Gwaihir

I’ve had the pleasure of watching my many nieces and nephews (and now grand-nephews) grow up over the last 30 years. One of the most interesting parts of that has been seeing their cognitive abilities develop. From watching them move dutifully through Piaget’s 4 stages of cognitive development to watching them grow up and start businesses, it has been, and continues to be, a fascinating ride.

Warm and fuzzy feelings aside, in some ways watching my “smart assistants” become ever more proficient at natural language processing tasks feels similar.

Siri and Alexa have improved quite a bit over the last 5 years but Google Assistant definitely takes the cake. It has improved by leaps and bounds and is now capable of providing answers to many very obscure or complex queries with extremely high specificity and accuracy.

I was having a mental lapse while thinking about the Lord of the Rings and rather than getting up to go get my Tolkien Encyclopedia or even pulling my phone out of my pocket, I simply said “Hey Google, what was the name of the Eagle who saved Gandalf from the Tower of Orthanc?” and a voice from the ether responded “Gwaihir, an eagle from the Misty Mountains who helped Gandalf before and during the War of the Ring. His name means Windlord in Sindarin.” That voice was the Google Assistant (although I configured it to sound like writer/actor/producer Issa Rae) emanating from one of my smart speakers.

There’s a lot going wrong in the world and there are certainly plenty of reasons not to be excited about what we’ll have to deal with over the next decade but I for one am truly excited to see how these and other technologies continue to develop. In the words of Dr. Károly Zsolnai-Fehér, “What a time to be alive!”