Tag Archives: future

Down the Social Media Rabbit Hole

I made a mistake last night. I was on Twitter and clicked on a video of a guy knocking down a surveillance camera on a street light in Australia. I then scrolled to the next video and went down a right wing rabbit hole. The first video was a voiceover of Tucker Carlson recently ‘dismissed’ from Fox News, and it was essentially trying to make humourous jokes about a transgender host taking over. Next was a Republican semi-automatic gun wearing black man praising the NRA and claiming the democrats are ‘coming for our guns’. Then came a Sean Hannity clip that I didn’t watch. Then came my first Canadian content with a clip bashing Justin Trudeau. And finally I called it quits after watching a geologist bashing climate change… in case you didn’t know, carbon dioxide is ‘plant food, not a pollutant’.

These crazy social media algorithms, and the deep fakes I spoke about a few days ago, are going to absolutely polarize us, paralyze us, and completely undermine us.

Don’t ignore opposing views, measure them. Don’t jump on the bandwagon, figure out if you want to travel the exact same route. Don’t criticize, question. Don’t SHOUT, disengage until cooler heads prevail.

Don’t pretend the algorithms aren’t already influencing you, be savvy and question why posts and videos are algorithmically chosen for you. You are either trying to be digitally literate or you are probably being manipulated and steered towards an extreme view.

From the horses mouth

I’ve already seen some really good deep fakes of famous people that both look and sound real. That was over a year ago and the technology is far better now. I just watched this NBC Nightly News clip on TikTok:

The whole video is cautionary and a little scary, looking at Artificial Intelligence (AI) as a possible threat to Humanity. At the 2:17 minute mark this was said,

“AI tools can already mimic voices, ace exams, create art, and diagnose diseases. And they are getting smarter every day.

In two years by the time of the election, human beings will not be able to tell the difference between what is real and what is fake.”

It occurred to me that the lead up to the next US election is going to include countless deep fakes that will be virally shared and reposted and re-shared, which will be far more convincing than anything we’ve seen so far. The clever ones won’t be far fetched in content, they will be convincing because they will subtly send people down a specific narrative without being outrageous or egregious and easy to spot. For example: Biden supporting and endorsing some ultra-left wing, ‘woke’ group the makes the right outraged. Or Trump speaking to a friend about how he hates guns and the NRA. Each of these can be completely fabricated and completely convincing.

This is really scary because where you get your news will be vitally important. Hopefully major news outlets would vet the videos and verify authenticity before sharing, but digital newspapers are always worried about missing the scoop and letting other networks go viral. Many less reputable sites will share the fake videos just because it fits their narrative. Other sites will knowingly share the fake videos because their intent is to mislead, and to feed anger and vitriol to their naive followers.

Conspiracies will be magnified and any mention of the videos being fake will be counter argued that reports of the video being faked are just the way the government is trying to keep the truth from you. The message being, the fakes are real and the reports of them being fake is the fake news. People already believe fake articles with no fact-checking, they are going to be completely fooled by extremely convincing fake videos.

My advice, find websites that you trust and make sure the web url is correct. Follow people you trust and question anything suspicious from them that isn’t from your trusted sites. If it’s not from your trusted site, if it’s not right from the horses mouth and it seems suspicious, consider it fake until you verify.

How serious is this? You don’t have to be famous to be deep faked. Here is a story of a mom thinking she was talking to her kidnapped daughter, convinced it was her voice on the phone with her kidnappers, but it was a fake and her daughter was upstairs in her room. The point of the video is to have a safe word with your family because anyone’s voice can be easily faked.

We are entering a time when people are defining truth differently, when fakes seem more like truth, and when sources of information are going to be as important as the information itself.

Unrecognizable future

Did you ever see the movie Blast from the Past? Here is the premise from Wikipedia:

The film focuses on a naive 35-year-old man, Adam Webber, who has spent his entire life (1962-1997) living in a Cold War-era fallout shelter built by his survivalist, anti-Communist father, who believes the United States has suffered a Soviet nuclear attack (in reality, a plane crashed into their house). When the doors unlock after 35 years (the amount of time his father believes the nuclear fallout will take to clear), Adam emerges into the modern world, where his innocence and old-fashioned views put him at comedic odds with others.

It’s a cute movie. It makes me wonder what it would be like for someone today to jump ahead and see what the future is like 35 years from now? What does life look like in 2058?

Will work look any like it does today? What about transportation? Money? Space flight? Religion? Politics? Artificial intelligence (AI) and computing?

There is so much that could, and will, be different from today. Some of these things might look similar, but some are going to look considerably different. I can’t imagine a world 35 years from now being less different today than 1997 was to 1962. Life in 2058 will be unrecognizable compared to life today.

For example: The entire monetary system is going to be digital. The workforce is going to be mostly different depending on how much AI has undermined many of today’s jobs. That same AI is going to change the way we integrate technology. Today it’s our phones that seem to be getting smarter and smarter but 35 years from now it will be integrated/cyborg technology that will be enhancing and enriching our lives.

I can imagine glasses or contact lenses or implants that give us information like map directions, names and details about people we meet, and even health data like heads up display data in a military jet today. I can imagine this working in a way with a hearing implant that allows us to have a video conversation like FaceTime on our phone today. Phones won’t be something we carry, they will be something embedded as part of the tools we wear or tools we integrate into implants.

If you don’t think that things will be drastically different than now, then you haven’t paid attention to the exponential rate of change that has happened since the 1990’s. In 1990 there was no Amazon, Deep Blue was 7 years away from beating world Chess champion Garry Kasparov, there were no smart phones, no electric cars, and Google was still 8 years away from being a company. Author Arthur C. Clarke said, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Smart phones today would seem like magic in 1990. What does 2058 hold for us that will seem like nothing less than magic to us today? It’s cliche to say, but time will tell.

Health and history

I had a dental cleaning today. I get one every 6 months. As I was sitting in the chair I thought about how far we’ve come in dental hygiene over the last few hundred years. I thought about how debilitating it would have been to need a root canal before root canals were a thing. Tooth aches can be an all consuming pain, and life before dentists could have been an agonizing experience.

So many inventions have saved lives: from penicillin to pacemakers, vaccines to vitamins, antibiotics to aspirin… science and medicine have been invented, created, and discovered to make our lives less painful and a lot safer.

We still have a ways to go with the likes of cancer, multiple sclerosis, Alzheimer’s, and other diseases yet to be beaten, but we’ll get there in my children’s lifetime, if not mine. Technology is getting better and the science of longevity is very promising. Soon our visits to the washroom will be more like doctor visits, with our urine and faeces being sampled and tested by our toilets, and an app on our phones will notify us if there are any health concerns to worry about.

It’s a marvel to think about how much has been done in the world of science and medicine to make our lives healthier and longer. It took a dental assistant getting plaque off of my not-flossed-regularly-enough teeth to help me appreciate the value of modern science. And, I’m happy to report that I’m cavity free!

Time in, time out

There is a certain wisdom that comes with age, with the passing of years and the recognition that more than half your life has passed. I’m not talking about how my days are numbered or anything like that, but rather that the time we have left is worth something. So how do we use our time? What do we put time into… and what do we get out of that time?

I have a good job that is in the service of others. I get good job satisfaction out of my work, but I also put a lot of my time into my work. I have an awesome family that I’d like to spend a bit more time with… and do, like our recent vacation to Spain. I have a small group of friends that I definitely want to spend more time with. I have a weekly walk and coffee with a friend, and I have regular events (plays & musicals) where my wife and I go out with 2 other couples we are close to. I have some awesome connections to my wife’s family and we meet for events like a dinner this long weekend. Beyond that I really don’t make time for friendships, and when I do it feels like an effort.

As I get older I’m seeing that the effort to connect with friends and family is vitally important. Vitally as in it fosters vitality. I spend so little time making the effort to connect to others I care about, but those connections are worth the effort. And if you don’t put the time in, you don’t get the reward out. My circle of friends is small, and I don’t want it any smaller. I need to make more time to connect to people whom I value… and who value me.

I need to make the time, because to quote a Canadian band, ‘They say, absence makes the heart grow fungus‘. If I don’t make the effort now, I’m probably not going to make it later, and friendships do not grow stronger out of time apart. New experiences with old friends: that’s what I need more of in my life. And these don’t happen unless someone is making an effort to connect… and more and more I’m realizing that I’m the one that needs to make the effort; to put the time in.

Capability and Time

This post is about General Artificial Intelligence, but I’m going on a bird walk first.

My dad has had a health setback and will be on a long road to recovery. I heard him talking about his recovery plans and I felt had to share a personal example with him. When I went through 6 months of chronic fatigue I finally found relief after I discovered that I had a severe Vitamin D deficiency and started taking high dose supplements. Here’s the thing, I saw positive results in just 3 days… I went from hearing my alarm and wondering how I could physically get out of bed, to feeling normal when I woke up in just a matter of days of taking suppliments. However, it took over 6 months to recover to the point where I could put my treadmill within 90% of what I could do before the fatigue hit me. My capabilities improved, but much slower than I thought would happen. We are good at setting goals and knowing what’s possible, but we often overestimate how fast we can achieve those goals.

But I digress (my dad’s favourite thing to say when he finishes a bird walks on his way to making a point.)

Chat GPT and similar language predicting software are still pretty far away from artificial general intelligence, and the question is: How far away are we? How far away are we from a computer being able to out-think, out-comprehend, and our problem-solve the brightest of humans? Not just on one task, like they do on competing in Chess or Go, rather in ‘general’ terms, with any task.

I think we are further away in time than most people think (at least those people who think that artificial general intelligence is possible). I think there needs to be at least one if not a few technological leaps that need to happen first, and I think this will take longer than expected to happen.

The hoverboard and flying cars in the movie Back to the Future may not be too far away, but the ‘future’ in the 1987 movie was supposed to be 2015.

Are we going to achieve Artificial General Intelligence any time soon? I doubt it. I think we need a couple quantum leaps in our knowledge first. But when this happens, computers will instantly be much smarter than us. They will be far more capable than humans at that point. So the new question isn’t about when this will happen, but rather what we do when it does happens? Because I’m not a fan of a non-human intelligence looking at humans the way we think about stupid chickens, or even smart pets. What happens when thé Artificial Intelligence we create sees us as stupid, weak animals? Well, I guess time will tell (but don’t think that’s any time too soon).

Fully integrated and invisible AI

We are moving into a new economic revolution. Not since the Industrial Revolution have we seen technology that will change the nature of work so drastically. Artificial Intelligence is about to be weaved so deeply into our lives that we will not know where it starts and ends. And while it’s not completely new to have our work enhanced by AI, the depth of influence and ease of use will make it transformational while also slowly becoming invisible.

What do I mean by invisible? We already use simple forms of AI in everyday life without thinking about it: We have autocorrect correcting our spelling; we have cars that warn us when we drift outside our lane or flash in our rear view mirrors when it’s not safe to change lanes; and, we trust autopilot to do the majority of flying on plane trips around the world. The leap to self-driving cars might have seemed incredible a few years ago, but now you can board a self-driving taxi in San Francisco.

Chat GP3, and now Chat Gp4, are going to change the very nature of work for many people in the coming months and years. Have a look at what Microsoft Copilot is about to offer:

More specifically:

Soon tools like this, aptly named Copilot, will become as useful and integrated into what we do as autocorrect is today. Take meeting notes? Why bother, just record the meeting and ask AI to generate both the notes and the next step tasks. Create a PowerPoint to present new information? Instead, share the information with Copilot and have it create the PowerPoint. Create a website? How about sketching it on the back of a napkin, sharing a picture of it and having Chat GP4 write the code and build the website.

AI is going to redefine the work of many people faster than any time in history, and the technology is going to be so integrated into the things we do daily that the use of AI will quickly become invisible… ever present, very useful, and unnoticed.

Feeding the (AI) brain

I worry about the training of Artificial Intelligence using the internet as the main source of information. One of the biggest challenges in teaching AI is in teaching it how to group things. Unless a group is clearly identified, it’s not a group. That’s ok when counting items, but not ideas. What is fact vs fiction? What is truth vs a lie vs an embellishment vs an exaggeration vs a theory vs a really, really bad theory?

There are some dark places on the internet. There are some deeply flawed ideas about culture, race, gender, politics, and even health and fitness. There are porn sites that objectify women, and anti-science websites that read like they are reporting out facts. There is a lot of ‘stupid shit’ on the internet. How is this information grouped by not-yet intelligent AI systems?

There is the old saying, ‘Garbage in, garbage out’, and essentially that’s my concern. Any form of artificial general intelligence is only as good as the intelligence put into the system, and while the internet is a great source of intelligent information it’s also a cesspool of ridiculous information that’s equally as easy to find. I’m not sure these two dichotomous forms of information are being grouped by AI systems in a meaningful and wise way… mainly because we aren’t smart enough to program these systems well enough to know the difference.

The tools we have for searching the internet are based on algorithms that are constantly gamed by SEO techniques and search is based on words, not ideas. The best ideas on the internet are not the ones necessarily most linked to, and often bad ideas get more clicks, likes, and attention. How does an AI weigh this? How does it group these ideas? And what conclusions does the AI make? Because the reality is that the AI needs to make decisions or it wouldn’t be considered intelligent. Are those decisions ones ‘we’ are going to want it to make? If the internet is the the main database of information then I doubt it.

Monochromatic cars

In a world of flashy outfits and accessories how has the car remained a single colour for so long? I understand that for some people resale value is important, but there are a lot of old cars out there just waiting to become someone’s work of art. We live in a world where so many people do things to stick out, but car paint has stayed monochrome. One colour per car.

I think this is going to change a lot in the next few years. We are going to see some crazy looking cars, and people will use them to express their identity, their uniqueness. Maybe not just artwork, maybe different colours for different parts of the car. Shades of a colour accented with darker hues on fenders and over wheels. A complementary colour on the hood.

It’s coming. Flashy cars for flashy personalities. And crazy artwork for people wanting to express their love for creativity. It’s just a matter of time.

When search engines become answer engines

One if the most alarming things I’ve read and heard about since I started mentioning Chat GPT and the use of predictive AI tools is that the model for profitability of content creators is going to have to change. With Google and Bing both embedding AI enhanced ‘answers’ as part of their search results, this is going to have a dramatic impact on website visits, (click-throughs and advertising views), content creators count on.

Here is a link to a very long but interesting essay by Alberto Romero on the subject: Google vs Microsoft: Microsoft’s New Bing Is a Paradigm Change for Search and the Browser

This is an excerpt from the section titled, ‘With great power comes great responsibility’,

“Giving value back to creators
One of the core business aspects of search is the reciprocal relationship between the owners of websites (content creators and publishers) and the owners of the search engines (e.g. Google and Microsoft). The relationship is based on what Nadella refers to as “fair use.” Website owners provide search engines with content and the engines give back in form of traffic (or maybe revenue, etc.). Also, search engine owners run ads to extract some profit from the service while keeping it free for the user (a business model that Google popularized and on top of which it amassed a fortune).”

and a little further down,

“…Sridhar Ramaswamy, ex-Google SVP and founder of Neva (a direct competitor of Bing and Google Search), says that “as search engines become answer engines, referral traffic will drop! It’s happened before: Google featured snippets caused this on 10-20% of queries in the past.”

So, getting a response from your search query already has a historical track record of reducing referral traffic and now search is going to get significantly better at answering questions without needing to click through to a website.

What is human (as opposed to Artificial Intelligence) created content going to look like in the future when search answers your questions that would normally require you to visit a website? What happens to creator and publisher profitability when search engines become answer engines?