Tag: Hard Fork

When It Comes to Fixing The Looming Problems of A.I., Ezra Klein is Full of Shit

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I finished reading Ezra Klein’s great book “Why We’re Polarized” with a lingering sense of being a little bit cheated. He was great at explaining WHY we’re polarized, but when it came to giving a rube like me any sort of solution as to what to do about that polarization there was nothing.

So I find myself listening to him on The New York Times’ Hard Fork podcast and he did it AGAIN. He gave a really cogent description of the problems associated with the rise of AI, but when he was asked how AI companies might make money other than in advertising — he punted. He pivoted to the idea that somehow we should get the government to award huge prizes for technology development.

Does he really think that somehow, magically the government is going to subsidise the AI industry to the point that Federal prizes would be able to supplant the vast sums of money that would come from the path of least resistance that would be advertising?

I hate that. I hate the idea that a smug wealthy podcast liberal Klein can make all this money, get all this status by bitching and moaning about the problems associated with AI…and yet he refuses to come up with any actual solutions. The idea of government “prizes” instead of advertising is complete and total bullshit.

I turn to people like Klein for not just complaints, but solutions. Because I think ultimately Klein’s complaints-with-no-solutions will ultimately lead to the exact thing he doesn’t want to happen: a combination of competition and people using the experiences associated with social media will cause AI to be based on the concepts not of government prizes, but pure capitalism.

The Death of Mass Media: Hard Fork, You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I was listening to The New York Times’ podcast “Hard Fork” and I was startled when they came up with a scenario for AI generated music that I have already gamed out for video entertainment — the idea that AI could, on the fly, generate entertainment out of whole cloth relative to what mood you might have at any particular moment.

It was spooky who hear people that others actually listen to come up with an idea I have already mulled. I felt their vision was way, way too limited. They were talking about music and so they said, “Hey, what are we going to do when AI can generate music on the fly that sounds like our favorite artists based on biometric sources?”

Think bigger, folks.

It won’t be music, but TV and movies that will be the most consumed by generative AI. Rather than listening to hours of AI generated Radiohead songs, what happens when you sit down in front of your smart TV and it does a quick face scan of you to determine your mood — then shoots out a TV show or movie that perfectly fits your mood at that specific moment.

What’s more, it would use a licensed database of full body scans of your favor actors to do this. So, it could be 30 years from now and we could all be watching very, very personalized Indiana Jones movies or TV shows to the point that mass media as we currently conceive it no longer exists.

But that’s really the end game of all of this — if everyone is watching AI generated TV shows and movies and listening to AI generated music….the idea of any sort of shared reality grows exceedingly quaint.

We already have problems talking to strangers at a bar because of the frayed nature of our shared reality. When everyone is watching very specific AI generated entertainment…oh boy. I suppose there might be a mass market for the entertainment generated by someone who is….really interesting?

But given how fucking lazy everyone and self-absorbed everyone is, it makes a lot more sense that one day in the not-too-distant future we’ll all entertain ourselves with such specific AI generated art that….lulz…everything will change overnight and we won’t even bat an eye.