This weekend was Confluence, an SF convention in Pittsburgh. I've been attending this con for the past few years. They have a great writer's and music tracks.

I spent Saturday morning in a seminar on merging world, character and plot. The presenter made a point that for SF and Fantasy, the setting is practically another character.

I attended three panels on AI, and I'm less of a skeptic on the topic than I was.

One of the panels was presented by a guy who works with the UPitt super-computer system. He talked about various AI projects they've worked on that are *NOT* ChatGPT. They use carefully curated datasets and are looking for correlations within that dataset, not trying to generate wrong answers to random questions.

One project is mapping the plankton species and things that eat plankton. This is a critical piece of info if you're trying to predict when or if the ocean is going to die on us.

The traditional way of doing this is to drag a net behind a trawler and count the stuff you dredge up. The problems are that you now have everything that lives in the top inch of the ocean to however deep your net is - maybe 30 feet.

That's several ocean eco-systems, all stirred into one mess.

The new AI Assisted technique is to drag an array of cameras behind the ship and record a few hours of activity. The AI can recognize the fish (or at least highlight frames with a thing that needs to be identified by a human).

With the net, they had to go back to port to empty the net and count what they'd caught. If there was something interesting in the catch, it was too late to go back to see what it was.

The AI can run in near-real-time, so if there's something interesting going on, they can turn around and get more details.

The AI trained on colon X-Rays is better than most diagnosticians at detecting colon cancers. I'm going out on a limb to believe that the best humans are better than the AI, but I won't argue that the AI can easily be better than the average.

Right now, I'm predicting that the next generation of personal computers will have several special-purpose chips for handling AI operations, and an operating system that splits tasks between the normal CPU and the AI CPU.

Intel is already making a CPU with a second processor (Neural Processor Unit) to enhance it's AI performance.

We talked about how AI's would affect the world in the future, and instead of the usual science fiction "A Century from Now", it was "Next Year."