The Wonders of A.I.

 

Maybe as short as a year ago, I would likely have only been able to look at the writing on this postcard, ponder what secrets it might hold, and then move on without every knowing. But with the rapidly accelerating Artificial Intelligence world, those days are relegated to the dust bin of our history. I simply uploaded this very image into Google's Gemini with the instruction to translate the German to English and in about three seconds, knew exactly what it said.

Dearest Klärchen (Little Clara),

For the New Year, I wish you all the very best that one could possibly imagine, and much enduring success with the German language. I hope your little trip went well. Did you also think of me sometimes? Your Else is looking forward to a happy reunion on Thursday.

I don't know who Else is/was and likely A.I. won't solve that one for me... at least right now.

 I thought I would test A.I.'s abilities further and upload this postcard which has nary a marking describing where this is much less the country. I asked Gemini to tell me what it could about the scene and it responded with:

This postcard captures a bustling street scene from early 20th-century Berlin, Germany. Specifically, you are looking at the intersection of Leipziger Straße and Friedrichstraße, which was the busiest and most famous commercial hub in the city during the Imperial and Weimar eras.

A.I. went on to tell me that the big building in the center with the arched recesses on the lower level was the Wertheim Leipziger Straße which some called at the time the most beautiful department store in all of Germany. Unfortunately, it was damaged during World War II and after being fixed up, eventually demolished along with everything else in the photo. Indeed, plopping myself down in this very intersection using Google Earth reveals and much changed landscape.

Further inquiries told me that the department store sat on the NE corner of that intersection and so I used Google Earth to wrangle a view of the NE corner as it looks today. I finally digitally turned over the postcard for the first time to see what was on the writing side of it and was initially worried because it said Potsdamer Platz. But putting that into Google Earth takes me to the very same intersection. Wikipedia even added that the Berlin Wall eventually went right through this intersection which besides the bombings, helps explain why it looks totally different now.

I think I prefer looking at the postcard version