Ken's Blog

The viewer count for the Colbert with James Talarico is now somewhere above 8.3 million, and still rising. Maybe people are tuning in because these days it is so rare and refreshing to hear somebody say something truthful in public.

My favorite Talarico quote from the interview (just one among many):

“Don’t tell me what you believe. Show me how you treat other people and I’ll tell you what you believe.”

Today is the 148th anniversary of the day that Thomas Edison patented the phonograph. To me it is a more intriguing invention than photography, because it is uses a two dimensional surface to record a one dimensional signal.

Of course the phonograph is not the first technological innovation to use a two dimensional surface to record a one dimensional signal. That would be the invention of writing, which predates the phonograph by thousands of years.

But the phonograph marks a kind of of trifecta for Edison. He also invented a version of motion pictures as well as that famous light bulb.

My friend Lance Williams once pointed out to me that there is an interesting way to look at this combination: “Edison invented the light bulb,” he said, “so that people would stay up all night listening to his phonograph.”

Wow, the Colbert / Talarico interview now has 6.8 million views on YouTube, and the number is still going up. I learned today that more people have now watched yesterday’s interview than watched Colbert’s interview with Taylor Swift in December.

This is democracy in action folks, the voice of the people. And when the people decide to speak, it’s a good idea to listen.

I love democracy.

I’m still reeling from the knowledge that I would not even have heard about James Talarico if that idiotic Carr wreck at the FCC had not tried to stop us from hearing what Talarico has to say.

This Colbert interview has quickly become one of my all time favorite YouTube clips. From the way the viewing numbers are rapidly soaring, I guess I’m not the only one.

In the end, maybe the thing that will save us from those would-be fascists is their astonishing level of stupidity.

I realized recently that the Disney songs I like the most are the ones that were popular when Walt Disney was still alive.

I am not sure whether this means that my tastes are aligned with Walt Disney or that my tastes are aligned with Richard and Robert Sherman.

I’m also not sure whether there is any real difference.

Today is the 80th anniversary of the dedication of the ENIAC computer at the University of Pennsylvania. That was essentially the start of our modern computer era.

I remember some years ago visiting U. Penn when my host led me a room, and unlocked the door to let me inside. To my astonishment, I found myself looking at the control panels of the original ENIAC, and I felt a sense of profound awe.

All six of the original programmers of that world’s first electronic computer were women. At the time, computer programming was considered clerical work, and male engineers looked down on this “subprofession”.

Now, of course, we recognize how innovative these six women were. They were pioneers in the now prestigious field of Computer Science, inventing new concepts like subroutines, which made ENIAC run more efficiently.

I met someone at a conference today, and he and I got into what started out as a pleasant conversation. At one point we reminisced about New York City in the 1980s.

Then he said “I can’t believe all those people voted for him.” I assumed he was talking about Trump, and I started to respond accordingly.

But it turned out he was talking about Mamdani. He was wondering whether NYC could survive the election of our current mayor. I tried my best to navigate this unexpected turn in the conversation.

“It’s great that he kept Jessica Tisch on as chief of police,” I said, “given that she is a Republican. He is trying to reach across the aisle.”

“But he wants to defund the police,” my colleague said.

“He once held that position,” I replied, “but he now realizes that he was wrong, and he has apologized for having said that in the past.”

The guy looked at me with a puzzled look. “You mean he said that after he was elected?”

“No,” I said, “he ran on that position during his campaign. He said positive things about the NYC police when he was running for mayor.”

I was starting to realize by now that we might be talking past each other. “Sorry,” I added, “when you said you couldn’t believe all those people voted for him, I thought you were talking about Trump.”

“I love Trump,” he replied.

And that’s when I realized that I was talking to somebody from the Foxiverse. The man probably had never heard anything that Mamdani actually said while running for mayor. All he knew was the make-believe version of Mamdani manufactured by the Fox News Network.

You can’t really have a conversation with somebody who has never been exposed to reality.

Are people unlucky today because it is Friday the 13th? Or is it just a case of confirmation bias?

If something bad happens to you on a Tuesday the 27th, you probably don’t think much of it. But when it happens on this day of the year, you remember.

So this is probably just one of those self-fulfilling myths. On the other hand, it makes for some very entertaining scary movies

After the XR/AI singularity, when everyone is wearing those future glasses, your personal AI assistant will know a lot about all of the physical objects that you can see. I wonder how that knowledge will be used in practice.

For example, will you choose to add annotations to your morning coffee? When you look at your coffee cup, a neat little text might pop up just above it, giving you all sort of useful information.

How fresh were the beans? What is the actual blend, and how caffeinated is it? How hot is your coffee at the moment? And how much more is in the pot?

All of the objects in your lives could be similarly annotated. Where is that screwdriver, the one which fits the particular screw that you are looking at? How much would it cost to add another shelf to that wall hanging bookshelf, and how soon could it be installed?

Will your relationship to your physical objects change once you are able to query them? Or will you just get tired of the whole thing and take off those darned glasses?

Unless you are physically in the same room with someone, you can no longer know for certain that you are talking to a human being, rather than an AI proxy. An AI can do a pretty good job these days of imitating a person, at least for short conversations.

If an AI agent has been trained on years of someone’s emails and texts, it can create a plausible simulacrum of how that person speaks, and even what they might choose to say. This might eventually lead to some interesting situations.

For example, sometime in the future you might decide to take the day off, and let your trusty agent respond to annoying emails and texts in your stead. As AI improves, your little “vacations” might become progressively longer.

At some point, you might just decide to let your AI agent take over those annoying tasks entirely. Meanwhile, your colleagues may be having the same idea.

Eventually, all business correspondence might actually be conversations between AI agents.

I wonder whether anyone will notice.