“Social media users see affirmation when they receive a thumbs-up or a heart. But that's not really why we're sending them.”
—Chris Taylor in The 'Like' doesn't mean what you think it means
Thoughts from John Karahalis
“Social media users see affirmation when they receive a thumbs-up or a heart. But that's not really why we're sending them.”
—Chris Taylor in The 'Like' doesn't mean what you think it means
“A man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest.”
—Paul Simon
A while ago, I wrote that artificial intelligence may soon author new Beatles albums. In hindsight, I feel silly for suggesting that only 50 such records might be produced. If an AI could create 50 new albums in the style of the Beatles, and in their voices, it could create 10,000. It could create them on demand. Want to hear the band singing about hoverboards in a collaboration with Skrillex? Sure.
Today, this is even closer to becoming reality. As Andy Meek writes in BGR, “Thanks to the increasingly creative potential of artificial intelligence… Beatles fans like me can get a small taste of what it might have been like had the Fab Four either stayed together, or gotten back together, to produce new music.”
His article includes some amazing AI-generated mashups as examples, like Paul singing “Imagine,” as well as an unreleased song that AI was able to finish from an incomplete fragment. I'll admit that the reporting is light on details, and there's plenty of “fake AI” stuff going around on social media (no surprises there), but for the moment, I'll take Meek and the creators at their words. If any of these songs was not created with substantial help from AI, they might as well have been, and a future AI will be able to do the same, given how quickly things are accelerating. Our difficulty distinguishing between “real AI” and “fake AI” says something on its own.
I recommend reading his full article, As a lifelong Beatles fan, this AI-generated Beatles music is blowing my mind, or at least listening to the audio. We're still a little ways off from artificial intelligence producing entirely new songs, but it may not be very long.
“I want to leave the world better than I found it.”
I used to say that, but I've come to appreciate that many things are not within my control. Through no fault of my own and despite my best efforts, the world may very well worsen in the future. Society may be devastated by climate change, nuclear war, artificial intelligence, or social media. Would that be a personal failure? Of course not.
I later settled on alternative wording: I want to leave the world better than it would have been without me. Even that sometimes seems impossible, given my contributions to pollution and my consumption of limited resources, given the number of ants I've inadvertently stepped on, and so on. Still, it seems like a more reasonable goal.
I'm not sure where I heard this, but it beautifully summarizes an important issue:
Every explanation fits the past.
In other words, any theory can be molded to agree with previous observations. A theory's usefulness and validity depends more so on whether it can correctly guess what will happen in the future, whether it has predictive power.
Some time ago, I came up with a little mnemonic to remember how direction of travel affects flight times:
East to west, you'll need rest. West to east, not in the least.
That's right, flying eastbound is faster than flying westbound along a similar route. For example, flying from California to New York takes about 5 hours, but flying from New York to California takes about 6 hours. The difference is not caused by Earth's rotation, but rather the jet streams.
Cross-platform messaging is a mess. That is, sending a message from an iPhone to an Android phone, or vice versa, still doesn't work right. Want to create a group chat or respond to messages on your computer? Good luck.
One solution would be for everyone to buy Apple products. That's not realistic, and it only rewards bad behavior; Apple's “our way or the highway” attitude is the reason this is so bad in the first place.
Another solution? Use Signal. Seriously. Just use Signal. Get everyone you know on Signal and never look back. It's time to text like it's 2023.
“We need to find a way back to reality, and the only way to do that is to have conversations that aren’t mediated by technology that is financed and animated by third parties who hope to persuade us. We must fight to speak to each other outside of the persuasion labyrinth.”
—Jaron Lanier in Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now
#Belief #Business #Communication #Politics #SocialMedia #Technology #Wellbeing
“We curate our lives around this perceived sense of perfection because we get rewarded in these short-term signals—hearts, likes, thumbs up—and we conflate that with value and we conflate it with truth, and instead, what it really is is fake, brittle popularity.”
—Chamath Palihapitiya, former VP of Growth, Mobile, and International at Facebook, in a conversation at Stanford
#Belief #PersonalDevelopment #SocialMedia #Technology #Wellbeing
I'm intrigued by Boring Report, a news aggregator that uses artificial intelligence to offer “boring” coverage of current events, free of sensationalism and clickbait. As one example, it offered the following headline:
Shakira and Lewis Hamilton Spend Time Together in Miami
for an article originally titled:
Newly-single Shakira enjoys cosy boat trip with Lewis Hamilton just days after pair were spotted at secret dinner
It's not perfect, but I like it. Imagine if all news read this way. How much more normal would the world feel?