Author: admin

Today at a conference at NYU I learned all about the Oura ring, that $350 health-monitoring device you wear on your finger. For example, one colleague told me that it can continually monitor your heart rate, body temperature, blood oxygen level and breathing rate. It even has a linear accelerometer.

Another colleague told me that it can also be used for family planning. When I asked her how, she explained that it can track your menstrual cycle.

I told her that you could also use a VR headset for family planning. “Why can a VR headset do that?” she asked.

“Because,” I replied, “it gives you a headache.”

Today I was in a discussion with someone who designs those user interfaces that you see on the Web. When you need to navigate somewhere on the web page of your bank or your airline or your doctor, there are teams of people who figure out how to make that process as unconfusing as possible.

As for me, I gave up trying to figure those things out as soon as I could simply ask Google Gemini. I just ask, in plain English, how to get to, say, the refunds option, or the cancel appointments option, and Gemini gives me clear step-by-step instructions how to traverse the tree of menu options.

It doesn’t take much foresight to realize that this phase of things is very temporary. Within another few years, we will all be vibe coding those nested menus.

Underneath there will still be a branching tree of menu choices, but we will never see it, because our AI bot will be clicking through those menus for us.

Navigating those web options will then become a lost art. I suspect it is an art that very few people will miss.

On my MacBook I have Google Docs. I also have Zoom.

I use both of these programs pretty much every day, as well as manyother useful pieces of software.

They co-exist with one another in a kind of uneasy truce, as though they are shouting at each other across a wide ravine.

I cannot embed my Zoom window into a Google document, and I cannot automatically upate the contents a Google Doc from the text in my Zoom chat window, or vice versa.

Both Zoom an Google Docs have facilities for creating and inserting sketches and diagrams, but there is no way to go from one to the other.

And neither Zoom nor Google Docs can interact with my 3D modeler in any meaningful way, let alone a presentation tool from another company such as Apple Keynote or Microsoft PowerPoint.

Why can’t all my apps play nice with one another? Do they really all need to be locked within their respective separate islands?

Or is this just the price we must pay for internet software that comes from large warring corporations?

A new month arrives
Fresh with possibility
And fresh with danger

What do Jonathan Swift, Mark Twain, Woody Allen and ChatGPT have in common? They were all born on November 30.

Three of those are known for their ability to show us the absurdity of our world. The fourth is part of a kind of absurdity that I suspect none of the first three ever imagined.

How odd that they were all born on the same day of the year. I wonder whether it’s all just an absurd coincidence.

I was attending a workshop the other day in which the question came up of what will happen to human creativity as AI continues to advance. One participant worried that AI might make end up doing everything, and then there would be nothing left for humans to do.

To my great relief, there was immediate pushback from many participants. One participant pointed out that children don’t need a reason to play together on a playground. Children play together on a playground because that’s what they like to do.

Similarly, we don’t do things just because they need to be done. We often do things because that’s what we like to do.

We take a walk, converse with one another, paint, play the guitar, and do a million other things simply because it feels good to o them. And in the case of engaging in these pleasurable activities, we often come up with new ideas.

This is wildly different from what AI does. AI does not engage in pleasurable activities, or think about things or people just because those things or people happen to be amusing or intriguing or charming.

Yes, AI will continue to advance. But that doesn’t mean that AI will replace us, any more than cars or telephones or pianos have replaced us.

Our tools and technologies, no matter how powerful they become, do not replace us. They simply allow us to express our humanity in new ways.

Two related techniques are currently rising at once: Extended reality and large language models.

As with any emerging technology, these are still finding each other. Each one is still finding its sea legs, and expanding its potential.

Yet as they each advance in their own respective spaces, they are gradually beginning to overlap in purpose. So here are two salient questions:

(1) What is the overlap between XR and LLM based AI? (2) When they fully meet each other, what will be their combined impact on the world?

One of the key ingredients for being on the cusp of an information revolution is the presence of two revolutionary technologies that happen to coincide.

One example of this occurred in 1953. At about the same time that the transistor radio was revolutionizing distribution of music, the Fender Bass was making it possible to put on live rock and roll concerts for large audiences.

Two fundamentally game-changing technological revolutions were happening at the same time in related fields. Each built upon the other.

So it is reasonable to ask:At this moment in time, what are two related technological innovations in communication that are occurring simultaneously?

More tomorrow.

How do we know when we are on the cusp of a new paradigm of communication, commensurate with the advent of written language or the invention of photography?

I will explore this question in more depth in the coming days.

Astonishingly, we have now entered an era in which it is illegal to simply remind people of the law. In fact, it seems to be an act of sedition.

Apparently, simply for stating the law, Senator Mark Kelly is being investigated for the crime of sedition. Our nation’s SODAFOP (Secretary of Defense and Former Television Personality) has called for the Pentagon to investigate the esteemed Senator from Arizona.

I know, I know, it sounds like something out of a sketch by Monty Python. But even the Pythons knew when something was too absurd.

In a way this is liberating. If you ever get pulled over by a police officer and he tries to read you your rights, you can respond arresting the cop — a citizen’s arrest — for committing exactly the same crime that Senator Kelly committed.

Poor George Orwell. The only slogans he could come up with for his fictional dystopia were “War is Peace”. “Freedom is Slavery” and “Ignorance is Strength”. It probably never occurred to him that the real world would end up embracing something as mind-numbingly stupid as “Legal is Illegal”.