Husband’s hearing aids are the sort that are battery operated. At least once a week he has to replace the batteries, those tiny round ones that come in a round plastic case and that are impossible to remove from their packaging. Husband has very poor fine motor skills at this point, and it has become increasingly difficult to change the batteries. I am always worried he will drop one and a dog will swallow it.
We decided it was time to move up to rechargeable hearing aids. We visited an audiologist last week and ordered these high tech, state of the art hearing aids. They come in a nice red color that are easy to see when not in his ears. They are somehow hooked up to an AI program that causes them to mainly pick up sound from the dominant environmental sound source. They sound so wonderful I almost want to give them names and have a welcome home party. They also cost a bundle, so Husband better not lose them.
I find the emerging AI presence in our world disturbing, but I can see the benefit if used for things like hearing aids. We pick them up next week in Sioux Falls. I hope they live up to their hype.
Thoughts, fears, hopes about AI?
Trail Baboon 
Two AI issues for me. The first is the AI voices on the other end of a phone call. The last few days I’ve been in charge of the phone calls to cancel Nonny‘s triple AAA card, AARP, Consumer Cellular etc. etc. I really want a live person to deal with when I make these calls. I want to write down the name of the person who I speak to, the date and everything on the last piece of paper we have. And every company is different. For some if you say “representative“ right away, you get to a live person right away but more and more often they still want to qualify you using their AI before they give you to a live person. Irksome.
I will admit right upfront before the second part of this diatribe that I have not done a massive amount of reading on this topic so if I’m really off base, someone please tell me. But I am worried whether our planet can sustain the voracious appetite of AI in terms of energy usage. We’ve already taxed the Earth plenty even without AI.
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I agree with all those sentiments.
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After having to use all 13 clues for Octordle and whiffing Quordle, I wasn’t holding out high hopes for Wordle. But I got it in TWO! That doesn’t happen very often
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We got yesterday’s in four, but ended up using the clue… probably would have been five.
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Where are these clues you are talking about?
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Interesting. I just put up a post about AI (https://vanmarmot.org/2026/04/01/its-a-blogs-life-01-april-2026/). I think of AI as just a very useful tool which, like most tools, works well for some things and not for others (try using a hammer as a screwdriver). That said, we don’t use it to write our posts. Since an AI can’t actually, in real life, go on a hike, it has no context with which to talk about our experiences out on the trail. Sure, we could use it to write a draft to edit but it’s proven easier and more authentic just to write our own stuff from scratch. I suppose one day there will be hiking robots powered by AI but, until then, it’ll be just us humans out on the trail…
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Misinformation.
I use ChatGPT.
Just the other day I asked a question about the demolished East Wing of the White House. The answer came back that the East Wing had not be demolished. I followed up by telling ChatGPT that it was in error. The response:
“Let me put this in the strongest possible way. There is no evidence that the East Wing has been demolished.”
Tried again with added “Why are you being so obtuse!”
“I’m not being obtuse. An event of such a magnitude would be reported in multiple media platforms. Provide a link to them.”
This was getting personal.
“Chat is stupid.”
“You have reached the limit on inquiries. Consider an upgrade to ChatGPT Go.”
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Heading over to the church for the service right now. I figure best guess seven more hours in which to refrain from harming any sisters or relatives. Fingers crossed for me.
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With you in spirit.
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Yes, godspeed!
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Like VS, I’m concerned about the huge amounts of energy (and water) needed to continue increasing our AI use.
I also hate all the decent jobs being lost – where are these thousands of people going to find comparable work?
And I hate not being able to get to a real person, mostly because large companies want to further cut costs so that billionaires can get richer.
The real place for AI in my mind is the medical research, where I see good things happening.
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AI suddenly wants to write summaries of emails, which was easy to stop. It wrote a summary that was longer than the email
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If the hearing aids are in fact AI connected, I’m not sure what would be the point. Most modern hearing aids can already be set to filter out background noise.
As I understand it, AI doesn’t work in isolation. Its job is to learn by gathering information and then contextualize that information, rightly or wrongly, by comparing it to all the information already compiled. To do that it needs to be connected. Your hearing aids likely are controlled by a phone app and are also connected to the web through that phone but you wouldn’t want your hearing aids to be reliant on a web connection because sometimes your phone is out of range of a tower and you might also want to turn off your phone occasionally.
AI offers utility in a great many areas and that makes it attractive, even essential. That utility is how AI insinuates itself into our lives. But AI is also constantly collecting data, much of it personal, from devices like your phone, your online activity, and even devices with an online connection like your hearing aids (is AI hearing what you’re hearing?), Alexa, any connected appliances like a robot vacuum, smart home accessories like doorbells and security cameras. It’s all available information if it passes through the internet.
My concern is who has access to that collected information, how might they manipulate or, as Wes discovered, corrupt it, to whom might they sell it, and what could be done with it.
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Right. Can Renee and husband be hacked through his hearing aids now? Who else is listening to his conversations?
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Snort
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AI, if the aids are AI connected.
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Rise and Shine, Baboons,
Husband also just got new hearing aids of the expensive techy variety. They are much better than the old pair, squealing much less, and requiring much less management from me (now my job). Worth every penny. I do not see that they are connected to AI though, but the programming is far more sophisticated than the last pair. My son, who is well-informed about such things tells me that the difference is in the programming of the App that manages it. The cheaper places hire companies in India to program the cheap ones. Those companies hire newbies just learning to code and the products reflect that. So that is the difference. (PS he works for a trucking logistics company with experienced, sophisticated digital engineers from India. It is experience that makes the difference, not ethnicity).
Son tells me that those developing AI at this point are not to be trusted due to their lack of ethics and morals. Cases in point: Musk and Zuckerberg. He has warned me about these two companies for years, and warned me years ago to distance myself from FB due to their use of data that goes into election messes, AI, and selling your data to who knows? Son took one job coding a medical device for FB, finished it and never returned to work there because of practices he saw/sees as unethical use of data. He says Ai is simply a more rapid processing and use of data, and it will only do what coders tell it to do. The problems come in there with those managing AI telling it to do unethical things, or just not caring about anything but themselves. Thus their willingness to suck up power and feeling entitled to that power without regard to cost or unintended consquences.
These guys are engineers with few people skills, and some lack of ability to cope with moral and ethical dilemmas that involve more than 1s and 0s. They certainly are not equiped to cope with a president like the felon who threatens them or to develop a corporation with ethical abilities.
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From the beginning, Facebook made it clear they owned all the information posted. In addition to selling advertising, they sell aggregated data to, presumably, anyone. AI helps sort that. It may be that selling personalized information is the largest part of Facebook’s (or Meta’s) business.
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Well, I’m a dedicated luddite. I’m not sure we need this kind of technology right now. I can understand its use for scientific research, but not for general use. It just doesn’t seem safe. There is so much opportunity for unethical or even illegal use. There is already so much misinformation everywhere, and often people don’t understand what they’re seeing. Why do we think it’s a good idea to add to that problem?
Besides all of that, what really concerns me is the consumption of energy and water resources that data centers need. We already have issues with land and water use. Why would we compound this problem by adding data centers? I guess the technologically elite think they can go live on the moon, and all the luddites like me can stay here on a destroyed planet.
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