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: AI avatars are now indistinguishable from their human sources; technology is increasingly pushing perfect price discrimination; the wu-wei of robots; Seinfeld's take on movies as Hollywood reckons with multiple storm fronts; livestreaming extreme weather; what it's like to be a bot; and, much more below.

Stuff about Innovation and Technology
Authentic Avatars
Recent technological advances have allowed for exceptionally realistic avatars of real people. Microsoft’s new VASA-1 AI can create a video of a convincingly human avatar from a single photo and a short voice clip. LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman conducted a video interview with himself via an AI-generated twin powered by OpenAI (I found AI Reid to be more Reid-like than real Reid). After MIT Technology Review reporter Melissa Heikkilä had startup Synthesia recreate herself, she questioned whether the synthetic media (their term for benign deepfake) depicting her avatar was actually real footage. Both people seemed to have experienced some self-reflection upon viewing their digital clones. And, it raises an interesting question of what we can learn from talking to an external copy of our "self" vs. the usual ongoing narrative inside our brain. Would a zoom chat with your AI twin – powered with enough context to generate questions/responses nearly identical to your own – be therapeutic and insightful, or terrifyingly paralyzing? As I’ve hinted in the past, one way to use AI is to create synthetic meeting participants. You could, for example, invite Albert Einstein or Warren Buffett to virtually attend a meeting using an LLM trained on their compendium of knowledge. Or, you could create a virtual employee that remembers all your past meetings and has the context to call out bias or potential errors in your process. Let your imagination run wild, e.g., why not invite a replica of each employee to participate in meetings? Or, why have humans attend meetings at all? Just give your replicas the meeting agenda to discuss among themselves and then provide you with a summary of their conclusions. But, don’t be surprised when these sentient bots start asking for pay raises and more time off to pursue their hobbies. 
 
Scalpers for Everything
One of the many memorable scenes in the 1991 movie LA Story is when Steve Martin tries to get a reservation at an elite dining spot, only to be interrogated as to whether he was worthy of such a privilege. The New Yorker reports on new tools and apps being used by diners and restaurants alike to create a premium trading ground for reservations, which can cost upwards of $1K. Danny Meyer has backed a CRM platform called SevenRooms that helps restaurants profile their customers digitally the way that Patrick Stewart, playing the annoyed maitre d’ in LA Story, did in person. Never underestimate the value of perceived scarcity and status-seeking currency that has defined human behavior for what’s likely hundreds of thousands of years. The supposition is that an army of AI agents will be actively seeking scarce spots for doctors, specialists, travel, etc. and then reselling them for profit – yet another example of AI creating progressive pricing that extracts the maximum amount of money from customers. Potentially the entire economy could be routed through ticket scalpers.
 
Butcher Bots and the Art of Effortless Action
The Daoist concept of wu-wei describes a certain “trying not to try” to accomplish your objectives in harmony, with less effort and more effectiveness. Philosophy professor Edward Slingerland, who wrote a book on the subject, describes wu-wei with a parable about a butcher expertly carving an ox with little exertion or dulling of the blade. The butcher says: “When I first began cutting up oxen, all I could see was the ox itself. After three years, I no longer saw the ox as a whole. And now—now I meet it with my spirit and don’t look with my eyes. My senses and conscious awareness have shut down and my spiritual desires take me away. I follow the Heavenly pattern of the ox, thrusting into the big hollows, guiding the knife through the big openings, and adapting my motions to the fixed structure of the ox. In this way, I never touch the smallest ligament or tendon, much less a main joint.” Slingerland explains: “The result is that Butcher Ding is not so much cutting up the ox as releasing its constituent parts, letting the razor-sharp edge of his cleaver move through the spaces between the bones and ligaments without encountering the slightest resistance.” I often think of wu-wei like that – moving through spaces of minimal friction rather than trying to hack through tough spots. This parable came to mind when I was reading a WSJ story about butcher robots. Cutting up animal carcasses is a cold, hard, dirty job that wears on people, causing a perpetual labor shortage in the industry. Tyson has a new, more automated plant that can process 20-30% more chicken with 250 fewer humans compared to an older plant of similar size. Meat processors are planning on spending billions in the coming years to increase automation, adding to their already sizable herd of robotic cattle drivers, automated cutting implements, and pick-and-place robotic arms capable of moving boxes of packaged goods. Despite all that progress, the article notes: “carcass-scanning computers can’t yet match humans’ ability to disassemble and debone larger cattle and hog bodies that slightly differ in shape and size.” So, until we can teach the robots a bit about wu-wei, humans will need to remain involved in animal butchery.

Miscellaneous Stuff
Hollywood Disharmony
Jerry Seinfeld made some cutting comments about the movie industry in a recent GQ profile while promoting his new Netflix movie Frosted, a farcical tale about the creation of the Pop-Tart breakfast pastry. In particular, he laments the evolution of the movie business from mass market to niche (much along the lines of my framing of Hollywood as Vaudeville in “Will it Play in Peoria?”) . Seinfeld says: “They’re so dead serious! They don’t have any idea that the movie business is over. They have no idea…film doesn’t occupy the pinnacle in the social, cultural hierarchy that it did for most of our lives. When a movie came out, if it was good, we all went to see it. We all discussed it. We quoted lines and scenes we liked. Now we’re walking through a fire hose of water, just trying to see.” Answering the question “So what, if anything, has replaced film?” Seinfeld replies: “Depression? Malaise? I would say confusion. Disorientation replaced the movie business. Everyone I know in show business, every day, is going, ‘What’s going on? How do you do this? What are we supposed to do now?’” Based on his experience filming Frosted, Seinfeld characterizes movie making as a mess, in contrast to something like stand-up comedy or surfing: “That’s how it feels when you have a good set—like you’ve caught this gigantic energy and are just sliding down it. There’s nothing pure in making a movie. There’s no flow. It’s highly complex and messy.” Speaking of Seinfeld’s “disorientation”, Aaron Sorkin recently hinted that he’s writing a sequel to The Social Network about how the protagonist of that 2010 movie led to the current troubling state of civilization by prioritizing money over integrity. Sorkin also discussed an apparent belief that AI will come for his job in the near future. Indeed, Hollywood seems to be coming to grips with Seinfeld’s observations: James Cameron recently expressed in the FT that AI could do the job of writing and directing, but perhaps not yet acting. Also of note: I enjoyed this GQ profile of NIN frontman Trent Reznor and his partner Atticus Ross on the exploration of creativity and the risk taking of trying new artistic endeavors.
 
Twister, the Livestream
I recognize some of you are here only for my quirky YouTube content recommendations. Well, it’s tornado season in the US, and, lately, I have been watching live storm chasers – sometimes a dozen streamers at once – as they throw caution to the wind and drive into nightmarish supercells. (Note: many storm chasers are also certified as first responders, teaming up with police to check on residents and provide aid in the aftermath of destruction). Recently, I’ve seen a grain silo fly across the road and some crazy twisting funnels. For those who remember 1996’s classic Bill Paxton and Helen Hunt flick Twister, keep an eye out for the remake landing this summer, which features Glen Powell in the Paxton role. How will Hollywood’s expensive fabrication stack up against my daily front-seat view of the real thing? 
 
What Is It Like to Be a Bot?
Back in #431’s You Are Special?, one of the topics I discussed was how embodied AI might have a sense of “self” – a different type of consciousness than what we humans experience that’s impossible for us to accurately conceptualize. This notion is encapsulated in Nagel’s “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?”. Effectively, we may never understand what it’s like to be something else if that something else has a different bundle of sensors and neural networks than we do. Further expanding our awareness of consciousness diversity, a large group of scientists say evidence strongly suggests that a broad array of living creatures, including insects, have what is known as phenomenal consciousness, which means that it is “like something” to be those creatures. While we may never know what it’s like to “see” using a bat’s echolocation, a viper’s heat-sensing pits, or a bee’s compound eyes as it buzzes through a nectar-scented floralscape, I think it’s helpful to understand that there are other ways to experience life beyond what we ourselves experience. Rather than being paralyzed by the notion that everything is conscious (I still plan to swat flies), just knowing that there exists a range of conscious awareness could guide us as we work with intelligent AI agents, some of which will have physical embodiment. For an enjoyable exploration of conscious AI agents, check out the classic Star Trek: TNG episode from 31 years ago, “Ship in a Bottle”, which concerns the machinations of the self-aware holodeck version of Moriarty. As Captain Picard concludes at the end of that adventure: “Who knows? Our reality may be very much like [Moriarty’s on the holodeck], all this might just be an elaborate simulation running inside a little device sitting on someone’s table.”

✌️-Brad

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