Kingsbury Associates

The Sunday printed NYT yesterday had a fun point/counterpoint about AI Bots and human connections.  I describe both pieces below and then try to harmonize them.   1. The News Piece Gift Link for the News piece https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/12/us/elliq-ai-robot-senior-companion.html?unlocked_article_code=1.MlA.nJTy.aHEjzaAHns_e&smid=url-share First, the NYT front page "top of the fold" was a story by Eli Saslow about an 85 year old in a rural part of Washington State who was equipped with a home robot for companionship. Here's the story's lead: "At 85, Jan Worrell lived alone on a remote corner of the Washington coast. Could ElliQ become her companion?"  This is a long wonderful told story of a woman who is a rugged individualist forming a relationship of sorts with the ElliQ home robot programmed to provide fun companionship. With her family spread far and in a location with no neighbors close, Worrell's isolation was real, and as the story expl...

  Many thanks to Pennsylvania Neuro Surgeon Jonathan Slotkin for his Dec 2 NYT Op Ed about the Waymo data dump.  Gift link below.  His conclusion to treat this not through the lens of tech but instead through public health is a striking contribution.  The graphic above is the most probative in his article - possible because of the completeness of Waymo’s data dump.  Slotkins’s point is that the data included all the miles and routes taken by the Waymo vehicles allowing a head to head comparison with human drivers resulting in the chart.  He is critical of regulations only requiring self driving companies to report crashes, because as he says, "We need the denominator [all miles traveled and where], not just the numerator [of crashes]." In a tech user presentation not long ago by a local town manager that I know, he challenged our audience with "how much safer will it have to be?"  Well, Slotkin’s data analysis answers that convincingly!  I’ve shar...

  When a friend read my blog about our EV journey, she commented that people were more interested in what's happening with AI.  She challenged me about my AI assessment, so time to blog about it.  I last wrote about nascent AI two years ago,  https://kingsburyassociates.blogspot.com/2023/01/newest-ai-entrants-observations.html  and much has changed since then.   A number of these Chat bots are in wide use today.  Here is a short list: ChatGPT (by OpenAI) Google Gemini (by Google DeepMind / Google) Grammarly AI (by Grammarly Inc.) / Productivity-AI Engines Microsoft Copilot (by Microsoft) DALL·E / Other Image-/Creative-AI Engines (by OpenAI) Claude (by Anthropic) Character.AI Google Assistant I want to start with my own recent experience with ChatGPT and then the insights gained from the June & July meetings of my local MUG - Mac User Group, Washington Apple Pi.  I'll include links there to the group's website.  ChatGPT & Web search AI...

I thought it might be helpful to tell our story of shopping for EVs, our decision, and how it's worked out so far.  Comments, please! Our Plug in Prius We'd long owned a plug in Hybrid Prius , where plugging in to our regular driveway outlet, we'd get 9-12 miles on the 2nd battery, and for those local errands pretend we were driving an EV !  I think this Prius was one of the early vehicles with regenerative breaking , where use of the brakes adds electricity to the small extra plug in battery.  The biggest challenge to the plug in hardware was a habit to leave the cable outside, which resulted in corroding and no longer working.  So over the 12 years we owned it, we went through 4 different charging cables!   A cool charging story with our plug in Prius happened when we drove to Ashville, SC.  Approaching on the Rocky Mountain Highway, the road has a very long decline into the valley where Ashville lay.   I mentioned the regenerative breaking.  We...

  Jonathan’s Vision Pro Demo - Amazing Tech, had me at floating Hello!! For my 30 minute Vision Pro Demo appointment, it was a pleasure to  visit again the Apple Carnegie Library Store in downtown DC - and with bike parking on both sides for the building, I was in bicycling heaven.   We began with about 10 minutes of Vision Pro set up, with eye configuration mostly, including the reader lens for me, and adjusting the band.  So this isn’t a device we could ever just pass around at a meeting.  Lavon, my charming and helpful demo instructor, assured that no shared screen FaceTime -as I’d tentatively arranged with Van —was possible during the demo, plus for test reasons, not even any screen captures.  All she could offer was a photo of me wearing the Vision Pro, so voila, above is the only genuine pic from the day!    When first donning the headset, one sees the Hello , that is the greeting on new Apple devices, but on the Vision Pro, it’s float...

 Check out ChatGPT and the AI image generators OpenAI.com says it is "an AI research and deployment company. Our mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity."   ChatGPT OpenAI recently launched for testing an AI ChatBot called ChatGPT - a natural language AI chatbot.   This chatbot has been much fun to test.  Here are the themes that I've noticed in testing it. 1.  Alternative to Google Search The natural language bot is superb at answering questions about things, that would take longer to find using traditional web searches.  For example, this exchange, about dog walk practices: Or just exchange about fish tacos recipe 2.  Written Product The ChatBot's written product has caused some doom and gloom in academia and workplaces, though good caution in response in this story, about ChatGPT being panned by professors, https://futurism.com/the-byte/professor-chatgpt-terrible-papers-failing-grades....