Big Tech's Man in a Box Strategy
In 1769, a Hungarian engineer named Baron Wolfgang von Kempelen created an automated chess-playing machine for the queen of Austria.
It took eighty-five years to confirm suspicions by a small minority that the Mechanical Turk was a hoax. It took an additional 100 years to build a machine that could beat a human at chess. In hindsight, of course there was someone in the box.
But it's more fun to believe the world is magic.
Over the weekend, Tesla held an event in LA to showcase some new and exciting innovations. There was the robo-taxi, robo-bus, and a robot named Optimus. The comparisons to the movie iRobot are unavoidable at first glance. But, of course, that would imply that Elongated Muskrat actually made something useful.
Optimus, the autonomous robot Elon says is ready to water your plants and, checks notes, watch your kids, was just a man in a box.
Tesla’s Beer-Serving Optimus Robot Was Controlled By A Human The Whole Time:
Robert Scoble, an AI enthusiast in attendance at the event, posted a video to Twitter of Optimus pouring drinks and waving to attendees. A second video, in which Scoble has a conversation with the bot’s operator and directly addresses the question of whether Optimus did anything autonomously at the party. The answer appears to be a resounding no.
Optimus is available soon for $30,000.
Why do tech companies promise magical automation that never comes to fruition? Cory Doctorow, one of the best tech critics of our time, has a theory.
From his 2021 Twitter thread on Amazon Air drone delivery service:
All of this raises the question: why? Why spend millions on something that was obviously not going to work out?
My theory is tech companies promise to deliver impossible things n order to cultivate an air of mystical capability that's invoked to mask real-world awfulness.
Related from April 2024— Amazon's AI Stores Seemed Too Magical. And They Were.:
Amazon’s Just Walk Out technology, which allowed customers to grab grocery items from a shelf and walk out of the store, was being phased out of its grocery stores. It partially relied on more than 1,000 people in India who were watching and labeling videos to make sure the checkouts were accurate.
Also, from July 2023— As these farmworkers' children seek a different future, farms look for workers abroad.
It all makes you wonder— will the global south one day pick our fruit and cook our dinners from the comforts of their home country for the next hundred years? What a utopia it would be for CEOs to exploit brown folks without ever having to look them in the eye. Such a system would give consumers a lot of plausible deniability. It's more fun to believe the world is magic.
Tips & Tricks
Google Search Tip— If you include before:date with your search term, Google will only include results published before the specified date.
For example, entering Mechanical Turk before:2006 will exclude write-ups on Amazon's Mechanical Turk platform, as it has not yet been implemented.
I found an old Google Guide with many search tips and tricks. It's rich in resources and doesn't have any ads. Ironically, you'd never find this site searching for it on Google dot com.
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Hot take
AI generated content can be good. But that doesn't make it any less bad. The problem with policing each other is that eventually, it wears us down and we give in. Because if the metric for success is how many people we can convince not to use the technology, then it's defeating to see people using the technology. The answer is legislation and hounding our politicians to make it happen.
I think.
Anyway. This TikTok video of a giant owl has almost ten million likes because it's good AI-generated content, I fear.
My slight TikTok addiction
I have—hold on to your seats here, folks—an addictive personality. That addiction can and has manifested itself in my Internet usage. But nothing has sucked me in as hard as when I scroll through TikTok too much.
It's the ADHD.
It's like I physically cannot remove myself from the FYP. I can easily waste an entire day on scrolling.
TikTok does to my brain's reward system what I assume would happen if an ancient hunter went hunting and the boar kept collapsing dead at his feet unprovoked. 
It's scary. Even when I manage to close my phone, my brain goes on autopilot and reopens the TikTok app within minutes.
So, I deleted the app from my phone and went browser-only (Safari). I'm unsure why I thought that would work, but it did! Immediately, I noticed TikTok's algorithm was significantly worse in-browser. It served me Nascar and foreign language videos; it's like TikTok didn't even know me. Then, every few minutes, I'd get a pop-up that nudged me to download the app. We're off to a horrible start. Fantastic.
The experience continued to degrade from there. After a week or so, the site kept prompting me to sign in even though I was signed in. Clicking the like button or comments on a video would send me to the App Store to download the app. It was frustrating.
Scrolling through TikTok was so significantly worse in Safari than in the app that I completely lost the allure.
TikTok wanted me in the app enough that it tried making the browser experience miserable. Jokes on them, though. Now, I'm only on TikTok two hours a day. I'm basically a Victorian child.
Anyway, TikTok is intentionally built to be addictive—we all knew that. But recently, some unredacted court documents were leaked. NPR promptly scooped it up and reported its findings. It's bad—like, make Mark Zuckerberg blush.
From TikTok executives know about app’s effect on teens, lawsuit documents allege:
TikTok determined the precise amount of viewing it takes for someone to form a habit: 260 videos. After that, according to state investigators, a user “is likely to become addicted to the platform.”
Excellent breakdown of the article by Miriam on, um, TikTok.
And the Nobel Peace Prize goes to
Geoffrey Hinton, Godfather of AI, who left Google to warn us about the dangers of AI, wins the Nobel Prize for, you guessed it, AI.
On a more sobering note:
From Hiroshima, Japan— Atomic bomb survivor Toshiyuki Mimaki weeps in front of the press for winning the Nobel Peace Prize for his team’s effort to rid the world of nuclear weapons. “I thought those fighting hard for peace in Gaza would deserve it,” he says. Watch the video from Al Jazeera English on X.
The BBC acknowledges Mimaki’s crying but omits why. As does NPR. I'm not a big "fake news” kind of guy. But news blogs do love the lie by omission tactic.
Risk of nuclear war rising amid global conflicts, Nobel peace laureate says:
Toshiyuki Mimaki, the co-chief of the group and a survivor of the Hiroshima bombing, said on Friday that the situation for children in Gaza is similar to that of Japan at the end of World War II.
“In Gaza, bleeding children are being held [by their parents]. It’s like in Japan 80 years ago,” Mimaki told a news conference in Tokyo.
Israel’s ambassador to Japan was critical of the comparison.
Thinking about
In 2012, Apple's Chief Marketer Phil Schiller deleted his Instagram account because Instagram launched on Android and Phil didn't like that. He effectively gave Instagram a week's worth of free press for their new platform. It was so silly. I think about that at least once a month.
Word of the Week
The digerati (or digirati) are the elite of digitalization, social media, content marketing, the computer industry, and online communities. The word is a portmanteau, derived from "digital" and "literati", and reminiscent of the earlier coinage glitterati (glitter and literati). Famous computer scientists, tech magazine writers, digital consultants with multi-year experiences and well-known bloggers are included among the digerati.
Link Roulette
Bonus: Google Drive with 22,000 animated GIFs
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