HOULTON, Maine — Rotarian Nate Bodenstab spoke to the Houlton Rotary Club at the Monday, May 1, meeting about “disc golf” and also touched on artificial intelligence. There were three guests present. Lucas Grant was the guest of Nancy Ketch. Joyce Fitzpatrick brought her husband Peter and Kay Fleming brought Jacob Plissey who is job shadowing with Kay.
Bodenstab presented the topics of disc golf and artificial intelligence. Beginning with disc golf, Bodenstab said he shared his proposal to the Putnam Trust Board of Directors to have a course on part of the land in the trust. A study done for the use of the land suggested physical activity.
Disc golf is like regular golf in the layout of the course except that discs or frisbees are used to play and baskets to receive the discs are set in the course. There can be 9-hole or 18-hole courses. There is a Professional Disc Golf Association and there are currently 5,400 courses in the United States. In two years there has been a 25 percent increase in the amount of courses nationally.
Often these courses are in towns and are free to play on. A 9-hole course costs around $10,000 to $20,000 to build. The sport is playable for all ages, is environmentally friendly and low maintenance.
The course is only in the planning stages at the moment as the Putnam Trust has yet to approve the project.
Artificial Intelligence is all around us. Bodenstab works for Nuance as the director of research. Their mission is to simplify technology. Bodenstab showed how A.I. has won in chess matches in 1997, won at Jeopardy in 2011, a self driving car was launched in 2015, and won the game “Go” in 2016.
A.I. is moving faster than expected in its evolution, according to Bodenstab. As soon as a concept is written and published online it is ready before the usual launch conference for a very quick development.
Andrew Ng of Stanford University calls A.I. the new electricity. Changes in shopping for clothing, groceries, transportation, industry, law, healthcare and even in the military are occurring daily. In law, tasks done by a junior lawyer in 12 seconds can be done by A.I. in one second. In health care, radiology examinations are more accurate when using A.I., according to George Hinton. As A.I. transforms the workforce, some types of jobs have grown while others are replaced. Bill Gates’ solution is to put a tax on robots. Bodenstab’s recommendation for the future is for everyone to learn computer science.
