AI Let Down

AI is great at manipulating text and documents, and it does a very nice job at examining photos and transcribing text from images. But today AI let me down with what seemed like a simple task: to take a single, three-and-a-half-hour MP3 recording and break it down into individual tracks.

I used to belong to 3rdSpace, which was a coworking space for creative people. They had monthly Jazz Jams along with other music events. I would typically turn on my audio recorder on my iPhone and let it record the entire event as a single audio file. Occasionally, I’d then take that MP3 file, load it up in GarageBand, and slice it into individual music tracks. But more so than not, instead of doing the work myself, I’d upload the single MP3 to AWS’s Mechanical Turk and pay someone a few dollars to slice up the music into individual tracks. 

This morning, I thought, for sure, that one of the big AIs could do this for me. After trying ChatGPT, Gemini/NotebookLM, and DeepSeek, they all failed me. The closest was ChatGPT, which kept apologizing for timing out on me. Gemini referred me to other applications, and DeepSeek was beyond its depth. 

Perhaps one day; but, for now, AI’s sweet spot is language, not action.

Gravity and Philosophical Cosmology: A Work in Progress

Gravity is not a a fundamental force in the universe.

Gravity is one of the four fundamental interactions in the universe, but it’s not a force since it has no messenger particle that transmits it. (Gravitons are similar to tachyons: they don’t exist.)

The electromotive force is transmitted by photons.

The strong nuclear force is transmitted by gluons.

These two forces, photons and gluons, seem to be the only forms of massless energy that we are aware of. Photons act over an infinite distance, whereas gluons travel only within a proton to bind the quarks that make up a proton.

The weak nuclear force is transmitted by w and z particles (which do have invariant mass, better known as rest mass). Rest means that, if a particle of energy could stop moving at c, it would literally have zero mass - in other words, all the mass of an energy particle is a result of its momentum. 

The leads to another phenomenon I’ve been trying to better understand, which is how do attractive forces work, such as the attraction of the north and south pole of a magnet? While this interaction seems as obvious as gravity, at first glance, I’m wondering if it’s truly an attractive force? Rather, could it be a push force where the space between the north and south poles creates an “energy vacuum” or lower energy state? In other words, is what we see as an attraction actually the magnets being pushed into a lower energy state from the space or forces around it? 

How does attraction work? Good question. I came to imagine repulsion in a classical sense. I can imagine “pushing.” For example, classically, I can envision two atoms emitting photons directed at each other like two people standing in a rowboat while throwing a ball back and forth to each other. The ball leaving one person’s hands is analogous to a photon emitted from an atom. As this process continues, the boats, like the atoms, are pushed apart. They’re repulsed. So, how do we imagine an attractive force? 

Additionally, it seems that gravity doesn’t originate outward from mass, rather inward; otherwise, how could the gravity of a black hole be detected outside the event horizon? How could a fictitious graviton travel faster than light to escape out of the event horizon?

Rather, it appears that the Cosmos (spacetime) is flowing, like a river, into mass. Crossing the event horizon is analogous to going over a waterfall. 

A final thought…

What happens or what exists in the space where the event horizons of two black holes overlap? The flow of the spacetime aether would be in opposite directions. Would it simply be a void of nothingness? 🤷‍♂️ 

AI in the Federal Government

I was recently speaking to some Veterans Administration (VA) consultants who told me that they're seeing a big shift in the time it takes to review a veteran's disability benefits.

In the past, VA benefits could take many months of review following medical appointments. Now, the consultants are sometimes seeing VA benefits finalized within days to a couple of weeks thanks to AI.

I asked AI to expand on my two paragraph blog post and this is what it came up with:

I recently had the opportunity to speak with some consultants who work closely with the Veterans Administration (VA), and they shared some fascinating insights about a major shift happening in the way veteran disability benefits are being processed. According to them, the time it takes for the VA to review and finalize disability claims has seen a dramatic improvement, largely due to advancements in AI.

Historically, veterans applying for disability benefits often faced lengthy wait times. After completing their necessary medical evaluations, it could take many months—sometimes even longer—for their claims to be fully reviewed and approved. This extended waiting period placed a significant burden on veterans who needed timely support and resources.

However, the consultants I spoke with explained that AI is now playing a pivotal role in expediting this process. In some cases, claims that once took months to navigate through various layers of review are now being finalized in a matter of days or just a couple of weeks. AI-powered systems are helping to analyze medical records, cross-reference data, and flag key details more efficiently than traditional manual processes.

While these advancements are promising, they also raise important questions about accuracy, fairness, and the role of human oversight in decision-making. Nevertheless, for many veterans who have long struggled with bureaucratic delays, this shift represents a significant and much-needed improvement in the VA benefits system.

As AI continues to evolve, it will be interesting to see how technology further reshapes government processes, particularly in areas that directly impact the lives of those who have served our country.