SITALWeek #406
Welcome to Stuff I Thought About Last Week, a personal collection of topics on tech, innovation, science, the digital economic transition, the finance industry, and whatever else made me think last week.
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In today’s post: using AI to minimize global warming from airplane contrails; chatbots as personal DJs for everything; the tradeoffs we make with our data have greater stakes with AI tools; the rise of mundane TV; GLP-1s reduce severe heart disease risk by 20%; I get caught up on some old movies; Jaron Lanier on musical instruments and the beauty of ephemeral, analog creation; and, much more below.
Stuff about Innovation and Technology
Contrail Avoidance
Contrails are vapor trails that form behind jets as they cruise through the atmosphere around 25,000 to 40,000 feet above the planet’s surface. These jet-fueled cirrus clouds, which form when moisture condenses onto sooty exhaust particles as jets pass through humid atmospheric regions, can trap heat in the atmosphere during the night (they also reflect a more modest amount of heat back during the day). The net effect is that those contrail cirrus clouds account for 35% of the global warming impact from airplanes, which is more than half the global warming impact from jet fuel. Using AI, Google worked with American Airlines and its pilots to adjust flight patterns to avoid humid regions, leading to a 54% reduction in contrails. Some extra fuel was used to adjust flight paths, but Google believes this can be minimized to grant a large, net-positive impact. The possibilities seem endless for applying AI-derived, efficiency-optimized methodologies to seemingly little problems with big results.
Artificial Emcees
Spotify is expanding its AI-powered DJ to listeners around the globe. The AI host is personalized for you, e.g., with “light-hearted banter and contextual information that references specific songs and artists the user has previously listened to”. I always prefer a DJ when I am listening to music, and I can easily see such a feature being part of our broader AI chatbot future. A chatbot with more context and personal knowledge can not only DJ streaming music, but also interject relevant news, local information, recommendations, reminders, important notifications, etc. Essentially, music and other forms of media will be DJ’d nonstop as you interact with your chatbot throughout the day. It’s not so much that streaming music services will have AI DJs, it’s that music will just be woven into your chatbot app (a platform which seems unlikely to be a music streaming app). It’s not a stretch to imagine that our chatbot companions will DJ all of the information and media we consume. In the past, I’ve discussed the potential for creating a more useful, traditional radio feel for streaming music with integrated talk radio (aka podcasts). I’ve also suggested the possibility of digital DJs as a service, where you could match up your listening preference with master content curators or other radio celebrities (if the streaming services would open up their algorithms to third parties). I think it’s still nice to know what fellow humans with good taste think I should listen to, but I am old fashioned like that.
Trading Data for AI Features
In order to access new AI features in Zoom, the company is requiring customers to make telemetry data (i.e., how people use the app) available to Zoom for AI training and analytical purposes. Such data sharing agreements are nothing new – for decades, consumers have been implicitly and explicitly opting in to share every single detail about their lives so that tailored ads can subsidize digital content. And, companies (largely enabled by cloud software) have been able to pool information to improve analytics and software/product functionality. Access to customer data has been a key part of the digital network effects that have allowed the Internet and cloud to grow so quickly. Google famously launched a free directory search/calling service, GOOG-411, in 2007 in order to secretly create and train its first voice recognition tool. But, at some point, it feels like data sharing in an AI world crosses a line. Responding to customers’ fears and confusion, Zoom had to issue a correction that clearly stated they will not use audio or video from customers for training. In the future, however, will users feel compelled to hand over potentially sensitive meeting recordings because the features they get in return will make it worth the risk? Given that LLMs are easily analogized as humans, perhaps handing your data to an AI seems like an overstep because it’s more like sharing personal/sensitive information with a human-like stranger rather than with rote algorithms/servers. There could be an advantage for companies that have access to training data sets other than customer opt-in information. For example, Google and Microsoft have broad businesses with multiple ways to obtain uncorrelated training data.
Miscellaneous Stuff
Mundane TV
Paramount is broadening the availability of the Big Brother “quad view” beyond Paramount+ to stream on the free, ad-supported Pluto TV 24/7. The all-hours streaming version of the quad channel (which debuted during the pandemic on Paramount+ in 2021) allows you to watch and listen to multiple camera angles at once. There is certainly a proliferation and growing demand for mundane content, whether it’s YouTube videos of people going on long, solitary walks (which I wrote about two weeks ago) or restocking their kitchens (as detailed in this WaPo article from the tail end of the pandemic that was recently brought to my attention). Viewers are increasingly opting for this type of low-budget, voyeuristic content over professionally produced and carefully crafted movies/series, and it seems to be growing in volume at an infinite pace. With each Hollywood work stoppage, we seem to lean more heavily into what was once called “reality TV”, but what is now, perhaps, just ambient reality. Specifically, reality TV grew in popularity during the 2007-2008 writer’s strike, and we also saw a large increase in unscripted entertainment during the pandemic (something I wrote about in more detail here). Whereas the prescient movie The Truman Show featured the god-like Christof in his aerial control booth, directing every minute of Jim Carrey’s life and his illusory free will, the reality content of today is under no real direction. Everyone used to be hyper aware of cameras and would change their behavior accordingly, but, now, people have become so accustomed to being constantly filmed that it has created a new normal of natural behavior regardless of whether the camera is rolling. The growth in mundane video is thus life unfolding minute to minute, as people go about their daily routines as if the cameras weren’t there – a show for nobody, watched by everyone.
GLP-1 Heart Health
Novo’s Wegovy was demonstrated to lower patients’ risk of heart attacks by 20%; meanwhile, insurance companies are growing increasingly desperate to shut down the weight-loss drugs as they are determined to maintain their system of making more profits over time by treating rather than preventing disease. Imagine a world where humans collectively weigh ten to twenty billion pounds less. The biggest overlooked benefit might be going from undersupply to oversupply of doctors and nurses (not to mention a reduction in our carbon footprint). As I’ve written about before, given the way GLP-1s impact the dopamine cycle, effectively curtailing desire for most things for many patients, new, targeted versions – or new types of weight-loss drugs, which are experiencing a VC renaissance – will hopefully selectively curb appetite to increase compliance and allow people to stay on the drugs longer without losing pleasure in other activities.
Under the Cinematic Radar
Last week, I watched three movies that shared a common thread: I should have known about them or their subjects long before now. As abiding readers know, I am obsessed with time travel movies, and, just when I think I’ve seen them all, I run across another one. It’s almost as if people are traveling back in time and making more time travel movies for me to watch. This time, it was Jeff Daniels in 1991’s The Grand Tour. I really enjoyed this movie, and I don’t want to give anything away about it. It does fit into one of the genres I identified in Time Travel to Make Better Decisions, but with some clever deviations. The movie was originally called Timescape and was set to have a theatrical release in 1991; however, it actually debuted on cable in 1992 as Grand Tour: Disaster in Time and was subsequently released to VHS under the title The Grand Tour. I watched it on the cult movie streaming service Arrow. The second movie was David Byrne’s 1986 musical masterpiece True Stories. This mockumentary (of sorts) is set in a small Texas town where John Goodman plays a semiconductor engineer (the movie tap dances around the rise of PCs in the 1980s, and the co-inventor of the integrated circuit, Jack Kilby, is given a “special thanks to” in the credits). That one is not available on any streaming apps, but you can buy or rent it from your preferred platform. Lastly, I watched a wonderful documentary on musical comedian Gary Mule Deer. I guess I am not hip enough to have had Gary in my life prior to last weekend, but I sure am glad that I do now. The movie is titled Show Business Is My Life, But I Can’t Prove It and is also available for rent or purchase. The title really says it all: Gary is a very talented icon, revered by the best, but largely unknown in modern culture. Sometimes I think: investing is my life, but I can’t prove it. It turns out that Gary traded a cocaine habit for an addiction to golf, and he’s been just steps away from me every year for the last decade on a nearby golf course. Incidentally, Gary Mule Deer is 83 years old, and he is playing live shows on tour on the following dates: August 10th, 11th, 12th, 19th, 23rd, 24th, 25th, 26th, 27th, September 8th, 9th, 15th, 16th, 19th, 20th, 23rd, Oct 6th, 7th, 10th, 11th, 13th...well, you get the picture. While I am at it, I’ll throw in a fourth movie I enjoyed last week that initially slipped past my radar: a documentary on 81-year-old pioneering standup comedian Robert Klein titled Robert Klein Still Can’t Stop His Leg (2016), which is also available to rent or buy.
Mystical Materials
Jaron Lanier is frequently cited in SITALWeek, and his latest op-ed – on the power of musical instruments in his life – is not to be missed. “Some of my favorite moments in musical life come when I can’t yet play an instrument. It’s in the fleeting period of playing without skill that you can hear sounds beyond imagination. Eventually, I cajoled the caterpillar and found a tone I love, solid yet translucent. When that happens, the challenge is remembering how to make those fascinating, false notes. One mustn’t lose one’s childhood.” Jaron continues: "As a technologist, my work has often focussed on the creation of interactive devices, such as head-mounted displays and haptic gloves. It’s sobering for me to compare the instruments I’ve played with the devices that Silicon Valley has made. I’ve never had an experience with any digital device that comes at all close to those I’ve had with even mediocre acoustic musical instruments. What’s the use of ushering in a new era dominated by digital technology if the objects that that era creates are inferior to pre-digital ones?...Human senses have evolved to the point that we can occasionally react to the universe down to the quantum limit; our retinas can register single photons, and our ability to sense something teased between fingertips is profound. But that is not what makes instruments different from digital-music models. It isn’t a contest about numbers. The deeper difference is that computer models are made of abstractions—letters, pixels, files—while acoustic instruments are made of material. The wood in an oud or a violin reflects an old forest, the bodies who played it, and many other things, but in an intrinsic, organic way, transcending abstractions. Physicality got a bad rap in the past. It used to be that the physical was contrasted with the spiritual. But now that we have information technologies, we can see that materiality is mystical. A digital object can be described, while an acoustic one always remains a step beyond us.” There is one line in the article that can poetically exist without context: “I don’t want to trick myself into a false mentality that lives outside of time, as if we weren’t time’s prisoners.”
Stuff About Demographics, the Economy, and Investing
Outsourcing Sunset
Emerging market economies, long the benefit of global outsourcing, may soon be one of the largest victims of AI, as the $300B business process outsourcing (BPO) industry defends itself from large language models, according to Bloomberg.
✌️-Brad
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