her books. Well, I bought this one book, it was a big book.
And I opened it up, and I immediately saw that she did not write one stinking word of this book. It is all 100% written and everything by AI. No personality in it, nothing talking about how she uses something, it was all AI. And, you know, she wasn't doing much re-examining.
Now, number seven, as they say, as we wrap this week up, it's a mirror. AI reflects what we feed it, our values, our basic hopes, and fears. It gives us a chance to consciously shape the future instead of sleepwalking into it. What in the name of the Jambos, does that even freaking mean I don't know?
I'm not sure I want to know, but I'm finding it everywhere. Have you googled anything lately? You know, if you go to Google and you type in something, Google used to pop up into it. Now, now you have this big, long AI BS all about that you have to read.
All right, there's some woman who is on one of the, do it yourself, picks up your house things. They did something questionable. And I went to Google, because I thought I remembered her, but I didn't remember her show, and I typed her name in the net. AI comes up with this.
I had to go through like five paragraphs of AI before I could find out the name of her show. And, you know what, my ex-wife and I used to watch it. See you next week.