The recent passing of Apollo 13 commander Jim Lovell at the age of 97 made VideoAge‘s Water Cooler think of the creativity of the scientists at the NASA Mission Control Center in 1970 who were forced to solve a life-threating problem inside a capsule at 320,000 kilometers from Earth, with only everyday kitchen supplies at their disposal (which was memorably immortalized in the 1995 movie Apollo 13 starring Tom Hanks).
However, over the years, even with advancing technology, the folks at NASA and other scientific minds haven’t been able to solve the problem of the incomprehensible public service announcements in the New York City subway system.
Similarly, science in America cannot solve the lingering problem of temperature controls on airlines and other modes of public transportation, as well as in movie theaters and stores. Apparently, energy conservation is not yet considered a science in the U.S. since temperatures are kept at either freezing cold (in the summer) or burning hot (in the winter), with the exception of airline cabins and movie theaters, where temperatures are consistently arctic. The idea inside the theater executives’ minds is that the cold temperatures help keep patrons awake. (They could instead try showing better movies.)
Even in the middle of summer, non-American passengers approach a trip on U.S. airlines like a mid-winter Himalayan excursion. This is despite the blankets that the airlines already provide. Foreigners can easily be spotted in Miami, Florida during the summer months by the scarves they wear to protect themselves from the chilly stores.
Clearly, climate control and PA sounds could be some of the biggest challenges that artificial intelligence in the U.S. has to contend with, so one hopes that they can be easily solved, perhaps with a language-learning model from Europe or Latin America.
“Houston, we have a problem,” is the now famous radio call that Lovell made to the Mission Control Center. This call is now directed to AI tech scientists so that they can help solve those aforementioned structural U.S. problems, not in Houston, but in Seattle.
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