Outside the cottage, it is a cold winter night. It’s sixteen degrees and feels like three, per my Weather Channel App. Tonight, I will be leaving the kitchen cupboard doors open and the faucets dripping. So far, so good. No frozen pipes yet.
Soft jazz is playing on the Echo and its Alexa technology was the hit of this year’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Auto manufacturers are integrating Alexa into their vehicles. It is, apparently, the “Killer App” of this year’s CES, which was, apparently, all about technology coming to automobiles.
Alan Murray, who is CEO of Fortune Magazine and Chief Content Officer for Time, Inc. writes a daily blog called the “CEO Daily.” I suggest you subscribe. He wrote this week, from CES, that all companies are becoming technology companies. It also appears, to me, that all companies are becoming media companies. It is a huge transformation that is going on.
Despite all the rhetoric about jobs being lost to China and Mexico [and some are], the biggest danger to jobs everywhere is the rise of Artificial Intelligence. A Japanese insurance company is laying off several dozen people because it has found software they feel will do a better job than the people, an offshoot of IBM’s super brain Watson.
Because of where the cottage is located, I have trouble with my mobile signal. I have a micro-cell. It has been giving me trouble tonight. When I phoned AT&T, I had an entire conversation with a gentleman who was not, in fact, anyone. He was an AI interface.
There is an Echo in my home and so I am experiencing the Alexa technology first hand. Amazing!
Great fun and a little disconcerting. And more and more jobs will be lost to AI in the years to come because we are looking at technology to replace us. There are a lot of Uber drivers out there but what happens to them when self-driving cars become common? What happens to all the long-haul truck drivers when there are self-driving trucks? What happens to all the crews of ships when we have self-piloting ships?
We are on the way to being replaced by technology. And we need to figure this out. Because it is happening.
Donald Trump is going to be sworn in as President of these United States. A lot of folks voted for him, I think, because he was addressing the issue of job degradation which has been going on but, I think, it was a backward-looking view because the real worry right now, globally, is not moving jobs off shore. That is so 2000. It is about the fact we are losing jobs to Artificial Intelligence. That is so 2017. And I don’t hear Trump addressing that.
Since I was a kid, I have loved science fiction and I am living in an age which would have been science fiction when I was a child. Excuse me, I just ask Alexa for a new jazz station and I get it. I ask her for the weather; I get it. It’s amazing and now we must deal with the job realities of what we’re doing because jobs will disappear as we create more and more devices to take care of us.
In airports, we have all seen the iPad devices that let us order what we want which is then delivered by a human. In about two years, there will be robots which will take care of that. What happens to those human servers?
Oh, and does anyone remember Hoot-Smalley? It was a bill passed in Congress to restrict trade after the stock market crashed. It created the Great Depression and I am fearing we will do something like this with the Trump Administration.
Look, I’m lucky. I am in the third act of my life; I have ridden the great American boom of the last half of the Twentieth Century to the max. Not rich, not poor, full of life experiences I never thought I would have. Every day I do my best to remember to be grateful.
And I hope I am not Louis XV, saying “after me, the deluge.”
Letter from the Vineyard 
Letter From Claverack 05/04/2017 The time is nigh…
May 4, 2017Well, the time is nigh. Today Republicans voted, successfully, on “Repeal and Replace,” hoping to end the Affordable Care Act with their own American Health Care Act. “Obamacare,” long despised by Republicans, may be gone and they will have had their way and many of them will be holding their breath that it does not go badly wrong because if it does, the piper will need to be paid.
We will find out if, as President Trump says, pre-existing conditions will be covered or as Democrats are saying, they will not. If they are covered, it does seem coverage will be much more expensive.
Not a fan of Jimmy Kimmel, I was profoundly moved by his discussion of his newborn son’s heart surgery. If you haven’t seen it, you need to watch it. It is from the heart. [Yes, pun intended.] Please look here.
As I ponder this, I am, not surprisingly, listening to jazz, being all hygge at the cottage, sitting in my favorite corner on the couch, starting preparations for a Friday night dinner party. Have I mentioned I tend to look at the Food Section of the New York Times before I read the news? First thing, comfort and coffee, and then I hit the hard stuff.
Yesterday marked the month anniversary of my once a week radio program. My first guest was Jeff Cole, CEO of the Center for the Digital Future at the Annenberg School of Communications, part of USC. We talked futures. How we are changing and being changed by technology.
His great concern, and I share it, is how we will, as individuals and society, adapt to the coming advent of AI, artificial intelligence, which is already shaping our lives. Last night, as I was heading to bed, I paused and asked Alexa to set two alarms for me and they went off flawlessly, a soft chirping sound in the dark which could be eliminated by a command: Alexa! Snooze! And she snoozes.
I am experimenting with Siri, changing her responses from American English to British English. All fun and games until we get to the moment when the machines decide we are superfluous. Think the Terminator movies or the Hyperion novels which, to me, are more likely than the Terminator scenario. [In some respects, particularly Book One.]
Since I was very young, I’ve been a space enthusiast. Stephen Hawking, the phenomenon of a physicist, has warned us we have about a hundred years to get off the planet.
We could do it if we put all our energies to it but I don’t think jihadists are going to put down their guns to get us into space.
Outside, there are soft sounds and the trees are blooming. In the morning when I wake, I thank God that I get to look out at the creek and am here, in Claverack, a place that centers my soul as no other place ever has. When I look out, I am sometimes nostalgic for the time fifteen years ago when the geese formed a flotilla on my waters. They are mostly gone now.
It sometimes reminds me of an episode of “Star Trek: Next Generation” in which Jean Luc’s brain is infused with the memories of a dead civilization and one of the signs of their passing was the drying up of a creek. Occasionally, I stand on the deck and think: if the creek is gone, so are we.
However, today the creek still flows.
Generally, I am not fond of George Will, the conservative writer. Today, I read an article of his that encapsulates my ongoing sense of unreality. Read it here.
Encased in the safety of the cottage, I am doing my best to live in hope because we must live in hope. Hope is what has driven the race forward; it is what has brought millions of immigrants to our shore, who have shaped the country in which we live. My great-grandparents, on my father’s side, were among them as were my grandparents on my mother’s side. They came to the United States, buoyed by a sense of chance, of opportunity.
It’s hard for me to think that could change.
Tags:ACA, Affordable Care Act, Alexa, Annenberg School of Communications, Artificial Intelligence, Center for the Digital Future, Echo, General, Jeff Cole, Jimmy Kimmel, Obamacare, President Trump, Stephen Hawking, technology, Trump
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