3 November 2024

Hi, Angela.

I'm sorry it's taken me a while to contact you with something more substantial after our product-related chat a couple weeks ago. I've been fairly busy taking care of my centenarian uncle and trying to keep abreast of current events, presently focused mainly on the upcoming presidential election. I'm quite concerned about the possible outcome of that race and I've been worrying about it for at least the past year. Unfortunately, I've not been able to keep up with the details as I had been while in the Boston area where I live, despite having access to the same information sources, which has lately been primarily MSNBC (where I've seen ads for the Kardia gizmo). I find that network does a pretty good job of presenting and analyzing what's going on from a perspective I find most aligned with my own.

I've been hearing a lot lately about how votes in your own state of Pennsylvania are crucially important, due to the number of votes it has in the electoral college (which I would like to see abolished, due to the skewing effect it has on election outcomes). I know that both of the main contenders have made several appearances there, as well as in the other "swing states."

Though I suppose there are many subjects we could consider together, the "artificial intelligence" one, which we spoke of briefly, seems a good entry point, since while interesting and important in itself, it also provides what I think to be a useful "springboard" for thinking about the broader trends the development of AI represents at a societal level. One possibly good source of information about such matters is a series of books written by Professor Yuval Noah Harari, which have to do with the human past, present and future. I've not yet read any of those books, but I have heard and seen a number of his interviews, in some of which he has talked a lot about AI and its possible effects on how we will live and interact with one another in future. I note that his web site has a number of interesting-looking videos on that subject.

As seems to happen fairly often in my experience, wherein I come across a number of items relating to some subject I've been thinking about, just serendipitously, I've recently heard a few radio features on AI, which I present below. I've encountered these items since we spoke, not through any effort on my part, but only as the result of my ordinary radio show listening. The first of these items is a recent interview with Prof Harari conducted by Matt Galloway, host of the CBC Radio One daily morning show The Current. That interview was done recently before a live audience in Toronto.

Another segment Matt did (this one in the CBC studio) features a consideration of the tremendous consumption of electrical energy that processing of AI tasks will require, which has prompted a few companies, such as Google, Amazon and Microsoft, to undertake efforts to build new power plants or even re-start the undamaged Three Mile Island nuclear reactor in your own state.

I also listened with great interest to a segment of the daily show Front Burner, hosted by Jayme Poisson, which talks about the development and use of AI to provide artificial companionship for those lacking personal friendships. I tend to think that what appears to be the fact that some people feel benefit from forming "relationships" with AI-enabled devices might indicate something about how scripted some ordinary face-to-face interactions with our fellow humans might actually be, since they can be mimikced by an automaton well enough that at least some people find their interactions with them to be fairly satisfying. There are, of course, various other aspects of this phenomenon one could usefully consider.

Well, I must now turn my attention to other matters, so I'll close here. If you would like to reply, you can use my personal email address, which is my initials, "gst" (plus the obligatory "@"), followed by my domain name, "webruary.org" (I won't write the whole email address here, lest it be harvested by one or more bots that don't respect the conventional protocol designed to exclude them (though I suppose myself to be vulnerable to some clever AI-enabled bots that can make sense of the address info contained in this paragraph :-) ).) I hope you might find some (or all) of the radio features cited above to be of some interest, and I look forward to hearing what you think of them. I'd be open to a phone chat at some point, but my time is limited at present, due to all I have to do while here with my uncle in California. It will be easier for me once I'm back in the Boston area, which I expect will be sometime between the two upcoming holidays.

I hope your weekend has gone well, and that the week will be a good one for you.

All my best to you,

Gary

P.S. (Monday, 4 November) I've just received an email that warns about the use of AI to confuse voters in Pennsylvania. You might find the toolkit provided to be interesting and/or useful.