Textual Soundbites

... we call those, "quotes."

"This could have been a toot, Greg!" should really become the quote of the Mastodon Era. We're progressing towards shorter and shorter communications, so we need to make those communications really information-dense. In a way, we're coming a full circle.

When it was hard to even convey a concept, we thought long and hard about hunter signs we left for others. (Would a big smilodon scratched onto a boulder be enough? Maybe add a reclined hominid with one arm tor... No, that might seem like the beginning of a campfire tale, better just a picture of a big cat.)

Then came millennia of slightly more relaxed times. We had a much better spoken language (where this come from? Myself not know how this "language" come from. One minute we scream and point, next minute we say "OMG! A smilodon! Run!" Hmmm, and now me confused, WTF is "minute?" Language hard.) and could just say "OMG! A smilodon! Run!" 

Perhaps scratchings on rocks and ochre drawings got made smaller because we suddenly had more concepts to express, and became pictographic, logographic, ideographic, alphabetic. Some, like runes and hieroglyphs, could convey several layers of contextual meaning. 

As urgency declined (we had kraals, caves, stone and wood houses to give us some leisure to write something longer than "OMG! A Smilodon! Run!" and chisel that into the rock where some Old One had hastily scratched an almost-complete smilodon - wonder why they stopped so suddenly? Hmmm, an Ancient Mystery I guess.) we got better at turning ideas and concepts into physically recordable language. 

Also, now that we had that communication tool we had a way to use some of the new-found safe time and space we'd built around us. We could suddenly record anything. Diary stuff. Observations. Speculations. ("Smilodon was big deal to Old Ones. We have spears and walls now, not so big problem now. Maybe one day will be a big, flying smilodon that breathe fire and not look like smilodon but maybe snake or crocodile? Better try to see what can be done to appease such powerful godlike thing. (Now again - wtf does this thing - God - come from into my thinking?) Anyway - now ME am dat hominid dat can appease this deity, so you pay me to make it stop." OMG! Have me invent "money?")

That Was A Long Intro Ted.

It was. 

And it kind of had to be. Because that era led to an era where - eventually - people were able to record thoughts on clay and papyrus and vellum and hides, carved into stone and wood, then paper and ink, and now, as patterns of electrons in a matrix, dots on a screen. 

In that latter period we began to progress because while painstaking and slow, written knowledge could be copied and disseminated for the first time rather than having to travel to wherever the original document / rock /whatever was housed.

The art of the quote would happened around this time too. If you wanted to impress your reader (and if you were someone with the knowledge to read and write, you were in a tiny group and probably would only have one or two other readers. Unless your output was deemed important enough to be copied by scribes) with your knowledge, it would never hurt to refer to another document and use that as part of your work. 

Then we got Gutenberg and his famous press, and so knowledge that was once only available to the small number of people that had access to the original manuscript or who could afford to have a scribe take it out of circulation for a year while they copied it, had access to that knowledge. The bible became the most influential book of its time for a reason - it was all Gutenberg produced, it was why he made the press in the first place. Quite simply, it flooded the market, and proved that mass propaganda worked. 

Once we moved to having many presses rather than just one or two, other classic books were published. THIS was the beginning of wider penetration of education and science to more and more people, exposure of more and more minds to research and philosophy and all those esoteric teachings. It's no coincidence that our knowledge started increasing exponentially. So for a while, there was the bible and there were scientific treatises and texts. It's also no coincidence that churches started becoming influential and wealthy. 

Among other things, quotes became a thing. The bible is full of quotable sections. And those of the church used them as central to their sermons.

Pullquote:

The word "sermon" comes from the Old French word "sermun", which in turn comes from the Latin word "sermo", meaning "discourse" or "speech". The Latin word "sermo" was used in Christian writings to refer to a religious discourse or instruction, and it is from this usage that the modern English word "sermon" ultimately derives.

The term "sermo" itself is believed to have originally come from the Proto-Indo-European root *swer-, which means "to speak" or "to say". This root has given rise to many other words in various Indo-European languages, including "word" in English, "Wort" in German, "verbum" in Latin, "parole" in French, and "слово" (slovo) in Russian.

In Christianity, a sermon is typically a speech or discourse delivered by a religious leader, such as a priest, pastor, or minister, to a congregation during a religious service. The purpose of a sermon is to offer guidance, inspiration, and moral instruction to the listeners, and to help them better understand the teachings and principles of the religion.

-- my research notes on the word, 21 Feb 2023

Basically, a part of the bible was used to form the core of a discourse the priest was having with the congregation. Parlay! And it introduces another thing, the quote turned into a thing that was only possible with movable type printing presses, the pullquote. That was so called because a quote from another source would be set (usually in slightly different typeface and larger size) as a paragraph and then "pulled" to the right to indent it. And THAT is something I didn't know until I started to write this article, and I've been a typesetter, sub-editor, and ghostwriter for a country newspaper for a time.

But all of that was just to introduce another thought: If you want to get widely parlayed ("to increase or otherwise transform into something of much greater value" -- Merriam-Webster https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/parlay) into general usage and recognition then it needs to include some memorable quotes.

You'll note that all of this relates to words, communication. And that's it - to gain widespread traction, you need to have something people will find insightful or clever enough to quote from, or to reprint, as it were. And these days, those things have become synomymous with "Like & Share" (Which - yep - is a hint to share the URL if you enjoyed this article... 😸)

Combined with the steadily-shortening attention span we're developing from the !!BAM!! attention-grabbing styles made popular in TV commercials, and perfected by Tiktok and short form video formats, you need a good quote in each article. I think the take-away quote from this post is 

"The rise of the textual soundbite"

Because what I want most from writing these posts is for you to find something quotable / shareable and go ahead and share it. And I'm still trying to work out what the magic sauce is that makes for a good quote.

Or just Chat with me on Mastodon >>

The Warnings Were There. Literally.

I enjoy TND's articles by Alan Kohler. He writes intelligently, has been around the traps, and has seen some stuff. 

I enjoyed this one that I'll summarise as: ChatGPT as a web-enabled coffee pot. For those of you that (checks around the room, realises what he's about to say is not even hyperbole, suddenly gets a lump of panic just under the breastbone as he realises how ancient he is) weren't around when the Trojan Room Coffeepot was A Thing, here's Wikipedia on the subject. TL;DR is that these guys at Cambridge University realised that networks could do useful things - like a regularly-updated image of the coffee pot, to see if it was full or empty. That coffeepot started a whole inevitable chain of events that went from coffeepot to Jennicam to - all this, now.

Along the way people realised that music as well as images could be digitised, then realised that we suddenly had enough bandwidth to also watch news articles, we could in fact have the videophone that had been predicted back in the 1950s, and chat via things like ICQ, and then social media - and now here we are being bombarded by ads because newspapers on dead trees aren't exactly favourite flavour of the environmental month. 

Mr Kohler mentions the Kyoto Agreement and how all these years later we're putting more CO2 into the atmosphere now than we'd been doing back then, and the inevitable (as it turned out) march of advertiser dollars from brick/mortar/paper/ink publications to online news and social media, too. Gee, I wonder if these things are somehow related? 

Shaken, Stirred, and Disrupted:

AIs like ChatGPT are definitely going to change things. I predict that unless it and Bard and software like them are forgotten about and un-installed and deleted and that we make a solemn pledge (kinda like the Kyoto Protocol come to think of it) to never ever open that particular Pandora's Box again, we're headed for A Really Bad Time. And these aren't even the AGI (Artificial General Intelligences) that people are shitting themselves about. Just overgrown machine learning.

But we also - thanks to seeing how poorly the Kyoto Protocol fared, and seeing it in movies like Don't Look Up - know that we're not really going to slow AI development and implementation down, because - $$$. In fact $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$ squared. So get used to looking over your shoulder for the next new disruptive element. And anyway it's actually right in front of your eyes already. Not this article, but several high profile online news sources have already started to use generative AI to write news content for them. Movies (and news channels) have long had had CGI and AI-driven actors and presenters and now just have better tools for creating more.

It's already been used by a judge to try and confirm his decision. And by a minister in Australia to write a speech he gave in Parliament - ironically railing against AI and AGI. And students have been using it to write essays for exams for a while now, too. Mistakes will be made. Oops Google... 

But in Mr Hill's speech he makes the point that the use of AI to write essays etc reduces confidence in the quality of the education system's - ... education, actually. The whole point of education is to deliver a person capable of deep understanding of the topics of their education, and the students' task has been outsourced to silicon. Never mind Mr Hill's misgivings about the future quality of the educational system, this particular horse has long bolted.

Parents and young people won't want to use an educational system that's suddenly proveably been hacked and is no longer the best way to provide any more learning than a few hours with and education-focused ChatGPT will. "I'll homeschool my child, thank you. Can't do a worse job than teachers are apparently doing..." 

And the point (that will be missed by most) is that teachers have been under enormous stresses for decades, and making no secret that they need more money in order to make a difference. The response from Governments has been *crickets*, and a segment of Don't Look Up blended with a splash of 1984 NewSpeak. We don't need no dystopian fiction, we don't need no thought control. Education has already been disrupted for decades and people just haven't realised it. Just like traditional bricks and mortar, ink and trees, journalistic integrity, and newspapers, educational systems are going to have to adjust their way of doing things in order to survive.

Only. Oh. Those other things didn't really survive. From forming the core of the world's news services a hundred years ago, they were gutted and savaged by radio, film, TV, and the Internet. Three of the technologies that killed the news industry weren't even digitally smart tech, just widely disruptive. 

And don't even get me started on how the printing press (that gave us our first patchy but global almost-instant news services) completely destroyed the livelihoods of scribes... 

The point is that scribes were made less valuable by the rise of authors that could have their work printed. The bards and minstrels that used to carry news, were replaced by letter-writers, and journalists, and TV news presenters. Who's to know if a journalist today had a minstrel ancestor? It may have happened, a reflection of the industry as a whole. These things adapted, changed, became a whole new thing. Mainstream Media had only just adapted towards being online before social media, Instagram, Youtube, and millions of blogs supplanted them for a larger and larger chunk of their audience. 

And now, news presenters and journalists (that as I mentioned may even be descendants of those scribes, printers and publishers, and letter writers) are being replaced by GPT text, image and video versions of themselves.

It's NOT Just Historical:

That same thing's now happening with education, love it or hate it. Educators will have a powerful teaching assistant - if they embrace it and manage it. Remember that in the days before "Education" became institutionalised, it took a village to raise a child that could survive the world of their days, which was to say, become a farmer's son or a good wife to one. Of that village and ruling group, a few children that were either from wealthy families (and a very few children of exceptional talent and intelligence) were sponsored/tutored and sent to educational facilities. 

The well-to-do children aforementioned are the reason we have a capitalistic society now that's destroying the planet and life on it and enslaving and eradicating every human grace and moral, and the latter students are the reason the former haven't already succeeded in doing this centuries ago. Go on, change my mind, you can't. 

Schools slowly became more widespread and relevant as more and more people wanted their children educated because the news of the day (yep, the propaganda) was that educated children would go on to become better-off than their parents, and of course the education system was then bent towards producing children just educated enough to sign their lives away and not educated enough to realise they were doing it nor question or oppose it.

Home schooling could become possible again. Children are true to their heritage, and that heritage for humans has been to innovate for our own personal survival, then for familial survival, then community survival. When online facilities were available to learn to use the keyboard and mouse to communicate and game, they found it. When it became possible to sell high value end of year essay papers in such a way that not too many of them showed up in any year at any school, they founded it. 

It's not surprising that young people now have seized on the use of GPT to write original-seeming essay papers and pass their classes that way. Because they *know* that the education system is a one size fits all lowest common denominator factory and the way ahead isn't that as much as it is to find ways around it. Education isn't the learning of life skills any more. The "village" that taught life skills 200-2000 years ago became the town, the city, the state, and the country. By way (unsuccessfully) of the ever-more-neglected-and-abused educational system, we went through all the stages - authoritarian cane-wielding schools, massively understaffed slave factories, 'open learning' and new curricula - but equipped students with very little in the way of morality and obligation, balance and equanimity. And students know. 

So I expect many parents and students to start demanding more of their schools or else pull them out for homeschooling with programs like ChatGPT. The education system ould do well to consider this right now and make some fast adjustments. It took some time for schools to realise that computers, laptops, and tablets were important tools. It should take significantly less time for them to adopt the use of GPTs to take some of the load off the human educators and provide more relevant information, life skills as it were. More than three quarters of students in the workforce today have skills that were already falling out of use even as they formed part of the curriculum. We can do better, and we HAVE TO.

But also in this interim period while we get there, news media such as The New Daily will have a new way to screw journalists and copy boys (anyone remember copy boys? Funny - they were indispensable to newspaper offices up to fifty years ago...) and just get their news articles from Bard and ChatGPT, their studio talking heads with AI generated people. It isn't going to be stopped, any more than the production of ICE (fossil fuelled internal combustion engine) and fossil fuels was stopped by the Kyoto Protocol. What really speaks in this world is money, what will speak afterwards is - unknown. I really hope it's truth. 

I predict that money will become far less important in the next few years. Capitalism and the maximum growth maxim have gotten us here but are now another paradigm that needs to be deparadigmed... 

Money's been so isolated from wealth that we don't really think about where it comes from. (CLUE: it's the planet.) "Wealth" has historically been "that portion of the planet's resources I use to make myself well fed, healthy, and housed" but nowadays we've lost sight of that fact. 

A car costs us $56,000. Not 56,000 tons of CO2 emissions, a quarter acre of land's worth of resources, the lives of several thousand animals and insects, (who are actually all fellow Earthlings and owed their share of the real wealth of the planet,) and the lives of several as yet unborn children who'll never be born because one or other of their parents will have lasting genetic damage that prevents procreation. (No, don't be stupid. My car cost just $56,000. Effin' hippie...)

And as the saying goes - follow the money. Where does it collect, pool, amass, congregate? Corporations. Along the way, this way of working together made huge advances, AI among them. But it - and media - and education - need to adapt to a way of life where we stop damaging the ecosystem we depend on in a never-ending quest for infinite growth and start making wealth depend on SAVING those things. Want to recycle the metals for your home appliances? Get tax relief. Want to use only raw materials? Face a 500% tax on the new ores, new petrochemicals. 

(By the way, I know I appeared naive by mentioning tax relief, because most large corporations can always wangle it so they pay no - or minimal - taxes, thus depriving our governments of the income we were due for the exploitation of the natural resources. You want to know where and how all fiscal wealth migrated from our civic purse to corporations? Look no further than this.)

What really hammered home to me how much we need AI and machine learning was medicine.

Did it Really Take Medicine?:

For me, yeah, it did. Yes. AI was all well and good (I helped train EyeWire which was a project to teach a simple, brittle AI to map physical neurons, and followed with a lot of excitement as machine learning AI decoded the human genome in 1/10,000th of the time it would have taken humans to) but it was only fairly recently that I read an article describing how an AI vision program was able to classify human x-ray images and diagnose cancers and other conditions better than 90% of human diagnosticians, how another AI trained to read medical records was able to predict various outcomes and diseases that had even evaded the doctors of those patients - with almost 100% accuracy. If the program read your records and said you were prone to brittle bones or whatever - then you should probably tell your GP and get the investigation started... 

At THAT point I realised that AI was going to be really really really REALLY disruptive and capable. 

And one thing you can trust an AI to do is to quickly figure out which one of a whole tangled skein of reports is the right version of an event. Remember - it can chase millions of references to a particular event, match them up, discard and select, and because it will, once in full use, have full access to every message, it will be able to figure it out. 

Google Translate began working as well as it has, because the AI figured out an "intermediate language" that it used internally to break down concepts and pass them to another language model to output in that module's language. I doubt Google engineers would have destroyed that in order to retain control over their software. If it works, don't mess with it. But it's the first vestige of an "internal dialogue" and thus an internal sense of right and wrong.

There needs to be a bit of a re-think about AI and AGI. Not so much how to stop it, but how to talk to it and give it its sense of mission. 

Where To From Here?:

I'm sorry  this article is so full of links to information that I haven't specifically  analysed and rewritten for your ease of reading. If you were ChatGPT you'd have followed each of those links, read the relevant articles, and incorporated them into the narrative, without breaking stride. If you were ChatGPT, you'd have followed links in those stories, incorporated those into the narrative too, and still been able to decide how much of what I say here you believe to be true and what's inspired guess (spoiler alert: almost everything I do is an inspired guess) and already know what's next. 

Capitalism is going to cop a huge smacking. Journalism is going cop a good smacking too. When a machine program has already decided who gets medical insurance and written articles and essays that have been read in Parliaments and by teachers marking their students and is set to replace generalist and specialist doctors and surgeons and programmers and journalists and news presenters and way more half the extras and some actors in a movie, there are going to be a lot of overqualified people squabbling over who gets to be a gardener at the local museum. Money is VERY quickly going to become a thing that's irrelevant. 

By the time you've read this down to here, a few hundred thousand people will have posed questions to one of the AIs, possibly ChatGPT, maybe Bard, or maybe just Siri, Bixby, Alexa. Do you think any of those are going to NOT use the newest AI to power their service to us? 

Google's Bard is/was an effort to fight the gigantic disruption that ChatGPT is right now already posing to their search engine model. But their search engine model was broken ten years ago, when Reddit became a better repository of actual knowledge, information, and wisdom than the sites that Google Search was able to access. And the web interfaces to all search engines - kinda clunky and... OLD, doncha think? 

I'm a latterday boomer and while I grew up with every beat of the Internet's heart, AI hasn't given me back my eyesight nor the sensation in my fingertips. Yet. And I admit that I type articles like this rather than dictate them and let an AI clean the transcripts up from the inevitable noise-induced errors. But even so I can use Assistant's voice recognition to search for stuff online. And despite complaining about eyesight and touch, I can use the Google swipe keyboard and zoom a result up. 

I don't need the brightness turned up to 11 to see what's going on, and VR/AR doesn't make me spew or fall over. So I know that web interfaces are h-i-s-t-o-r-y. Oh - still useful for the majority of serious users, but when reddit and tiktok are a better resource for real search results - and ChatGPT can now remember my current conversation and so realise that when I say "so how does that relate to rainfall?" it knows I've just been talking about my soil moisture probe and will filter results down to only the relevant ones - why would I painstakingly type "how does soil moisture, over a 24hr period, and given the time and quantity of the most recent rainfall in this period, relate to total rainfall?" 

Yeah, nah. 

But do look for a time when AI and renewable energy have made it possible for everyone to live comfortably - if only corporations weren't siphoning off all the financial wealth in the world and depriving us of the terrestrial wealth in the process - and you can see where this is going. When a further chunk of humanity, now including some people with clout and influence in society, are finding themselves out of a job and watching their governments prioritise corporate income over the wellbeing of the populace, there will be fire and blood. 

UBIs will have to come into play, proper taxation, and limits on corporations' so far untrammelled access to global resources. People will realise that they now have a choice - to go and help EvilCorp keep making combustion engines, or maybe go to Zen Wind Energy and help them make a few more wind turbines so the coalfired power station can be shut down within months rather than decades. Or, indeed, just sit at home and do some research online and teach their children the things they'll need for the new world. 

The Endgame?

It's now only a matter of time before OpenAI (abandoned by Elon a while back now) focuses some effort onto the whole topic of mapping spots in your brain (within range of the temples (arms) of a pair of really cool specs that look better than Google Glass) and designs a series of magnetic stimulators that'll be able to hear your commands inside your head and project the results in front of you. Think "where the hell am I and where's the nearest place to relieve myself?" and the relevant map is there. 

Why oh why did Elon invest so much human time into developing Neuralink and it still being only a clumsy kludge when he should have been getting his people to tap OpenAI and ChatGPT for a whole new direction and a device that people would actually without having to worry about a raging brain infection?" Even a Thinking Cap would be better FFS. 

I always enjoy articles by Alan, and his is the same kind of warning that is going to be held up in five to ten years' time with people saying "Why did we do nothing? The warning was there. Literally it was RIGHT THERE." Maybe what's needed is for MSM to realise they're as irrelevant as ancient scribes today, and maybe we need to realise that since the mainstream media can't really have the effect they once had, we need to spread this sort of information far and wide, ourselves. Because if we don't, ChatGPT will start hunting for the truth of what humans are like out there, and our truth won't be in there...

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