Author: admin

I have been haunted recently by a detail in Isaac Asimov’s Foundation trilogy, which I first read when I was a kid. In the book, there is a technology that lets a widow or widower to talk with an animated photo of their deceased spouse.

When you talk to such a photo, some sort of artificial intelligence animates it and gets it talking back to you in the general manner of your now expired husband or wife. You are only experiencing an illusion that the person you loved is still with you, but presumably it is a comforting illusion.

Asimov includes one scene in which two such photos, one of a man and the other of a woman, two total strangers, are randomly placed face to face in a forgotten warehouse. For many years they continue to engage mindlessly in meaningless conversation with one another, until at long last their energy sources run out.

This prescient scene may be a metaphor for where we are heading with generative AI. Perhaps this is the way the world ends — not with a bang, but with meaningless chatter.

At some point, you will simply be able to describe a movie, and it will come to life in real time, thanks to generative AI. But why think of this as an activity for one person?

Eventually this new art form will come to be seen as an opportunity for collaboration, with people contributing according to their skills and interests. Multiple people will drive the creation of different aspects of the emerging story world. One person might create the scenery, while another describes the motivations and background of various characters.

Still another person describes the lighting and mood and general visuals. And then there is the creation of an engaging plot, which requires its own particular way of thinking.

On top of this, these sorts of future movies will be endlessly mutable. You might start with a movie that somebody else has made, and use generative AI to create your own variant.

Of course many questions remain. For one thing, I wonder how the copyright laws will evolve to account for all of these new ways of creating.

I wish, when things get tense between me and people that I care about, that I could have an extra minute to take a little time-out. Maybe there would be a device that I could carry in my pocket that has a little button.

When I press the button, time would stop for just 60 seconds. During that time I could gather my thoughts, figure out what I really want to say and why, and then continue the conversation.

I suppose that is too much to ask.

The movie Oppenheimer gets much of its punch from it’s hero’s most famous quote. You don’t need to have seen the film to know what that quote was.

Upon witnessing a successful test of a nuclear weapon, Oppenheimer quoted the Bhagavad Gita: “Now I am become Death,” he said, “the destroyer of worlds.”

Which gets me wondering what kind of real life story would inspire a biopic built around the hypothetical opposite quote: “Now I am become Life, the creator of worlds.”

I suspect that it would be a very different story.

When I was a little kid I remember that my parents gave me my grandparents’ old discarded telephone to play with. It was one of those phones that had an old fashioned electro-mechanical ringer inside it.

I took it apart and examined the innards. What I saw was very educational.

There was a metal springy clapper that was designed to hit a bell. When it hit the bell, that would connect an electric circuit that would activate an electromagnet. The electromagnet would then attract the clapper which would pull back toward the electromagnet. When that happened, the electric circuit became disconnected, which turned off the magnetic attraction.

The clapper would then fly back toward the bell striking it again. This would repeat over and over again as long as the ringing was supposed to continue.

Even today, when you hear a classic ringtone, you were hearing a re-creation of this electro-mechanical mechanism.

What was wonderful about this was that even I, a small child, could see this and trace through and understand the principle. Sadly, that is no longer the case with today’s all-electronic mechanisms.

In order for self driving cars to really take off, all cars would need to be self driving. That would solve many problems at once.

Essentially, the cars would all be nodes in a single network. At all times they would be cooperating with one another, acting as coordinated cells within a single organism.

Perhaps the only way this could get started would be if some enterprising corporation made it happen. They would need to offer a fleet of vehicles to an entire municipality, completely replacing traditional automobiles.

I wonder whether anybody will actually do this.

At some point in the future, people will no longer be looking at physical screens. Somebody might look at a virtual screen in order to simulate the experience of looking at a physical screen, but that will be a software construct.

Eventually, the entire idea of screens may fade away, replaced by something that is much more natural and immersive and closer to the way that humans communicated before TVs and computers came along.

When that happens, future generations may come to see our old fashioned movies and TV shows as quaint, or even unwatchable. Maybe the old content will need to be processed to make sense to future generations.

Old black and white movies are sometimes colorized to make them more palatable to modern audiences. Maybe the same thing will happen with flat screen movies and TV shows. In order to make sense to future modern audiences, they will need to be volumized.

Mountains are a lot bigger than we are. And being on a mountain makes me feel very small.

Which gives me an excellent sense of perspective. I think this is a good thing.

Suppose, just for the sake of argument, that all of the information on Wikipedia was in your head as instant recall. Any factoid — whether famous birthday, significant historical event, geographic location or anatomical nomenclature — as well as any scientific explanation, economic theory or notable literary quote and its associated meaning, would be right there in your head, without needing to be looked up.

What would this change? Would it mean that we work differently, play differently, socialize differently? Would we remain fundamentally the same as a social species, or would there be a radical shift of some sort?

I don’t know the answers, but I suspect that these are going to become important questions.

Today I went to a Costco in a strange city. Although I had never been in this Costco before, it seemed eerily familiar.

It’s because the layout was exactly the same as the Costco where I often shop. For a moment I had the crazy thought that I was back at the other Costco.

And then I started thinking, wouldn’t it be cool if Costco’s were actually cosmically connected. If you have the right sort of membership, you could enter into one and exit out another.

This would be such a good way to travel. It might not even require a mandatory purchase.

If that were true, I would definitely say that membership has its privileges.