Category Archives: Science & Technology

“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.

Memories

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To some extent we are the sum of our memories. Or it feels that way. But neuroscience tells us that every time a memory is recalled, it is recreated by the brain, slightly different each time it’s retrieved. So, a memory of a memory. Of a memory. Imagine each memory as a photo in a shoebox. Everytime you pull one out, it’s just a little bit different. We’re not bothered by this because we are unaware of the change. We have no memory of the previous version. Neuroscience also tells us we are able to recall only a fraction of our experiences.

My conclusion: We are not our memories.

So who/what am I? Perhaps the most important question one can ask, and that few ever do. Are we our thoughts and feelings? If so, what are we in those rare moments when we are not thinking or feeling? I like Sam Harris’ description of such mental objects as “temporary patterns of energy.”

Plum Island

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From Plum Island, a 1997 thriller by Nelson DeMille:

“Can you describe to the duties of the Gordons?”

“Yes… They were involved mostly with… genetic research. Genetic alteration of viruses to make them unable to cause disease, but able to stimulate the body’s immune system.”

“A vaccine?” Beth asked.

“Yes, a new type of vaccine. Much safer than using a weakened virus.”