Doc Searls's Blog, page 3

Getting Real With AI.

The incorporeal non-place where we also live. By Hugh McLeod, 2004.

When I read that some conversations with ChatGPT had appeared in Google searches, I did a search for “Doc Searls” ChatGPT and got a long and not-bad but not entirely accurate AI summary below which normal-ish search results appeared. When I went back later to do the same search, the results were different. I tried the exercise again in another browser and again got different results. I also found no trace of personal chats with ChatGPT surfacing on Google. But with returns diminishing that fast, why bother to keep looking?

What I did come to realize, quickly, is that there is no “on” anymore with Google. And there may never be an “on” with AI as it seems to be playing out.

There is also no “on” in “online.” No “in.”

We use adpositions, which include prepositions, to make sense of the natural world. They are made for our embodied selves. Under, around, through, beside, within, beneath, above, into, near, toward, with, outside, amid, beyond (and dozens more) make full sense where we eat, breathe, use all five of our senses. In the natural world up truly is up, and down is down, because we have distance and gravity here. We don’t have distance or gravity in the digital world.  But the digital world is no less real for the absence of distance, gravity, substance, shape, and everything we can see, smell, hear, weigh, touch, and feel here in the natural world.

Cyberspace is beyond ironic. It is oxymoronic, self-contradictory. It’s a spaceless non-place except in an abstract way. When people in Sydney, Lucerne, New York, and Tokyo meet on (or through, or with—pick your inadequate preposition) Zoom, they are not in (or of, or whatever) a where in the physical sense. They are co-present in the non-space that Craig Burton called a giant zero: a hollow virtual sphere across which any two points can see each other.

But we treat this zero as a real place, because we have to. Hence the real estate metaphors: domains with locations on sites where we construct or build the non-things we call homes. And it all goes pfft into nothingness when we fail to pay our virtual landlords (e.g. domain registrars and hosting companies) to keep it up. And nothing is permanent. All those domain names and home spaces are rented, not owned.

All these thinkings came to mind this morning when I read two pieces:

Peter Thiel Just Accidentally Made a Chilling Admission. Five Decades Ago, One Man Saw It Coming. By Nick Ripatrazone in Yahoo NewsWhat’ll happen if we spend nearly $3tn on data centres no one needs? by somebody behind the FT paywall. But I could read it here, so I did, and maybe you can too.

The first speaks to living disembodied lives along with our embodied ones.

The second speaks to the mania for Big AI spend:

It’s also worth breaking down where the money would be spent. Morgan Stanley estimates that $1.3tn of data centre capex will pay for land, buildings and fit-out expenses. The remaining $1.6tn is to buy GPUs from Nvidia and others. Smarter people than us can work out how to securitise an asset that loses 30 per cent of its value every year, and good luck to them.

Where the trillions won’t be spent is on power infrastructure. Morgan Stanley estimates that more than half of the new data centres will be in the US, where there’s no obvious way yet to switch them on.

I now think at least some of that money will be far better spent on personal AI.

That’s AI for you and me, to get better control of our lives in the natural world where we pay bills, go to school, talk to friends, get sick and well, entertain ourselves and others, and live lives thick with data over which we have limited control at most. Do you have any record of all your subscriptions, your health and financial doings and holdings, what you’ve watched on TV, where you’ve been, and with whom? Wouldn’t it be nice to have all that data handy, and some AI help to organize and make sense of it? I’m talking here about AI that’s yours and works for you. Not a remote service from some giant that can do whatever it pleases with your life.

It’s as if we are back in 1975, but instead of starting to work on the personal computer, all the money spent on computing goes into making IBM and the BUNCH more gigantic than anything else ever, with spendings that dwarf what might be spent on simple necessities, such as the electric grid and roads without holes. Back then, we at least had the good fortune of Jobs, Wozniac, Osborne, and other mammals working on personal computing underneath the feet of digital dinosaurs. Do we have the same people working on personal AI today? Name them. I’m curious.

Note that I’m not talking about people working on better ways to buy stuff, or to navigate the digital world with the help of smart agents. I’m talking about people working on personal (not personalized) AI that will give us ways to get control of our everyday lives, without the help of giants.

Like we started doing with personal computers fifty years ago.

 

In fewest words, yes.

When I just opened the app, I got the screen on the left. Since I wasn’t listening this afternoon, it made no sense. The one in the middle appeared when I returned to the app. It just lists channels, starting at the bottom (from which they annoyingly moved “Fifties on 5” and “Sixties on 6” to other channels), and then shows me the right screen when I hit Library, which used to have the much more sensible label “Favorites.” I hate the whole mess, but that’s beside the point of this post, so read on.

Here is my answer to the question Does SiriusXM know what station you are listening to?

The SiriusXM streaming app logs what you listen to, when, and how you interact with programs and channels across your devices (phone, pad, smart speaker, website through your browser, whatever).

This data is used to personalize your “experience” (as the marketers like to say), sync your profile across devices, and support marketing efforts (which these days are mostly surveillance-based) while maintaining “pseudonymous tracking.”

Older SiriusXM radios (before about 2020) had no return path for usage data to flow to the company, but almost all new cars have their own cellular data connections (over which you have no control) for reporting many kinds of driving and usage data, including what you do with your car’s infotainment system.

Your SiriusXM radio use is among the many forms of personal data being reported by your car to its maker and to other parties known and unknown. To explain this, the SiriusXM privacy policy provides, in the current business fashion, what Paul Simon (in “The Boxer”) calls “a pocket full of mumbles such are promises.”

All that said, there isn’t much in my experience of SiriusXM to suggest that I am being understood much in any way by the system. There are many more of what used to be called “favorites” in the Library. But there is no obvious order to how and why they appear where they do on the list. I have other complaints, but none are worth going into. And I’ve already posted my biggest complaint in How to Make Customers Hate You.

New Life for LIVE

Colbert’s cancellation looks political, but it’s not. The show was a ratings winner, but a money loser. And the ratings for all of late night, like all of live TV, have been in decline for decades, along with the question, “What’s on?”

We live in the Age of Optionality now. Watch or listen to whatever you want, whenever you want, on whatever you want.

Except for sports, news, and Saturday Night Live, live programming is disappearing from radio and TV. Meanwhile, radio and TV themselves are being sidelined by apps on phones, flat screens, smart speakers, and CarPlay/Android Auto.

Fact: The only thing that makes your TV a TV is the cable/antenna jack in the back. Otherwise, it’s a monitor with a computer optimized for clickbait and spying on you. The clickbait is the (often spying-based) “for you” shit, plus what the industry calls FAST (Free Ad-Supported Streaming Television) channels: old westerns, local TV from elsewhere, looping news from services you never heard of, hustlers selling junk, foreign language programs, a fireplace that doesn’t go out, plus other crap.

Broadcasting has devolved from Macy’s to Dollar General.

But live programming is still with us. It’s just not on TV or radio, just like food trucks aren’t in buildings. At this stage what we have are pop-up shows with very high harbinger ratings and uncertain persistence. Here are a few I just looked up:::

Newsletter WritersCasey Newton (Platformer)Matt Taibbi (Racket News)Heather Cox Richardson (Letters from an American)Anne Helen Petersen (Culture Study)Emily Atkin (Heated)Puck News team (e.g. Dylan Byers, Teddy Schleifer)Influencers (Mostly on TikTok and Instagram)TinxChris OlsenBretman RockTabitha BrownCelebrities (on YouTube, Substack, TikTok, X Spaces, etc.)Andrew CallaghanMarc MaronHank GreenElon Musk & David SacksWritersTim Urban (Wait But Why)Bari Weiss (The Free Press)Douglas Rushkoff (Team Human)

Since I’m not on TikTok and barely on Instagram, I know none of the influencers I just listed with a bit of AI help. If I have time later, I’ll add links.

Meanwhile, the writing isn’t just on the wall for live old-school broadcasting. The wall is falling down, and new ones are being built all over the place by creative voices and faces themselves. Welcome to Now.

How about ASO, for Attention Surfeit Order?

Royal Society: Attention deficits linked with proclivity to explore while foraging. To which Thom Hartman adds, The Science Catches Up: New Research Confirms ADHD as an Evolutionary Advantage, Not a Disease.

Which I've always believed.  But that didn't make me normal. Far from it.

In my forties and at my wife’s urging (because my ability to listen well and follow directions was sub-optimal), I spent whole days being tested for all kinds of what we now call neurodivergent conditions. The labels I came away with were highly qualified variants of ADHD and APD. Specifics:

I was easily distracted and had trouble listening to and sorting out instructions for anything. (I still have trouble listening to the end of a long joke.)On puzzle-solving questions, I was very good.My smarts with spatial and sequence puzzles were tops, as was my ability to see and draw patterns, even when asked to remember and rotate them 90° or 180°.My memory was good.I had “synchronization issues,” such as an inability to sing and play drums at the same time. This also involved deficiencies around “cognitive overload,” “context switching,” multitasking, coping with interruptions, and “bottlenecks” in response selection. They also said I had become skilled at masking all those problems, to myself and others. (While I thought I was good at multitasking, they told me, "You're in the bottom 1%.")I could easily grasp math concepts, but I made many mistakes with ordinary four-function calculations.I did much better at hearing and reading long words than short ones, and I did better reading wide columns of text than narrow ones.When asked to read out loud a simple story composed of short and widely spaced words in a narrow column, I stumbled through it and remembered little of the content afterward. They told me that if I had been given this test alone, they would have said I had trouble reading at a first-grade level, and I would have been called (as they said in those days) mentally retarded.My performance on many tests suggested dyslexia, but my spelling was perfect, and I wasn’t fooled by misplaced or switched letters in words. They also said that I had probably self-corrected for some of my innate deficiencies, such as dyslexia. (I remember working very hard to become a good speller in the fourth grade, just as a challenge to myself. Not that the school gave a shit.) They said I did lots of “gestalt substitution,” when reading out loud, for example, replacing “feature” with “function,” assuming I had read the latter when in fact I’d read the former.Unlike other ADHD cases, I was not more impulsive, poorly socialized, or easily addicted to stuff than normal people. I was also not hyperactive, meaning I was more ADD than ADHD.Like some ADHD types, I could hyperfocus at times.My ability to self-regulate wasn’t great, but it also wasn’t bad. Just a bit below average. (So perhaps today they’d call me ADHD-PI, a label I just found in Wikipedia).The APD (auditory processing disorder) diagnosis came mostly from hearing tests. But, as with ADHD, I only hit some of the checkboxes. (Specifically, about half of the ten symptoms listed here.)My ability to understand what people say in noisy settings was in the bottom 2%. And that was when my hearing was still good.

So there's no good label for me, but…

Good read

I just got turned on to Paul Ford's What is Code, from 2015, but still current today. Shoulda been a book, like Neal Stephenson's In the Beginning Was the Command Line. You can still find the text online, such as here.

Nice, I hope

That "intention economy" appears (in a positive way) in this story from South Africa, in IOL.

One reason I love Indiana

My car's dashboard has been telling me we have a slow leak in the right front tire. So I drove up to Tieman Tire here in Bloomington. It was busy, but they took me as a walk/drive-in, and then took an hour to remove the tire, find the leak in a tub of water (which wasn't easy, because the leak was too sphinctered to make bubbles: they had to feel in and on the tread all around the tire to locate the leak, which was from a tiny nail), remove and patch the tire, balance it, and torque it back onto the car… and then to make sure all four tires and the spare were all properly inflated—all with some enjoyable and informative shop-talk about cars and tires.

Price: $20.

They now have me as a loyal customer.

Dame Time!

I love that Damien Lillard is returning to the Portland Trailblazers. He and the town love each other, and the team is already on the ascent. It's a great move.

The Eagle in the Coal Mine

 

Public broadcasting is the strongest form of broadcasting that’s still left. One reason is that it’s the only form of broadcasting for which its consumers are also its customers. Yes, not all those customers pay, but the market is there. If you donate to public radio or television stations, or to podcasts supported by subscriptions, you are paying for goods and services. You are customers in an open marketplace.

But broadcasting itself is an anachronism. For radio, listening is moving from radios to phones* pads, and smart speakers. For television, viewing is moving from antennas and cable to Internet streams. Even the PBS app on your streaming box requires that you first pay your public TV station. (Because PBS wholesales its programs to stations, which in turn retail their programming  to you.)

It’s a matter of time before AM and even FM radio are gone from cars, because every station has a worldwide coverage footprint over the cellular data system, making stations’ over-the-air coverage obsolete. Never mind that there are rural areas not reached by cell. If you want radio in those places, the satellite kind (SiriusXM in the US and Canada) will work, even though there is no local programming.

Also, most stations are now just ways to route programs. Few midmarket and smaller market stations are still programmed locally, or still employ local talent other than in clerical and ad sales positions. Local and regional public radio stations still tend to be staffed, but are still in the business of programming more than distribution. The primary listening devices now are apps on phones, not radios (except in cars, where the AM/FM/satellite radio tuners are increasingly buried behind other functions on dashboards).

There are going to be some big victims. Rural public radio in Alaska (for many locales, the only kind of radio), for example, just got clobbered by the end of CPB funding, which was its major source of income. But listeners can still pay to keep the stations going. That’s why I wrote If you like public broadcasting, be customers, not just consumers. Read it again, if you haven’t already.

And then, if you really care, help develop EmaniPay, which will make it much easier for consumers to become customers.

_____

*Even in cars, through CarPlay and Android Auto. In Teslas, the equivalent happens without a phone.

From Dates to Tweets

For the past few weeks I've been writing the blog mostly in Wordland, which is awesome. I'll still keep doing that (such as right now). But I'm hitting the pause button on combining a day's postings under title that's a date.

I went with dates-as-headlines because it most closely resembled the way I wrote on my original blog, which is archived here. Note that most of the posts under each date were short, kind of like a tweet. Each also had a short snarky headline that worked as the punchline for the post. (A trick I learned form Esquire's Dubious Achievement Awards, which, alas, are all paywalled).  For example, Further proof of life after birth was the headline of my last post before I turned 60.

I sorta replicated that approach here by putting a boldfaced one-liner at the start of each post under a date headline. That worked for readers (meaning it looked good), but a problem showed up when I looked back through posts in my WordPress dashboard: All I could see were dates. I couldn't see the leading lines (sub-headlines of a sort) of each post under the date headline, because those sub-headlines were buried in text. I needed clues in the form of posts' headlines.

So now I'm leaving the dateline up to WordPress and writing headlines anew for each short post.