Fake news was scary enough … but now it is going to a new level. Technology is going to make it harder to find the “signal” in the “noise”.
Here is a preview of tech solutions (which already exist) that are likely to create a new set of problems and challenges for us in the future.
Replica is a company whose goal is to replicate celebrity voices. They see this as enabling creative applications of their voices without the commitment of the celebrity – of course the owner of the voice that's being replicated would control when/where it could be used.
Combine that ability to simulate voices with deepfake technology (which can alter video in many ways, including to look like the mouth in the video is is saying the words that were simulated) and the potential for confusion or deception skyrockets.
My guess is that you will hear a lot more about this soon because of upcoming elections. It will also become increasingly relevant in everyday life, business, trading, and legal situations.
A picture used to be worth a thousand words, but this may change that equation forever.
The answer is …. not as close as I would have thought. Nonetheless, they just hit a Trillion Dollar market cap. So, they must have gotten something right!
It's interesting to think about which factors or missing innovations caused the difference between their imagined vision and reality.
They really bought into scaleable, HD, transparent, touch screen displays being not only available, but located in everything by now … which suffice to say, isn't the case.
The reality is …
A lot of these innovations actually have little use – Not every situation needs a transparent monitor – they're worse than standard monitors in almost every way. You end up using absurdly expensive screens to display a digital version of a post it note or handwriting. The desk/monitor hybrid would be covered in sheets of paper, office supplies, and your coffee. A boarding pass being a screen is highly inefficient for so many reasons – and so is a digital newspaper. We have those – they're called phones.
They assumed batteries would be way farther along – The thinner your monitor, the more transparent, the harder it is to create a high-performance high-fidelity battery to maintain it. Unfortunately, batteries haven't had nearly the boom like the rest of our tech (though they are getting better).
IoT Adoption/Security – One of the biggest problems with IoT is that the more these pieces communicate the harder it is to prevent hacks. A chain is only as strong as the weakest link – and a smart coffee maker isn't nearly secure as your computer.
Fingerprints (Glass) – I get this isn't a "real" concern – but every piece of technology they showed was transparent/glass. On top of being very breakable (see Samsungs new foldable phones) Could you imagine how smudged/dirty everywhere would appear? Imagine a New York subway with this technology.
Expense v. Convenience – A lot of technologies are feasible – but aren't cost-effective. Look at the slow adoption of Solar cells as their efficiency per cost went up.
Making everything a device/screen means more opportunity for companies to serve you ads and retarget you ad infinitum.
Ultimately, I find this perceived "modern digital office environment" very inefficient. A lot of these "innovations" are less dynamic and easy to use than their analog counterparts. Mechanical keyboards serve a purpose.
In reality, a lot of the trends we've adopted to increase collaboration and sharing have been counterproductive. Not every office needs an open floor plan – not every team needs 15 subteams with 4 bosses – and using 20 different productivity tools actually decreases productivity.
That being said, we've come a long way in 10 years. Think about the quality of your phone in 2009 or your desktop computer – whirring loudly as it tried to access the disk, or the internet, or anything really.
What we have now isn't perfect – but it's leaps and bounds ahead of where we were. A lot of technology seems like science fiction – like the Babel fish from Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.
The Eye was rimmed with fire, but was itself glazed, yellow as a cat's, watchful and intent, and the black slit of its pupil opened on a pit, a window into nothing. – Frodo seeing Sauron through the Mirror of Galadriel in The Fellowship of the Ring
The Event Horizon Telescope just released the first-ever image of a black hole … specifically a supermassive black hole with a mass 6.5 billion times heavier than our sun. This behemoth of a black hole is over 50 million light-years away in a galaxy we call M87. The little blob (in the picture below) is 25 billion miles across, and the bright part is brighter than all of the billions of other stars in that galaxy combined. To put it in context … the black hole, shown below, is larger than our entire Solar System.
The image shows a bright ring formed as light bends in the intense gravity around a black hole that is 6.5 billion times more massive than the Sun
In my opinion, the black hole image is even more amazing when you zoom out and see the entire m87 galaxy. The little black dot inside the orange is the black hole.
via NASA/CXC/VILLANOVA UNIVERSITY/J. NEILSEN
To take a step back, a black hole is a celestial object that has a gravitational field so strong that light cannot escape it and that is believed to be created especially in the collapse of a very massive star. It warps spacetime and superheats all surrounding materials.
“In space no one can hear you scream; and in a black hole, no one can see you disappear.” ― Stephen Hawking
Before today, black holes had only been observed indirectly. We had math that "proved it." Now, we have direct, observable, and corroborated evidence for everyone to see.
Do you understand the gravity of that?
In my lifetime, Black holes have gone from a fringe theory to a possibility, to a probability, and now, to reality.
It is amazing to think about how right Einstein's theory of general relativity was … especially considering that he did the math in 1915, before we had the technology and science to back it up. The basic idea is that the relative velocity of light doesn't change, therefore it must be a constant in our universe. Using his math, we were able to predict how a black hole would "look", and it was supported by the Event Horizon Telescope's image.
Veritasium puts understanding the image into better perspective. Check it out.
For a side note, the first proposal of black holes actually goes back to John Michell in 1784
"If there should really exist in nature any bodies, whose density is not less than that of the sun, and whose diameters are more than 500 times the diameter of the sun, since their light could not arrive at us; or if there should exist any other bodies of a somewhat smaller size, which are not naturally luminous; of the existence of bodies under either of these circumstances, we could have no information from sight; yet, if any other luminous bodies should happen to revolve about them we might still perhaps from the motions of these revolving bodies infer the existence of the central ones with some degree of probability, as this might afford a clue to some of the apparent irregularities of the revolving bodies, which would not be easily explicable on any other hypothesis; but as the consequences of such a supposition are very obvious, and the consideration of them somewhat beside my present purpose, I shall not prosecute them any further."
It took a massive amount of work to produce the photos of the black hole shown in this post. The ingredients: 200 researchers, 20 years, over 9 petabytes of data, 8 telescopes, and immense vision. Oh yeah, I almost forgot, it also took the 104 years of research since Einstein's theory.
Here's a TED talk from Dr. Katie Bouman in 2017, about taking a photo of the black hole. Katie went to MIT and led the creation of a new algorithm that helped produced today's image.
One thing that Deep Learning excels in is analyzing pictures & videos, and creating facsimiles or combining styles. If you want to create art with deep learning look no further than the Deep Dream Generator or deepart.io which use Convolutional Neural Networks to combine your photo with an art style (if you want to do it on your phone another cool tool to check out is Prisma).
Deepfake is it's exactly what it sounds like … the use "Deep Learning" to "Fake" a recording. For example, a machine learning technique called a Generative Adversarial Network can be used to superimpose images onto a source video. That is how they made this fun (and disturbing) Deepfake of Jennifer Lawrence and Steve Buscemi.
While this is a fun example, Deepfakes create very real concerns. They're often used for more "nefarious" purposes (e.g., to create fake celebrity or revenge porn and to otherwise make important figures say things they never said). It's likely you've seen videos of Trump or Obama created with this technology. But it is easy to imagine someone faking evidence used at trial, trying to influence business transactions, or using this to support or slander causes in the media.
In 1977, the Voyager 1 launched into space. Just over a dozen years later, the Voyager 1 spacecraft had traveled farther than any spacecraft/probe/human-made anything had gone before. It was approximately 6 billion kilometers away from earth. At that point, the Voyager 1 was "told" by Carl Sagan to turn around and take one last photo of the Earth … a pale blue dot.
The resulting photo is impressive precisely because it shows so little in so much.
"Every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there–on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam." – Carl Sagan
Earth is in the far right sunbeam – a little below halfway down the image. This image (and the ability to send it back to earth) was the culmination of years of effort, the advancement of technology, and the dreams of mankind.
The resulting speech from Carl Sagan is still profound, moving, and worth a listen.
Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there–on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.
Today, we have people living in space, posting videos from the ISS, and high-resolution images of space and galaxies near and far.
We take for granted the immense phase shift in technology. You have more computing power in your pocket than we first used to go to the moon.
As humans, we're wired to think locally and linearly. We evolved to live our lives in small groups, to fear outsiders, and to stay in a general region until we die. We're not wired to think about the billions and billions of individuals on our planet, or the rate of technological growth – or the minuteness of that all in regard to the expanse of space.
However, today's reality necessitates we think about the world, our impact, and what's now possible for us.
We created better and faster ways to travel, we've created instantaneous communication networks across vast distances, and we've created megacities. Our tribes have gotten much bigger – and with that, our ability to enact massive change has grown as well.
Space was the first bastion of today's innovation, but today we can look toward A.I., medicine, epigenetics, and more.
It's hard to comprehend the scale of the universe and the scale of our potential … but that's what makes it worth exploring!
Porn was the launchpad for video streaming, mobile-enabled sites, VR, and (unfortunately) pop-up ad technologies.
With that said, the next chart surprised me. It shows the number of years it took for various products to gain 50 million users.
Pornhub tracks data like its business depends on it. Well, it is the number one site for pornography. What does that mean? In 2018, over 5,517,700,000 hours of porn was watched on their site. That’s approximately 6,298 centuries of video.
Moreover, last year, it got 33.5 BILLION visits. That’s 1,064 people a second, or 92 million a day. To put that in perspective, that's more people than live in the entire country of Germany.
Here are some additional factoids about its use.
4403 Petabytes of data transferred (574 MB of data for every person on earth)
Consumed more bandwidth than the entire internet in 2002
Stormy Daniels was the number 1 "trend" search in 2018 (followed by Fortnite …)
AI has been around in science fiction for over 1oo years. As it becomes reality, it's amusing to look at different depictions and attempt to connect the dots.
AI first broke onto the film scene with Metropolis in 1927. "Maria" the evil robot disguising herself as a human played on many human fears; deception, lack of control, and perhaps most importantly being replaced.
Maria represented a future that was bleak and set the foundation for AI in cinema. Since then, there have been approximately 100 movies starring AI.
According to Enlighten Digital, 52% of movies portray AI positively, which means it's about 50/50, and there has been a 144% increase in AI movies since 2010 – so we're becoming more saturated with AI.
According to a study by Cambridge, seeing more films portraying robots (whether positive or negative) is associated with more positive attitudes toward robots. This is in line with the theory that the more exposure one has with "out-group" members (i.e. robots, or people of other races) the more positive one's attitude toward them.
These movies all have different tones but there's a trope that remains common from that initial film in 1927 to films in 2018.
We're always imagining that next step. What's going to happen as AI becomes (in some ways) smarter than us? What's going to happen when our creations surpass our control? What's going to happen if the line between human and robot blurs?
There are a lot of advancements in real-life, in respect to AI. As such, there is a lot of movement on AI ethics, and how to best limit or best enable AI.
In film, we gravitate toward two extremes – utopias and dystopias. In real life, we can recognize those extremes are unlikely … but the effect of AI is still profound.
We're expanding a technology with the ability to radically change our world – for better or worse – so it's important to keep a purpose-driven approach. We can't lose track of humanity in the pursuit of AI.
Metropolis's final title card (that first AI movie from 1927) still rings true … "The Mediator Between the Head and the Hands Must Be the Heart"
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