Imma Just Do Round-ups now.

I'm noticing something that's creating difficulties for tech bloggers, tech journos, and avid tech readers. It's partly Ray Kurzweil's fault, partly Gordon Moore's fault, and it's also a fact of life and Nature. 

I commented in other recent posts that some things I was writing articles about were progressing so quickly that it was getting hard to keep up. How hard? One of those articles is scheduled for July 26th, weeks after this article will already have been posted . . . I wish that last sentence was hyperbolic BS but it isn't. As I was writing it I had to stop and rewrite chunks of what I'd already written, to include new information. That, on top of yet other articles I'd posted and in some cases needed to update mere days after posting.

So if you want to read "Technology's Pace Is Racing" you'll need to wait until 26 Jul 2023 to open the link. And that is a really weird feeling for me, linking to an article that hasn't been posted yet. Also, by the time it comes out, I'll already have written several other articles that have probably leapfrogged it. 

The Race Is On

I mentioned YouTubers having difficulties with progress, tech equipment and hardware reviewers who take the time to produce a decent long-form video report, finding that newer technology almost made their video outdated by the time they posted it. Unless you want a quickly-assembled frantic short-form video that's pretty much ephemeral, there's some production time involved. 

Prediction #1:

In order to cope, some of the more popular tech review / explainer / news YouTubers will begin to rely on AI to write their scripts, edit the videos, and publish them. Some may even generate deepfakes of themselves to present the videos, taking themselves out of the loop almost entirely. Some will use this as a way to get more travelling to location, interviewing, and on-the-ground fact-gathering time, and less need to stitch it into a coherent report and present it. 

If they're in a field where they can do their entire field part of the production process by remote video presence, expect that often a deepfake will be doing the whole interview for them while they do other things like recording 

I don't think it's a stretch when I say that tools like telepresence robots will be pressed into service. Channel presenter sits behind their desk and pretty much has a Zoom session into a robot at the other end, they get to 'virtually see' their target story location and converse with the people there while their camera operator manages any vision-gathering equipment the telepresence bot has available - and maybe even that can be handled by a piece of AI software. 

Bottom line: Big YouTubers will have the resources to invest in such software and hardware and will get bigger - unless the tide turns against such automation. (It won't - if anyone still has any romantic notions of the person with the iPhone and a ring light and tripod unbelievably making it to the Big League Of Influencers, give it up now - there's a professional; production team behind almost every one, and they're all desperate to ditch a few costs (="probably means staff") so every automation process has been adopted to speed the workflow and reduce the number of hours it occupies... )

Sub-Prediction #1.01:
Who will benefit? Well, for a start, the "Next Big Thing" people. They'll start off already using all available automation and automata - the "iPhones" of their era - and so will be seen as resourceful and edgy, whereas the old guard will all be seen as betraying their old school values. I've already been guilty of looking askance at long format content creators falling for the lure (and income) of the short-form video brainfart formats, and those that overuse automation and obviously plagiarised-and-written-by-GPT scripts, and actually stopped following a few of them.

But a new audience will see new rising stars and accept all the things I see as shortcomings as "edgy" and "nouveau."

My best guess of a "talking head"
operating another "talking head."

Back at the studio, the footage and audio can be stitched together mostly by AI under the direction of the video and audio producers and the presenter, and then presented by their deepfake studio presence. A story with a deadline can be gathered in the same day in this way.

(Talk about a weird weird WEIRD coincidence - my podcast reader has been throwing up some weird results lately, this time from 27 Jan 2023 an ABC News Daily podcast.

It's titled "This episode was written by an AI bot." I can't even make shit like this up, as I cued it up, put the earphones in, and gave it a listen. (I've only had ABC 'casts on my reader for about two months total and have received a few long-past items but this would be six months old")

And it wasn't all written by an AI bot, just the introduction was. And it seems it wasn't read by a deepfake voice - or was it? - and the rest was a normal ABC podcast format. But thanks to the Sentient Inernet AI Overbeings for providing this little extra snippet...)

-- ABC News Daily

Why?

A few months ago, the online publication world was enraged by GPTs. Some bloggers and news outlets put their content behind a paywall to prevent any AI getting it's neural networks into their all-precious "content." I haven't followed this up, but what would it cost someone to take out a subscription to their content - and hand control of it to their AI? That was such a knee-jerk pathetic and ill-thought-out response to the possible GPT threat that left me shaking my head. 

Today, most of the big players haven't specifically said they use GPT networks to write their content, but I've seen quite a few copy writers have lost their jobs, and most strongly suspect that a piece of software has replaced them. 

(SIDENOTE: I know, my social graph is only a small part of the world, but the composition of it is much the same as any other person's. I don't believe I have a propensity to favour professional writers over anyone else, so I can safely assume that what I can infer from my group will be similar to what others can infer from theirs. And that means that many people will have noticed that the field of professional writing has just taken a direct hit.)

Direct a journalist to interview and report that back, feed it through a speech to text to a GPT and bingo! - an article pops out the other end only needing slight adjustments if any at all to be published. 

Hand a script to the teleprompter operator at your news studio, the newsreader will not know if it was written b y a human, a GPT, or the janitor.

This creates a situation

... where some news organisations loudly and publicly distanced themselves from the use of AI - but they also have had layoffs. There are now some TV stations that use virtual deepfake newsreaders and use it as a selling point, and an unknown number that also use them but are keeping schtumm on this fact. 

As mentioned a bit back, Youtube depends on content - terabytes, petabytes - of content, and on people glued to their screens. Both the screens and the attention spans are steadily shrinking. I don't mean everyone becomes a compulsive grasshopper consuming content one tiny fragment at a time without ever noticing the grass stem that the fragment came from. 

But I mean the vast majority of content is consumed for entertainment alone and not for any deeper significance or educational value. Youtube lives by those views, not by the views of the long-format videos these days. And it's also not Youtube's "fault" - they need the money, after all. I mean - look at the history of entertainment. 

+ Hominids imitating a big fat lazy prey animal to its family. Time to hunt.
+ Images scratched in the wall of a cave that they all used on their migration. Big fat lazy prey animals are to be found here.
+ Short dances and plays, demonstrating "how we do things around here." We hunt big lazy prey animals like this, and we share it with the other families who live here. Culture is being taught and learned even as it entertains.
+ That Shakespeare, he's got such great plays! And so is this acting troupe! And the artworks in the foyer! 
+ Mr Rogers. Mork & Mindy. Carl Sagan, Stephen Hawking, Dr Julius Sumner Miller, Neil deGrasse Tyson on TV
+ Physics Girl (please send her all your support as she still deals with Long COVID) and Joe Scott on Youtube and Nebula.

THAT'S entertainment.

Pretty much the arc of history - we live by stories, teach by stories, entertain one another by stories. And we get better and better at telling our stories farther and wider. Always at almost every stage there's technology involved, props, drawing stones, footlights, televisions, and the Internet. And at almost every stage, entertainment trumps education, and the money's where the audience's wishes are. 

And That's Why I Predict #1

In order to survive adopters of new technology, existing performers have to also adopt that which gives the advantage. And now there are so many new things in the mix, there'll be a lot of change. There'll be hold-outs that will resist. But by and large the way our entertainment and infotainment will be produced will allow more and more to be created. And when there's more information available, the tech innovators will learn more and be able to create newer better tech. And that's reason #1 why my hobby is becoming harder to keep up with.

Prediction #2

Bloggers are a pretty egocentric lot - we diarise online, after all, no matter what the subject is, we are in effect using a form of vanity press to get our ideas and words out there. You'll probably find the world of blogging to be the last to be affected by the GPT uptake. 

I tried to get ChatGPT to write me a few articles' worth of content. And it did a creditable job of it - here, take a look - but of course I don't have the money to buy a full subscription to any of the major AI outlets so I got 350 - 450 words only per topic, and I didn't fact check any of it because that would defeat the purpose of a cold test. The respective AI sites produced reasonable output but I prefer my own style. 

I'm a fairly simple case - I don't have the money to use a GPT to write my articles anyway, but even if I did, I'd prefer to write things myself. I'll presume that other granddad bloggers will be a bit the same and avoid using mechano-ghost-writers too. Which will form a pool of old-school handmade content online. If people still want it.

You can help this granddad blogger by donating - it really helps me to pay for things related to the blogging and Making projects. I especially made that little graphic above to make it easy for people to tip me for my content and help me with those costs. 

So anyhow - my prediction is that you'll get more and more AI-written content (unacknowledged) on news sites, and find a core of old school bloggers who'll probably avoid the lure of the AI Goldmine.

Hang on - "Round-ups?"

Yep. 

Stuff happens so fast that I have no hope of creating one post for each new piece of good news that shows up on my radar - so I'm considering putting together round-up posts. 

And I'm not even kidding - I'm having trouble keeping up with writing two to four posts a week across all my blogs and there are currently over a dozen links (each needing a paragraph or two to introduce them) already... Same thing's happening with other tech, with politics, and with all my other topics. 

If - IF - this gig was a job, I'd be on it 12-14 hours a day but it's just a hobby and doesn't pay me anything so I can't afford to just employ someone to do the laundry, cooking, and gardening to keep my spouse and myself alive so that I could dedicate myself to fulltime writing, and it's already eating into what little time I have. So sometimes, when things go hyperbolic, it'll have to be a round-up like this.

A different Singularity

Ray Kurzweil predicted a Singularity where our human evolution would be overtaken by tech. Gary Moore observed that the number of transistors in a device doubled roughly every eighteen months. 

"The Ted Predictor" (here he modestly coughed to divert attention from his obviously attention-grabbing ploy) is my own invention, which roughly translates into: 

"The amount of technological power one can obtain for a given sum - adjusted for inflation - doubles every eighteen months, and the converse also - the same amount of technological power drops in price by half over that time." 

-- Ted  

In fact, I think the Ted Predictor is somewhat holding back because while some things (laptops and PCs, for example seem to be being artificially held back) aren't following the Predictor, almost everything else is exceeding it. I put off buying a particular 3D printer because it was more than twice what I was prepared to pay for what amounted (at that time - don't hate on me!) to an expensive toy. A year later I bought it - admittedly as a result of two specials on top of each other - for under half what it had cost when I first checked it out.

The Great Chip Shortage put dents in all the predictions, and Raspberry Pi are still relying on their "first to market" cred to keep prices high. But meanwhile China's been racing itself to the bottom on other chip / small board computer market and I can get a radar human presence detector for around six bucks today that had cost upward of twenty - thirty just over a year ago. The microphone I wanted but would have had to pay upwards of a hundred for almost two years ago, I can now buy for thirty-three. 

But I don't want it now anyway, because reasonable pair of wireless Lavalier mics that were over $50 just a year ago were on special sale for $12 a few weeks ago so I got them. They arrived here in Australia within twelve days. And didn't cost anything for shipping.

And of course, the sheer quantity of new tech is increasing. The sheer quantity and level of detail about world events and politics increases. (You can cram five news grabs into the time that a news magazine video article...) Our demand for energy increases, and energy tech ramps up. And yep - I'm saying that entertainment (infotainment, okay) drives much of the technologies we are using today.

Free Prediction: 

You can see that entertainment went from utilitarian, once-off, and vital; to something you might see once or twice in your life; to seeing the newsreels at the cinema every few weeks along with the latest B&W movie; to something we consume almost continuously every day. 

The only thing we still aren't doing is living inside the entertainment. That was what Second Life wanted us to do, what Meta is trying to do now. Until the technology catches up, 

And how meta is this? I said in posts over one and a half decades ago that we would develop augmentation technology that would be far better than any VR / AR visor technology, and have reiterated that in a blog post (which may or may not have been posted by the time this post comes out) again. Ray Kurzweil's Singularity may be coming very soon. 

And once that tech comes along, we'll be able to actually live the medium. Don't think this is a decade away - I suspect it's quite a lot closer than that. And sorry - it won't be Musk's Neuralink technology, that's a bit like hammering a couple of nails into your skull and connecting a 9V battery to them. NOT my idea of fun. 

Actually, even my idea (as good as it might turn out to be - or not) doesn't appeal to me. But I'm a fossil FFSM's sake. New younger people will see it as normal.

Augmented and Virtual Reality platforms will take the place of Youtube. Tom Scott has a guess at Youtube's future (the whole video's worth watching, do yourself a favour and restart it after this) and it's much the same as mine - low effort will win out - and that's a bit depressing. 

But look - if I could make an engram from an experience I have and you could just download it and bam, there it is now in your mind - would you still want to go and look at the video version, watch it at painstakingly slow speeds, mull it over, leave a comment asking what I meant when I said "engram" there at 14 minutes into the video? 

Note:

I even make most of the artwork in my blogs. I freely admit I use AI to generate base images for me because my hand-eye coordination sucks balls, but I build the works up painstakingly with only a mouse and a free software package called paint.net not because it's easy but because I like to put myself into my articles, and make them a more pleasant experience for you while reading them. 

It's not that I can't use a drawing pad and stylus, but that I can't afford one. And all it would take to turn a two hour paint project into a one hour joy is that my donations don't even fully cover running costs yet. You could help me immensely by going to my Ko-Fi page and donating the price of a cup of coffee monthly. Or if you prefer a more direct giving approach you could just Paypal Me directly. Believe me it would make a huge difference.

Hazelwood Ex-Coal-Fired Battery

I watched the Hazelwood coal-fired power station come down a few years ago. I cheered even as I realised that electricity tariffs would go up. 

And of course they did. But also Mike Cannon-Brookes fired the first shot in his wrestling match with AGL to get them to shut down more fossil-fuel-fired power stations. (And proud and happy to say he's won that round despite AGL's opposition.) And tariffs went up. But I realised it'd been inevitable also.

So What Now, Hazelwood? Whither Morwell? 

Naturally, the logical use for an old power station. From Big Coal to Big Battery. If ever there was an act symbolic of ecological awakening, this is it. May there be many more.

Stinky Stacks To Batteries.

So glad that they did this. Nothing's a nicer feeling than shutting down another source of fossil fuel emissions. Unless it's re-using the site to put a new load management battery in. And it's only the start of building in a lot more battery capacity at the site. Battery capacity is going to be increased, and with it Victoria's energy security. 

Why It Makes Sense

A power station already has huge power lines into it. Powerlines can direct energy in either direction equally well. And - while it's a report that shows little understanding of how electricity works, there was a brief spot for it on ABC where the guest said it would store "all the electricity from rooftop solar" I guess he thought there'd be separate pipes inside the power grid just for all those solars to trickle along?

It'll provide employment - perhaps not as much as the Hazelwood power station but then again renewable energy is THE employment growth sector, to be closely followed by recycling quite soon I'll venture. 

The station was designed to have a fifty year lifespan from when building finished in 1971, then in 1996 it was estimated to have forty years' life left. By the oiriginal estimate it should have been shut down in 2021 but when the new company took it over in 1996 they'd pushed the date to 2036, and in fact if memory serves me it was shut down in 2017 and the station was already becoming difficult to keep maintained by then. You see the amount of blue sky fudge factor everyone involved was building into their BS figures... 

Hazelwood was also one of the dirtiest power stations* per kWh - in the world!!! - and a measurably significant portion of Australia's total pollution. Good riddance to it is the nicest thing I can think of to say about it. Here - have a picture of one of PTEC3D's finest Climate Professors, Dr Furgatroyd:

Yes, AI and I made this!

Dr Furgatroyd will at least put a "nnaaaawww" smile on your face. The fight to save the environment is going to be won one power station at a time, one Big Battery installation at a time. And we have to KEEP THE BASTARDS HONEST all the time. 

* - BTW that one power station was truly a killer, pumping megatons of killer particulates into the air for almost fifty years. 

But here's a surprising (to you possibly - to me they have been my enemy for decades now due to my respiratory condition) source of killing particulates - yep, the humble wood stove. 

Every year my respiratory health takes a nose dive for winter, and every bushfire that's anywhere within miles around. Turns out that even when the smoke is way up high, the particulates flow along much closer to the ground and cover even greater distances. 

So while I love the heat from a good old wood fire and being able to simmer meals slowly for maximum flavour and tenderness, and really miss it, I'll be glad when they're made illegal. Sorry all. 

And as the article points out, there is also the matter of illegal firewood operators who destroy habitat and use less than clean-burning wood.