Category Archives: Science & Technology

“Nothing You See is Real”

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Wikipedia: “Donald David Hoffman is an American cognitive psychologist and popular science author. He is a professor in the Department of Cognitive Sciences at the University of California, Irvine, with joint appointments in the Department of Philosophy, the Department of Logic and Philosophy of Science, and the School of Computer Science. Hoffman studies consciousness, visual perception and evolutionary psychology using mathematical models and psychophysical experiments.”

Based on years of meditation and lots of reading on the subject of consciousness, I actually get this.

The Scariest Beast Ever Created

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“Many lesser troubles will appear in everyday private life. Simulated fake AI porn will likely be a big annoyance, since people like to pay attention to that. If you’re a gamer, AIs will be trained to cheat at your games. If you’re a schoolteacher, you’ll look askance at the kid at the back of the class who never raises his hand but turns in essays that read like Bertrand Russell. Fraudsters might fake the voices of your loved ones, and invent scams to demand money over the phone.”

— AI is the Scariest Beast Ever Created, Says Sci-Fi Writer Bruce Sterling

How to use AI to do practical stuff

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An overview (with lots of links) on how to use AI by Ethan Mollick.

Large Language Models like ChatGPT are extremely powerful, but are built in a way that encourages people to use them in the wrong way. When I talk to people who tried ChatGPT but didn’t find it useful, I tend to hear a similar story.

The first thing people try to do with AI is what it is worst at; using it like Google: tell me about my company, look up my name, and so on. These answers are terrible. Many of the models are not connected to the internet, and even the ones that are make up facts. AI is not Google. So people leave disappointed.

“A quick and sobering guide to cloning yourself”

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I recently stumbled upon a Substack article by Ethan Mollick, a professor of management at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, titled “A quick and sobering guide to cloning yourself.”

“With just a photograph and 60 seconds of audio, you can now create a deepfake of yourself in just a matter of minutes by combining a few cheap AI tools. I’ve tried it myself, and the results are mind-blowing, even if they’re not completely convincing. Just a few months ago, this was impossible. Now, it’s a reality.”

As a former radio guy I was more interested in the audio portion of Professor Mollick’s experiment.

“Clone a voice from a clean sample recording. Samples should contain 1 speaker and be over a 1 minute long and not contain background noise. Currently works best on US-English accent.”

I created an account at 11ElevenLabs, picked a voice and uploaded some text from my blog bio.

For $5 a month (first month free) you can synthesize your own voice. I uploaded a recording of me reading that same bio.

Finally, I pasted in some text from one of my blog posts and my voice was “cloned.”

Just to be clear, the first audio is one of their “voices.” The the second audio is a recording of my voice. The real me, if you will. And the third audio is the synthesized Steve voice. I’m not sure someone could tell the difference. I sort of prefer the synthesized reading over my own. In two years (?), this technology will be so good it will be nearly impossible to tell real from cloned.

“It’s time to pay attention to A. I.”

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I confess I haven’t been paying much attention to the ChatGPT phenomenon but the video below is a pretty good explanation.

In a follow-up video (Google Panics Over ChatGPT), we’re told Microsoft CEO Satay Nadella is reported to have said “…its impact will be at the magnitude of the personal computer, the internet, mobile devices and the cloud.” That’s a big impact. Or hyperbole. Or both.

I knew him well

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If a person were to read my ~6,000 blog posts, spanning 20 years, he/she would know me better than anyone who has ever met me. That person does not exist and I suspect never will.

Perhaps one day an AI (“I prefer the term ‘artificial person‘”) will read them and want to discuss what I wrote/shared.

I won’t be around but perhaps this future AP will be able to create a synthetic version of me, using everything I’ve shared (YouTube, etc) and we’ll have a nice chat.

Television on the iPhone

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When commercial television was introduced in the 1950s, a 16-inch set was the biggest available. Twenty years later, the biggest screen size was 25 inches.

We recently purchased a 60 in OLED TV and it’s amazing. But last night I watched an Apple TV episode on my iPhone using my AirPods (3rd gen).

There was no sense of watching (for an hour) a small screen. And the sound was unlike anything I’m used to sitting across the room from the big screen. Occasionally had the sense of being in the room with the characters.

We called them “pay phones”

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There was a time (before mobile phones) when I knew the location of every Casey’s and Hardee’s pay phone in Iowa. They were the only way to stay in touch with the office. Check for messages, etc. Here’s how I remember making calls from the road:

  • enter 10-digit Sprint Card number
  • enter 10-digit number of the person being called
  • enter my personal Sprint number (10 digits?)

And while I couldn’t recite those Sprint numbers, I could punch in the numbers without thinking.

William Gibson’s drones

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Yesterday’s drone flight has me in a drone state of mind. My first (of 25) blog post mentioning drones was in 2005, but some of those are references to military drones so not sure when I became aware of consumer drones. Last night I started reading (for the 10th time?) William Gibson’s 1988 novel, Mona Lisa Overdrive and found this passage:

“She was accompanied, on these walks, by an armed remote, a tiny Dornier helicopter that rose from its unseen rooftop nest when she stepped down from the deck. It could hover almost silently, and was programmed to avoid her line of sight. There was something wistful about The way it followed her, as though it were an expensive but unappreciated Christmas gift.”

The man has been incorporating drones into his stories for 30+ years. And this might not be the first instance.