Connectivity. What does that mean in today's world? That's what Chet and Gary
discussed today. Let's go!
Good morning Chet and how are you today? I'm doing great Gary how about yourself?
Well it's been so long since we've done one of these almost forgot how to do it.
Oh are we doing something? I think we're doing something today. Yeah it's been a
while. Well the microphone's working so it's working. It took me a while to
figure out how to work it but it's working. So today I think we're going to
talk a little bit about connectivity. And that's also the subject of your of our
meeting. That's right living in a connected world 14. So if I don't get this
on here before the meeting this information will be good for after the
meeting. There you go. So just what does connectivity mean to us as Apple Club
members? Well it's an interesting thing and I think it's as seniors that we
don't tend to be as connected as our kids are. You know when you take a look at
you've got all the social media sites and other things that are online online
news and online banking and so forth and we tend not to be quite as connected
as the kids. And I think that's something that we need to make sure that we
better understand because what we're seeing in the world around us is banks
are going to online banking stores are going to online ordering a produce that
you can have delivered to your house. I mean you can have Kroger's bring food to
you and we don't have a Kroger's store anywhere around us and they'll bring
food to your door. Those kind of things you can order a pizza and have it
delivered to your door all of that stuff online. That's one form of being
connected but there's something I think that's even more important and that's
the idea that we can actually be connected by documents that we have
shared with other people. And there are two different ways we can share
something. If I create a note with the Notes app I can share that with somebody
else by making a copy and sending them a copy. Interestingly though in my mind
that doesn't connect us. Why? Because when I copied it I actually created two
independent documents. If I change the original after I make the copy the copy
doesn't know I did that. If the person I sent the copy to makes a change I don't
know anything about it. So we didn't really connect each other. I sent you
some information and you know I'm around but it's kind of like putting
something in an envelope and mailing it. If I change the original after I mail it
you don't know about it and what you do with the original or with your copy I
don't know. So we're connected for a brief amount of time? A very brief amount of
time. In fact I got it to the point in my own mind of thinking about the copy as
a historical document. It's a snapshot of the original at a point in time and it
doesn't evolve after that. The other side of this is the technology that we
have available to us especially in the Apple world allows us to actually share
a document for the purposes of collaboration. When we do that there's
only one copy of the document. It's sitting in iCloud and both of us see the
same document. So if I collaborate with you on a note and you look in and say
wait a minute it should have said this and you changed it I immediately know
you changed it. I can change it and immediately change your back. I looked
up the information on notes and you can share a note with up to a hundred other
people. And as you make changes to it everybody sees the changes that are
being made to it. So I think when we talk about collaboration when we talk about
sharing when we talk about living in a connected world we need to start to think
about what does it mean to be connected not what does it mean to contact make
phone call to somebody send a something to the mail send them an email but to
actually be connected to look at this and saying I'm sharing the same thing.
Freeform is a great example of this. Freeform you can share with multiple
people and you can have multiple people drawing on the freeform document all at
the same time and you can actually see the keystrokes of the other people as
they're drawing. That's in real time. In real time. Now notes there's a little bit
of a lag. It tends to wait a few seconds when somebody's typing on their version
before it posts it back to everybody else. But it's almost real time. So the
difference is are we really being connected or are we simply notifying
each other of historical fact. We know another real life example of this is
creating a grocery list and sharing it. Yes. As you're shopping with your significant
other your wife your girlfriend whatever you go separate ways and as you tick
things off then the other party knows that they can see it was ticked off.
That's right. Yes. So I think that's a pretty pretty cool feature because you
could be at two different stores right and things will get ticked off. So yeah
that's kind of a real life application for me anyway. Yeah and the thing that
we're looking at is is going to get more and more interesting as we see a lot
more robotics stuff show up. Robotics has exploded over the last couple of years.
When you look at the state of the art of robots today their dexterity their
mobility their ability to copy human actions has gotten so good that
we're very very close to having robots that can work in the home cleaning and
washing dishes and folding laundry and doing a whole lot of things like that.
And a lot of people can say well I don't believe you but if you if you look at
where the state of the art is we're probably within two years of that.
Is the thing. And when you talk about well how in the world are they going to
know how to do that that's the artificial intelligence side and that is
another thing that is just literally blown up all over the place. We've figured
out how to teach computers not program them teach them and once we knew how to
do that then the our ability to do things through artificial intelligence are
mind-boggling. So I think we're looking at realistically an environment that
probably in the neighborhood of five plus years five years or so you're going
to be able to buy a robot that you can put in your home that can take care of
the house for you. We'll have our own butlers and maids. Butlers and maids. The
interesting thing is that as we start doing that our dependence on the
technology is going to increase. So I think one of the things for seniors and
seniors can take advantage of these. The fact that you can have the system do
things for you or you can have an electronic servo or robot or what do you
want to call it that does things for you is the the real benefit that I see to
seniors. But it does mean that we need to learn how to deal with that. Well
there's also there's always that question of you know the dark side of
that where people actually generate pictures AI pictures or voices to gain
access excuse me access to personal data. No matter what you do there's always
going to be a section of people that try to get around it and use it for for bad
instead of for good. Can you point to any point in history where that has not
been a true statement. That's what I said it's always gonna it's always been there.
It's always gonna be there. That's right and it just means that we need to learn
to do things differently. I remember when I was a kid growing up women never paid
much attention to how they carry the purse. And now there's a great deal of
time and energy put into how's the best way to carry a purse so somebody can't
just grab it run away with it. So you know we learn things like that we learn
to look for indicators that there is a potential problem. And I think that's
the kind of thing that we're gonna have to find. There's a lot of talk in the
industry at the moment with this ability to generate pictures and to mimic
someone's voice and talking about requiring that the companies that build
software that do those kind of things embed in that voice or that picture
some kind of a code that says this is not real this was generated by chat
Jpt or it's the hydro voice routine or something like that that's that's working
out there. So there are some efforts to try to get a handle on this. Yeah as long
as as long as safeguards are built into it that's what you're looking for.
Well that's the thing that's kind of frightening you watch some of the new
software that's shown up that's actually able to generate movies and you can go
in and say create a character for me that looks like and then give it a line of
dialogue and the mouth moves and the eyes and the eyebrows move and the head
moves just like a human would move and you look at that person is
saying those words. I can remember back with Forest Gump was the movie where
they had Forest Gump talking to Kennedy and they actually made Kennedy's lips
appear to say the words that he supposedly was saying and they did that
by going back and finding speeches of his and capturing little snippets of
pictures out of those with his lips moving in that that fashion and that's
how they put that together we don't have to do that today. It's pretty simple now.
Yeah it's very simple. So if they I guess if whoever designs these or gets these
on the market if they would take as much care as Apple. Apple is a very secure
company that's what they hang their head on is the security side because we're
always getting security updates all the time. So if someone puts that much thought
and effort into security on these AI then it can be used for good. Well it's
interesting though that one of the phenomena that we see is that people
want cheap. Oh yeah. And putting some of these extra bells and whistles in and
some of the security features in cost more so they're not as cheap as the
version that doesn't have them all. And somehow we've got to get through to
people that the cheap version yes I can get it for ten dollars instead of twenty
dollars is not the right answer when you're looking at some of this stuff.
Well I'm sure we'll dive deeper into connectivity on Wednesday. Can't wait to
hear the presentation. How many slides this time. Let's see I think it's around
forty five forty five. Oh you're slacking. Well I want to have some more time for
the table exercise than otherwise. Yeah this doesn't take quite as much energy
as going through the artificial intelligence one and getting all that
out. But I think that between artificial intelligence and this connectivity
thing that's kind of setting the stage for where we're going in the near
future. Well it's going to be interesting we can't wait it's going to be
Wednesday the 14th from one to three happy Valentine's Day in advance so we
love our members can't wait to see him. Right. Chad has been great as always. I
think we'll end here and have a wonderful day. You too Gary. Bye. Bye.