{"id":4366,"date":"2025-05-05T01:09:00","date_gmt":"2025-05-05T06:09:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/?p=4366"},"modified":"2025-04-19T07:19:08","modified_gmt":"2025-04-19T12:19:08","slug":"useful-and-helpful-software","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/2025\/05\/useful-and-helpful-software\/","title":{"rendered":"Useful and Helpful Software"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">by Dwayne Phillips<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Instead of wiggling around so we can call our efforts &#8220;AI,&#8221; let&#8217;s focus on useful and helpful software.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Over a decade ago (yes, that long), I was working with a graduate student on their writing. They had difficulty describing their research to others. Their work was wonderful.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">They had developed a concept and software to demonstrate the concept of how to aid people find safety in a building that was on fire or had other disasters looming. The software was going to save lives using a combination of building plans and the appointment calendars and contact information of people.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Today, we would call this &#8220;agentic AI&#8221; or some other made-up term that would sell in our AI-infatuated world. Gosh. How about calling it useful and helpful software? How about just calling it something that is useful and helpful and drop all technology terms?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Let&#8217;s build things that help persons, whose bodies have failed them but their minds still function to use machines and, interact with the rest of us. Let&#8217;s help persons survive disasters. Let&#8217;s help persons do many other useful things so that the true character and value of those persons shines through to the rest of us.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Pollyanna? Perhaps, but let&#8217;s do better.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>by Dwayne Phillips Instead of wiggling around so we can call our efforts &#8220;AI,&#8221; let&#8217;s focus on useful and helpful software. Over a decade ago (yes, that long), I was working with a graduate student on their writing. They had difficulty describing their research to others. Their work was wonderful. They had developed a concept [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[469,293,10,3,314,507,5],"tags":[470,294,133,126,315,508,128],"class_list":["post-4366","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-artificial-intelligence","category-concepts","category-people","category-technology","category-user","category-value","category-writing","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-concepts","tag-people","tag-technology","tag-user","tag-value","tag-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4366","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4366"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4366\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4367,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4366\/revisions\/4367"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4366"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4366"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4366"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}