Once in a while, I learn of something that seems really different, things that my grandfather would never have heard about. One such item is parrots talking to other parrots using Zoom or Facetime-type software. Look it up. The topic is a current one and I am confident that Google or other search programs will supply links to what has been happening. When I read "What Hath God Wrought" by the historian Gordon Walker Howe, I learned that the amazing feat of communicating with someone in California while being in New York City was nearly completely beyond belief. In an attempt to explain how that could possibly be, one explanation was that people were using lightning to accomplish such "talk". Today, we are much more comfortable with the notion of electricity and its uses. But at that time, many people had zero experience with anything 'electrical'.
Another, somewhat futuristic topic, at large today is chatbots. The one that has gotten plenty of press lately is ChatGPT. There are all sorts of predictions that this type of Large Language Model will upset many practices and ideas. If you take a large library and connect it to a powerful, fast computer, you might have a research assistant that can quickly answer a very broad range of questions. I have been advocating making similar use of the Google search "engine" and asking questions of interest and seeking topics and subsubjects related to what happens to be on my mind.
I read today in the Numlock News newsletter that money managers made .8% profit while a chatbot made 4.9% profit working with stocks. That is just the sort of event that worries people about emerging artificial intelligence.
