AI and Ham Radio

 One of the hotter topics on the Ham Radio forums (and in a few places, on the air) has been AI, and how it will (and has been) intersecting with Ham Radio.

Most consider it to be somewhere off in the distant future. I disagree. If you think about it we've already got AI to a large degree. Identifying signals? Grid tracker and CW skimmers, we have.  Nobody's coughed up signal identifiers for the phone modes yet but with voice recognition coming along the way it is I can't imagine that's too far off either.  Signal processing? We already have some really serious advances in noise abatement the last few years. I've had my 991a for a few years now and it's still amazes me with its noise reduction capabilities.

Oh, you mean transmitter signal processing? In other words making the most out of your transmitted signal? Yeah we have that too. (Though I still like using the analog processors that I have)  Automated logging? Again we have that in the digital modes but not in the voice modes as yet.

I'm not quite sure what else could come out of AI for amateur radio but if you think about it that's what innovation is... Going beyond most other people's imagination.

That said, there seems no end of comments about it. 

Many seem concerned that AI will ruin Ham radio. In response, I will make the observation that any new technology that comes down the pike is going to be at least partially destructive to the technology that it builds on. Or, at least it will cause some change of direction of the technology it builds up. That is simply the nature of technology.

It seems to me that the question before us then is do we reject newer technology because it's a change from the old? We see a LOT of that going on in Ham radio today. The Digi modes, for example. 

Now, of course, we've seen this happen with every new advancement in tech on the bands. I've already cited in the past the tussle 50 years ago, over AM vs SSB.

Here's a question: What exactly IS AI? At what point do we cross over from automated processes to artificial intelligence? Where is the exact demarcation point?

To put a human spin on it, people entering higher education all have different levels of intelligence and most have different areas in which that intelligence shines.  But here it is.... intelligence is foundational.  The educational process meanwhile is a process of programming, in my view.  What passes as Artificial intelligence, at least for now, is naught but programming, not intelligence. You know why they don't put legs on computers? Because they'd walk off a cliff if you told them to. We've not yet reached the point where a computer with legs would be intelligent enough to recognize the danger, and want to survive.

There needs be a level of intelligence in the case of humans for programming to work. Computers don't have that, yet, if they ever will

Certainly, there will be more advances in this area.... there always are, despite the Ham who assert that it's not ham radio without a CW key and a couple of 6146 tubes.  But until we get some better definitions going on what AI actually IS, we can't really hang a label on ANY of it.