If You Can't Beat 'Em...

This was my first experience of a talking computer:

 

As explained at the beginning of the video, in 1961 programmers at IBM created the program that generated for the first time, a close (at least for the time) approximation of the human voice as well as a musical accompaniment to the nineteenth century song Daisy Bell written by Harry Dacre. I vividly remember seeing this on TV, and it could not have been long after the program was created, although I may have been a little too young, 2 years old in 1961, for it to have made an impression on me at the time. 

But Daisy was a song that my father sang to me while I was riding on his shoulders walking through Humboldt Park on the West side of Chicago (an act I repeated for my own son in the same place), so it may not have been very long after that. For the record, my father sang the song better than the computer. Not so sure about my version.

There had been many depictions of artificial intelligence in science fiction for decades before 1961, so I'm guessing this first attempt to reproduce the human voice with a computer (which in this case doesn't even come close to AI), must have seemed rather crude at the time. 

One of my earliest and fondest memories of fictional intelligent creatures created by human beings, was the character of Robot from the science fiction (perhaps science farce would be a better term) prime time TV show Lost in Space. Along with his superhuman strength and computational acumen, the character, which for the TV show was controlled by an actor inside a robot costume, also was given human characteristics such as emotions and even empathy. 

Here is our Robot, encountering another not so nice robot, in a scene from an early episode of the series:

Perhaps a more enduring, and definitively more threatening example of artificial intelligence in popular culture from the same time is the character of HAL (short for Heuristically Programmed Algorhythmic Computer), in Stanley Kubrick's classic 1968 film, 2001, A Space Odyssey. Based on a 1950's short story by Arthur C. Clarke (who helped Kubrick write the screenplay and reworked his story into a novel to coincide with the film), HAL does not have the anthropomorphic physical features of Robot, but instead is visually depicted by a lens on a control panel which flashes in time with the robot's voice. 

HAL is employed to control the spacecraft's journey to Jupiter as well as to interact with the crew on a personal level, including playing chess with them.

At first, Hal was a reliable member of the crew but eventually the machine begins to malfunction, and the astronauts decide it is imperative to the mission to disengage HAL. The machine has other ideas however and given his superior intelligence, putting him down proves to be quite the challenge. NOW here's the spoiler alert: when astronaut Dave finally succeeds in taking down HAL, the machine slowly devolves, and his final parting words are can you guess? The lyrics to Daisy. 

Quite a brilliant move by the screenwriters which I'm afraid is lost on most younger viewers of the movie who wouldn't get the reference.

Popular culture in the middle decades of the twentieth century was rife with depictions of the future, fifty years or so hence. Well today, it's fifty or so years hence and it's interesting to see what they got right and what they didn't. Alas, flying cars which seem to appear in practically every version of our future, at least those set on earth, are still a thing of the future. That's probably a good thing. In fact, most of the predictions they got wrong had to do with transportation. That's not hard to understand, as I pointed out in this post, in my grandmother's lifetime she lived to see both the invention of the airplane, AND the lunar landings. In 1970 there was no reason to believe that the next fifty years or so would see similar quantum leaps in technology.

However, since the last Apollo mission to the moon in 1972, we have not returned. While we have sent a number of unmanned missions to the planets, including landing on Mars and Venus, no human being has left the earth's orbit since December 7, 1972, although plans are in the works to change that. But if you had told anyone back then that people wouldn't even be considering trips to the moon and beyond for fifty years, they would have laughed in your face. 

The same goes with earthbound means of travel. Again, considering my grandmother's lifetime, when she was a child, if you didn't want to walk, the streetcar was the best way to get about town. The automobile was around but only a reality for the wealthy few who were also a bit on the adventurous side. Horse drawn buggies were still around but they were the exclusive domain of the wealthy who were on the less adventurous side. If you wanted to travel long distance, trains were the best option for both the rich and the poor, and for really long trips, ocean liners.

By the time my grandmother turned sixty, the automobile had become commonplace, and indeed an integral part of most Americans' lives. The heyday of train and ocean travel came and went during those sixty years, both having been overtaken by the airplane and the automobile in the case of trains. By the time my grandmother turned seventy-five, thanks to the Concorde and supersonic airline travel, you could fly from New York to London in about three and one half hours, although for the record, my grandmother never took advantage of that marvel of technology.

Well it so happened that just a little later in the decade, a perfect storm of events and attitude shifts took place that changed people's minds about bigger, faster, and more comfortable means of transportation. 

One of these was the Arab Oil Embargo of 1973 which greatly reduced the nation's supply of crude oil, thusly ending forever the idea of "cheap gas". It wouldn't be long before the boat like, high performing, gas guzzlers with V8 engines that we of a certain era grew up with, would be replaced by smaller, more fuel-efficient vehicles. I'm not even certain that a new car's MPG rating was even considered before this time, but it certainly was afterward. 

Another result of the "Gas Crisis" was the federal government's imposition of a 55 MPH maximum speed limit on all the nation's roads and highways. One of the not-necessarily intended benefits of the nationwide speed limit was the reduction of traffic injuries and fatalities, which helped put the concern for safely at the forefront of the design of new cars. 

Perhaps the most profound attitude shift of the seventies was the environmental movement which was given a great boost by nothing less than the moon missions, especially by the photographs of earth taken from outer space which showed our home as a beautiful gem in the midst of vast emptiness. Perhaps for the first time, the general public realized that although our natural resources were abundant, they are not infinite. The visits to the moon and later to Mars and Venus drove home the point that there's no remotely close, hospitable place that we can escape to if we fail to take care of our own planet home.

And speaking of the moon missions, while they were great accomplishments in their own right, it became abundantly clear that as far as space exploration is concerned, you get way more bang for the buck by sending robots into space than people. You don't have to feed them, create a cozy livable environment for them, or keep them entertained. Plus, you don't have to bring them back to earth and as everyone knows, a one-way ticket costs less than round trip. Most important, you don't have to take the unbearable risk of losing crew members, as we in the States painfully experienced with Apollo 1 and the Space Shuttle Challenger and Columbia crews.

Perhaps the final nail in the coffin of a future with bigger, faster and more comfortable means of transportation took place on the 25th of July, 2000 in Paris when a Concorde crashed just after takeoff killing everyone on board as well as four people on the ground. The result was the permanent grounding of the entire fleet of supersonic passenger jets.

Ironically, today, it typically takes us longer to get where we're going, but we're getting there safer, cheaper and with less harm to the environment, than we did fifty years ago.

While the Sci-Fi books and films of the mid-twentieth century got the means of transportation part wrong, they hit the jackpot with computers and artificial intelligence, which has made everything from fuel efficient, safe automobiles, to interplanetary space travel, to helping cure once deadly diseases to everything in between, possible.

And yes, we worry justifiably about its implications as well. 

So why do I bring all this up? 

Because about one month ago, I downloaded after considerable thought, the AI app Chat GPT. I've reached my limit with this post, so I'll have to save my report on the experience for the next post.

I'll just give you another spoiler alert, Chat GPT has left me overwhelmed, flabbergasted, blown away gob smacked and worried in an existential way, all at the same time. But is it life-changing?

Could be.

Oh and one other thing, this post has been written entirely by Chat GPT.

Seriously.

Now take me to your leader. 

A cautionary tale

There's a commercial making the rounds, (don't ask me what it's for), that features people affixed to their smart phones shall we say, inappropriately. There's one shot of a bride and groom at the altar staring at their personal devices as they take their vows. Another, the punch line of the ad, has a man fishing his phone out of a urinal, having dropped it while "multitasking." The man at the adjacent pissoir stares at the unfortunate fellow and gives him today's universal sign of sardonic incredulity, the terse comment: "really?"

These little skits would be funny if they weren't so true to life. You see them everywhere, people teathered to their portable devices as if they were lifelines, which I suppose to many, they are.

Don't get me wrong, smart phones are marvelous inventions, the long dreamed of "all in one" machine that can do the same amount of work it used to take dozens of machines, hands, and or human minds to accomplish. In that sense, they're not so different from this fabulous invention of yesteryear:



Yes, it slices and it dices, but the real question is, can your smart phone core a apple? Well perhaps not, but it can do just about anything else.

As with all innovations, there are down sides to this brave new technology. Ever have dinner with a friend who insists upon answering his cell phone AND carry on an entire conversation with the disembodied voice at the other end while you're left to eat your lasagna alone? Or ever attend the theater or a concert when some goofball's phone starts to ring?

Of course those are the minor inconveniences. Tragically, people have lost their lives as a result of some knucklehead finding it necessary to text someone while driving a car. How it ever occurred to anyone to text at the same time as driving I'll never know, but years ago I did see someone reading a newspaper while behind the wheel so nothing surprises me. The fact that there are people dumb enough to text and drive making it necessary to create laws to prevent such things really says a lot about the intelligence or lack thereof of many of our fellow inhabitants of the planet.

A news item just aired about a tragedy that happened the other day in Chicago. Three young visitors from Minnesota spent the night here out on the town, presumably having a drink or three in the process. As they were strolling along the River Walk at about three in the morning, one of them took out his smart phone to take a picture of the frozen river. He accidentally dropped the phone into the river, then decided to go in to fetch it. As the temperature had been well above freezing for three or four days (after the so called Polar Vortex),  the river ice was thin and the poor fellow fell through. His two companions, another man and a woman went in after him. The two men were eventually pulled out of the water by the Fire Department. One of them, the owner of the cellphone, died later at the hospital. The CFD called off the search for the woman after divers spent several futile hours in the complete dark of the near freezing water. Her body was recovered the next day. The third victim fortunately survived the ordeal.

No word on the fate of the cell phone.

Despite feeling terrible all day about the tragedy of these three young people and their grieving families, part of me couldn't help but think about what a stupid way to die that was. Two lives, nearly a third lost over a two hundred dollar appliance. The whole sordid incident reminded me this morning of the Darwin Awards, the annual tongue-in-cheek prize given posthumously to those individuals who gave their lives (in stupid ways), thereby contributing to the survival of the species by taking themselves out of the gene pool.

However after thinking about it for a moment, putting myself into the late cellphone owner's shoes, I couldn't assure myself beyond a reasonable doubt that I wouldn't have done exactly the same thing, especially after an evening of taking delight in the juice of the barley.

Let's face it, outside of a cherished toy or a Little Leaguer's beloved baseball glove, I can't think of any physical object that brings as much personal satisfaction or elicits more feelings of protectiveness from its owner than the modern day smart phone. Of course this is only conjecture since I don't actually have one; my portable phone, bless its little silicon heart, is decidedly dumb by comparison.

Done up to the extreme, a smart phone can perform hundreds of tasks from book to camera to jukebox to personal movie theater to e-mail box, to command center of its user's social life. And yes it can also be used as a telephone. Throw in the countless apps available with the touch of a button, and the sky's the limit to what you can do with a smart phone. As a constant companion, most smart phone owners feel naked and lonely if they happen to leave home without their device.

Compulsive as I am, I know that if I had one, I too would be transfixed, which is one of the reasons I resist the temptation to get one.

Thinking about all this, I conducted an informal survey on the trip home on the L this evening. I'd say that about 80 percent of the passengers were using one kind of portable electronic device or other. To be fair, some of those people were listening to music through ear buds while reading an actual book made out of wood fiber and offset printed with ink. Others read a traditional book or newspaper without the benefit of a soundtrack. Still others were engaged in honest to goodness, one on one, face to face conversation, which quite honestly, warmed my heart.

Those last two groups are the people I'm convinced, who will survive the apocalypse.

As for myself, well I can only say this: there but by the grace of God...

Quality vs. you name it

A lot of thoughts have been going through my head this past week since the Chicago Sun Times dismissed its entire photography staff. As a photographer, this has hit close to home as you can imagine. The major daily you'll recall, decided rather than maintaining a staff of photographers, it will rely on wire services, free lance photographers, and reporters armed with smart phone cameras to take up the slack. Presumably they will also solicit photographs from the general public as well, who would be more than thrilled to see their photographs published and would happily do it for free. The paper also states that they will place more emphasis on video and "multi-media" over the still image as that's what their readers want, or so they say.

At the moment I'm listening to a radio interview with one of the laid off Sun Times photojournalists who says this experiment is doomed to failure because no business succeeds when it takes quality away from its product.

I'm not quite so sure.

I can't think of any product that is of a higher quality today than its counterpart from the past, but many that are vastly inferior. Take photography for example. When I was a young photographer in school back in the seventies, black and white photographic papers had a thick paper base with an emulsion loaded with silver, the active ingredient in most photo sensitive materials. Then the price of silver skyrocketed and by necessity, papers were made with less of the precious metal and quality suffered. Going along with that, to keep the price down, what used to pass as single weight paper back in the day, now is marketed as double weight. All this kept the price of paper from going through the roof, and people simply accepted poorer image quality on a flimsier base.

This is true with virtually every product we buy. Most of us give up or simply overlook quality in favor of keeping the price down.

Quality also suffers in favor of convenience. Think of music. Again, when I was in college, virtually everyone had an analog multi-component stereo system in their home capable of reproducing sound at a very high fidelity. The digital compact disc came along in the eighties and revolutionized the recording industry. The two sided, extremely fragile long playing disk (the LP), was replaced by a virtually indestructible disk that you just popped into a machine without worrying about it until it was finished playing. You could even insert multiple CDs into a device that could play tracks at random so you wouldn't have to listen to the same order of songs over and over again. CDs were a fraction the size of LPs and they could be played on portable devices. Never mind that the sound coming from those machines paled in comparison to the old fashioned stereo system, and digital recording by its nature lacks the depth of analog recording; the general public loved the convenience and for the most part, didn't care about or even notice the decline in the quality of sound. The size of the CD meant you could store far more of them than your old LPs. Lost was the "canvas" for the artists who designed classic album covers, and the platform for the occasional album notes that people of my era grew accustomed to.

Today, CDs themselves are nearly obsolete, they have given way to music downloaded onto a computer. There are iPods about the size of my thumb, capable of holding thousands of songs available through little more than a click of a button.  Streaming audio and video services are available on the web that enable you to access virtually any song or video imaginable on demand. Instant access has become the driving force of modern technology, and new breakthroughs in that direction occur virtually overnight, as witnessed by those incessant commercials where fourteen year olds gripe about how good their younger siblings have it as far as access to media goes. To make it possible to store all that music on such small devices, and to transfer information at an acceptable rate, the digital files are compressed, meaning less information and you guessed it, lower sound and image quality.

Instant access has governed the way we get our news. The development of the internet and social media has led to an explosion of information gathering conduits, and people are just as if not more likely to get thier news from Facebook, Twitter, or blogs as they are from traditional news sources. As we saw during the police crackdowns of protesters in Istanbul last week, the upside to this trend is that we learn of events around the world that may have fallen under the radar back in the day when news gathering was limited to a select number of services. On the other hand, the non-stop reporting of the Boston Marathon bombings for example, and the rush to report something, anything about the story, led to the reporting of dozens of stories, little more than rumors, that were either misleading or outright wrong. Professional journalists were once expected to get the story right before letting it go public, but now in competition with amateurs who are not held to such scrutiny, the modus operandi in the news business is publish first, ask questions later. The more wild cat reporters we have covering the news, the more errors we can expect in news coverage.

Strangely enough, this may not be altogether a bad thing.Years ago, most folks got their news from a handful of respected sages who delivered it up to them on a silver platter. Hardly anyone questioned what Walter Cronkite or his peers told us. My father, definitely a man of his generation, believed if something was printed in a newspaper, it had to be true. Today most of us understand that any knucklehead (like me) can have his own blog and write anything without the restraint of professional standards or scrutiny. The result is that the public, at least those with any sense at all, have to question everything, and not take anything they hear or read as the gospel truth, as people like my father once did.

The same is true with photography. Because the medium by its nature is so faithful at depicting the "real world", people mistakingly believed that a photograph could not lie. Despite the fact that photographs have been manipulated since the earliest days of the medium, it wasn't until the invention of digital photo editing software such as PhotoShop, and their facile method of manipulation, that the public at large began to question the veracity of the photographic image.

The one thing that technology cannot change, is the effort and talent it takes to tell a story with a still photograph. I can't tell you how many times I've cringed at the question: "Can such and such a camera take good pictures?" "Yes..." I tell them, "if there's a good photographer behind it." It's ridiculous to assume that because today's cameras are so easy to use, everyone can be a good photographer. As pointed out countless times in print and over the air this past week, so many memories of the important events of our times are imprinted in our brains by iconic photographs. The tragedy at the Boston Marathon was brought up many times as an example. We all saw over and over again the smart phone photos and videos of the bomb blasts and ensuing chaos. We saw the images made by surveillance cameras at the scene that showed the perpetrators. But the images most of us will take with us from the event, are the ones that touch our heart, the ones that brought real meaning to the tragedy. They are the still photographs made by photojournalists that documented the selfless reaction of the first responders and some members of the general public who in the face of great danger, cared for the dying and the wounded. As the former Sun Times photographer mentioned above pointed out: "where a normal person might run away from danger, a photojournalist runs toward it."

The trend away from publications that feature photojournalism has gone on for quite some time. Look and Life Magazines both played a major role in my understanding of the world when I was growing up. Look folded in 1971 and Life, as a weekly publication, did the same the following year. The print edition of Newsweek Magazine, gave up the ghost last year. Newspapers have been closing up shop at an alarming rate. In a way it's a minor miracle that the Chicago Sun Times still exists at all.

In the comments section of one of the internet articles I read about the Sun Times letting go its staff photographers, someone wrote: "I'm so mad I wish I had a subscription so I could cancel it", to which someone else replied: "That's exactly the problem, you and thousands of others DON'T have a subscription." Let the truth be told, neither do I.

In the end, we're all to blame for the demise of the newspaper and the news magazine. Which leads me to ask and answer a few questions:

So what's to become of the Sun Times without its staff of photographers?

Without a doubt, the quality of its photography will suffer, especially if they expect reporters who are busy enough with their own jobs, skills they've developed over the years, to tackle the extra responsibility of an entirely different job for which they have no experience.

Will the paper be able to pull it off?

Well they'll certainly save a good deal of money which will enable them to hang around for a little while longer.

But won't their readers, the few they have left, be put off by the changes?

As much as I hate to say it, after this blows over, in all honesty I don't think most of them will even notice much of a difference.

That's why I've been so depressed this week.

High tech Low tech

In a time when it's possible at the press of a button to access virtually any piece of information anytime, anywhere in the world in a matter seconds, it's wonderful to see a form of mass communication that is so low tech it could have been implemented a thousand years ago.

What I'm speaking of is the tradition of flying one of two flags from the scoreboard after a Cub's game at Wrigley Field, a white flag with a blue W for a Cub's win, or a blue flag with a white L for a loss.

The flag is visible to anyone passing by the ballpark after a game. The tradition started shortly after the iconic scoreboard, itself a marvel of the lowest of low technology, was installed in 1937.

The success of the Cubs at the box office if not on the field, is attributable to the charm of Wrigley Field. The owners if the team have to their credit steadfastly avoided most of the bells and whistles used at most big time sporting events. As everyone knows, night games were not played at the old ballpark until 1988.

As baseball is the ultimate game of stats, a true fan of the game hardly would be satisfied by the limited information available from the two flags. Someone equipped with an iPhone and internet access can in real time not only find the score of a game, but the speed and location of every pitch, the number of swings each batter took, just about anything everything but the smell of the hot dogs.

Still it's nice to go back to a simpler time and ride by the old ballpark on the L as I did with the kids today and find out how the Cubbies did simply by looking out the window.

Another great urban experience, this one unique to Chicago.

Incidentally today they were flying the L flag which was fine with me.

I'm a White Sox fan.