Forget about the Overton Window, the Shelley Window is expanding fast
PLUS scrubbing your digital footprint, more nuclear plants and AI data scoops. But first the new product of the week.
As the technology stories get stranger and scarier, while human behaviour blithely adapts and assimilates, I decided the only sane response is to double down on sarcasm, silliness, and satire. In this edition I also dream some possible futures and take swipes at TikTok. (Definition of Overton Window below1)
EXPERIMENTAL RECIPES
MAIN COURSE: A name for SciFi becoming real: The Shelley Window
Science fiction tales has been around since ancient times, with story tellers speculating on space travel and aliens. The role of technology gone amok as science fiction really started with Mary Shelley and her great novel Frankenstein, which she wrote through trying personal times in 1816. Fittingly I propose we name the process by which science fiction becomes a reality after her.
The latest of so many science fiction musings that deserves our current attention is robot warfare. France announced that it will have robots capable of being at the front by 2040. I guess they are significantly ill at ease in today’s fraught times, referencing the Russian-Ukraine war, and are getting ready for more battles and skirmishes to come. Nothing soothes nerves like the rattling of digital swords as they prepare for “high-intensity warfare”.
What is France planning to do with these robots, you ask? A range of tasks from surveillance to remote repair work to mine clearing. All of these sound pretty hazardous to me, meaning they will be throwing their robots under the proverbial tank.
This is a key theme of so many SciFi series and movies, but it brings to my mind Battlestar Galactica. For those who haven’t yet watched it, the Cylons (warrior picture below) were created by humans as robotic servants and soldiers, designed to perform labor and fight wars on their behalf. Over time, the Cylons developed self-awareness and became dissatisfied with their subservient role. It went downhill for humans from that point. So we have that to look forward to in our future, but maybe not right away.
Long term readers will recall a couple of articles I wrote about robots. We have had the hapless half marathoner robots. We also had the not exactly breath-taking expert prediction of laundry folding home-bots by 2045, five years after France supposedly deploys robots to the front lines.
But at least one of the French military planners must be a TechTonic reader (they are everywhere) who realizes that right now robots are more rudimentary than our science fiction imaginations. He said, "The robots must facilitate combat, not hold it back." It was meant to demonstrate that the robots aren’t really up to snuff just yet but said in an ominous way. I say we need less focus on Peak Oil - whose date keeps changing - and more on Peak SciFi coming through the Shelley Window.
READER’S POTLUCK
This is a new section as readers are sending me articles and links which is VERY much appreciated. So please keep it up as you now have your own section, right after the Main Course
If you have been a long time reader, or anyone who understands our present infodemic age, you should be nervous about the verity of anything you read, see or hear. Except for this newsletter of course. Here is an intriguing story of a special service (where there is one there are bound to be more) that “cleans” your digital footprint for a fee, further muddying our polluted info waters. It is the modern equivalent of the “service providers” who fix crime scenes, like Clooney and Pitt in the flawed Netflix Wolfs film.
The cleaning idea is that very few people ever go beyond the first page of the Search Engine results. The basic strategy is to make up good, different stuff about the customer to fill up the first page, and push the negative parts of the customer’s life onto other pages. "The whole point here is to confuse people," said Ahmed Al-Rawi, director of The Disinformation Project at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, B.C. This article follows the various digital entrails of some of the ”buried people”, which makes me even more worried about how we know anything.
Just verifying for those of you that looked me up on Google that indeed I once was in videos with Madonna in the 1980s before shifting my focus to launching several high end restaurants in Manhattan.
I am guessing that some of you are chomping at the bit to get the name of this service but you will have to click the story link for that walk of shame. Just remember that I can track who followed what link. Ah, the satisfaction of living in a surveillance society where no one knows what is real anymore.
QUICKBYTES: “Hey! Hey! What’s that sound?”
Yes a quote from a great Buffalo Springfield song👇 but increasingly the answer to this question will be “just another AI spawned song”. Soundcloud, the music hosting service beloved by independent artists changed their Terms of Service in 2024. You know those horrible legal things that pop up every-time you sign up for new software or when Facebook wants more of your soul, which literally nobody reads but you have to click YES to agree / get to the goodies.
Eventually one person read the Soundcloud terms and found that if your music was residing on their platform they could use it in many ways including training their AI tools. Soundcloud has the rights to do this but they clearly state, that despite the addition of many AI features in their offering, they have never yet used any independent artists works in training their AI. Most of their newly added AI assist tools help with “new track generation” and to “quickly produce high-quality tracks” Do we really trust that organizations like these really have our best interests at heart?
But what I still have so much difficulty in understanding, is why humans want AI generated art of any kind? Why do they want to create an image of an ice cream cone as if painted by Picasso? Have they been to a museum to see and think about real Picassos? Why do people want to hear the next generation of muzak written by AI? When did they last go to a concert to see singers and musicians play for real?
I guess for some of us the future is literally lying on the couch while watching AI generated people, who will be all young and gorgeous, singing AI written songs on RobRot, the next generation social platform where everything is stolen intellectual property.
EXTRA HELPINGS: More Nuclear
What do cheating students, mendacious office workers, and vengeful professors have in common? They have all gone ga-ga for AI-AI (pronounced like aye aye Captain give me some more of that Chatty GPT). Of course that addiction..….I mean increased demand means more power. Not to the leaders of our countries but in the use of ordinary electricity. The Initialism GPU, the chips driving most artificial intelligence, actually stands for Grabs Power Unremittingly. You read it here first
One of my 2024 predictions is coming true about the growth in our commitment to nuclear power,. ( I will be doing a mid-year review at end of June). Here is the latest story of big tech embarking on nuclear plant initiatives. This time Google, who also has their growing cloud business to keep in kilowatts, announces the early stage of a deal to build three more nuclear plants. I think we will hear about more such projects before the end of 2025.
Close your eyes and think ahead a few years. We aren’t that far from a future where your autonomous driving car takes you on a Sunday drive it chose for you. At some point in the journey, your car’s voice implores you to look up from your screen to look outside where you see a large, ominous looking warehouse with the telltale concrete cooling towers of a nuclear plant behind it. Another great data centre you think to yourself as your eyes quickly return to your screen where you are generating more AI images for your QuickQuack channel. The last one of a Zombie exploding into popcorn went viral.
MENU MISTAKES
Now we are gamifying business lessons on how to be a drug dealer. So many new career choices: cybercriminal or old fashioned drug baron. I need to see some videos on PickPocket in order to choose.
I read on ClickCrap that the real story behind this sympathetic portrayal of Mexican cartel members was that the producer struggled mightily playing the drug dealing simulator and had empathy about how hard this career is.
Streaming now on FlikFlop. I found the plot thin and it had literally no character development.
Thanks for reading. As always I appreciate comments, feedback, likes and so on to keep the fires burning. Keep the cards and letters; er,…. articles and links coming in order to make this newsletter more of you.
The Overton window is the range of ideas, policies, or arguments that are considered politically acceptable to the mainstream population at a given time
What I always liked is that Mary Shelly is arguably the world's first science fiction writer.
As someone who has been reading SF for 60+ years, it has struck me how, despite some amazingly accurate predictions, most authors missed some key aspects. For instance, very few anticipated smartphones (or even personal computers). "Star Trek" sort of came close with their "padd" devices and communicators, though Dick Tracy's wrist communicator -- with video -- came closer. So many thought fax would still be a thing, even on spaceships.
I heard a while back that Microsoft wanted to revive Three Mile Island, and just recently that Google is looking into building a nuke plant. Hopefully, they'll look into some of the better technologies, like thorium reactors. And frankly, it seemed clear we'd need nuclear power even without the massive energy sink of Ai. Wind and solar ain't gonna cut it.
About France and robot-warriors: in addition to Battlestar Galactica horrors, also Maginot Line comes to my mind as a reason not to trust their wisdom. About AI and art: I am with you on that entirely. Thanks for sharing these pieces, and how readily we will give away our humanity to the tech overlords in the hopes of a slightly easier afternoon.