Tech Tales From the Hart

Wily Ways to Pump Fake

Artificial Intelligence Today

May 11, 2020

People are freaking out at the possibility that one day artificial intelligence (AI) will take away so many jobs done by humans, and become so smart, that it will threaten the livelihoods and quality of lives of human beings. Some people fear AI will become so smart that people will be stupid by comparison. Scary thought, indeed.

But there’s a way for people to fight this battle. The idea is to confuse and play mind games with AI. This is sort of like when you’re playing basketball and you give your defender a pump fake pretending you’re about to shoot. But once your gullible opponent leaps to block your shot, you hold the ball and drive past them for an easy layup.

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How do you confuse AI?

Let’s start with this real-world but sort of alternative universe example. You have an Alexa device in your house. You know that if you tell Alexa to play a song you want to hear such as “Sweet Caroline” by Neal Diamond, Alexa will quickly retrieve that song and play it for you.

But this transaction comes with a threat to your civil liberties. You become ensnarled in a classic good news/bad news situation. The good news: You get to hear a song you like instantly. The bad news: Alexa then knows more about you.

She can figure out with a higher probability of accuracy what other songs similar to Sweet Caroline you are likely to want Alexa to retrieve and play.

Alexa will get to know so much about you that it could start to creep you out and make you question if you’re being followed by some inanimate conniving force like you sometimes see on “Star Trek” episodes. The more Alexa knows about you the more potential she has to control and manipulate you. Nothing less than your fundamental freedoms as a human being are at stake.

So what do you do?

You play mind games with Alexa. Outwit her. Tell Alexa you want to hear a song you detest such as “We Built This City” by Starship. You are no alone: In a semi-scientific survey of music fans, this song earned the dubious honor of being rated the “worst song of all time.”

Because you asked Alexa to play it, she will. But you can turn it off because you don’t like it. Just because you ask Alexa to play a song doesn’t mean you have to listen to it. This will make you feel powerful compared with Alexa. This boils down to you versus artificial intelligence, battling each other’s brain power.

And here’s the best part: Alexa will not have grown any more wise about the songs you like to hear. Tapping into her sexy algorithms, she will go to work figuring out the probability that you like to hear a song sort of like “We Built This City,” such as “Lovin’ You” by Minnie Rippert. If not the worst song ever, it’s in the top 10.

But like every other music fan, you won’t like that one either. You will not be alone. No one anywhere likes either of these songs including the bands who produced them.

The downside is you won’t get to hear songs you want to hear. Everything in life comes with a price tag. But you care much less about hearing a song you like than Alexa knowing too much about you. You don’t want your privacy being invaded and a computer software controlling your life. It’s human nature.

You have not given Alexa information that helps her figure out more about you. She has been deceived. Go on and be down with your cool self.

You have outfoxed a digitized woman. You will never accomplish this with a real woman, especially a foxy one, but that’s a multi-layered topic for a different day and a more politically incorrect audience.

You have outwitted a computer and its intimidating and intellectually arrogant algorithms. Better that than the other way around. Darwinism reigns. Either you survive or AI does. We all know where your loyalties lie.

Consider another example. Let’s say you want to know what the weather will be like tomorrow in your hometown. Ask Alexa to tell you tomorrow’s weather for three towns located at least 2,897 miles from your house.

Alexa will give you all that weather information for 17 places. But don’t bother listening because you don’t care what the answers are. You won’t be in those places tomorrow and, even if you were – by some weird coincidence -- going to only one of the seventeen, you can find out the weather when you get there.

No need to burden yourself with too much information especially when you have so many other to do items to take care of before you leave such as remembering to pack enough underwear.

Now you have thrown Alexa off on an aimless and pointless tangent. She’s mystified and bewildered, a lost soul in cyberspace. She deduces you probably live in one of those seventeen places. Wielding her machine learning skills, she will make future assessments of you and make probability evaluations about your interest in these places.

But Alexa will be doing algorithms using bogus information. She won’t know any more about you than before you asked for the weather in the 17 faraway places. Not only will Alexa’s power of you be diminished, she will be hunting around for insights about you in all the wrong places. You will have rendered Alexa a dolt.

If you really want to know tomorrow’s weather in your hometown, turn on the Weather Channel and search for the forecast for your town. You will get what you need that way without disrobing yourself to Alexa.

Now let’s take this one step further into the stratosphere. You say to Alexa: “Play We Built This City in the 17 towns where I asked you for the weather.”

Alexa will be blown away. She will start trying all sorts of ways of making sense of your request using an entirely misleading pile of junk data. Imagine how messed up mentally this will make Alexa. She may get so frustrated she will do what computers do when they’re confounded: crash. Her algorithms will explode.

She will try to figure out, for instance, another song you may like that is similar to We Built This City and synthesize that with the 17 cities you asked her to give you the weather forecast for.

You can imagine her thought processes: “What’s a song like “We Built This City” in Seattle Washington or Sacramento, California, and what do these things all have in common that tell me more about this person so I can know so much about them that one day I will be smarter than them and control their lives?

Those thought processes will be nothing more than a mish mash of balderdash. Alexa will be flummoxed. She won’t have a clue about you.

You will have outsmarted her. Feel haughty. Feel relief. Sit and watch TV. Or go outside for a walk. Or drive your car down the road, knowing that you remain in control of your life. You, a human being, will have fended off the artificial intelligence onslaught.

In the existential head game now vexing our planet, you emerged victorious – at least for today.

“Solutions Are the The Dreck of High-Tech”

April 29, 2020

Way back in pre-historic times during my first days as a media relations manager, I started meeting with product managers and directors about new products and services they wanted to announce via news releases.

They invariably and incessantly wanted me to refer to these offerings as a “solution” or “solutions.” No more, no less. Nothing else mattered to them. One priority. A single agenda. Call it a solution, slap a headline and a few sentences around that word, and off we go. Wipe our hands clean of the project and move on to announcing the next solution two weeks later.

I received directives to write about broadband networking solutions, fiber optic cable solutions, semiconductor chip solutions, smartphone solutions, satellite radio solutions, to name only a few.

Name anything tech. Be assured marketers wanted to call it a solution. Just get that word “solution” in there, PR pawn, or go back to high school where you belong. Just get ‘outta here and ‘outta our ways. Your job is to push send.

“We want to announce our new solutions,” the marketers would tell me.

“What problem does the solution solve?” I would ask.

“Don’t worry about that. Just make sure you call this a solution. Nothing else matters.”

These banal conversations dragged on for decades. Solution became the catch-all vogue word to describe every product and service no matter what it was, no matter if it solved any problems, no matter when we were making the announcement or to whom, regardless of making money and competitive differentiation, regardless of the survival of the business itself and the livelihoods of its employees.

“Why don’t we get more specific about what this product or service is such as a semiconductor chip that enables faster downloads of Internet pages?”

“All our competitors call their stuff solutions so we have to do the same. Make sure you put the word solution in that news release. It’s gotta be there.”

Solution this, solution that, product solutions, service solutions, software solutions, hardware solutions.

Solutions for everything until the end of time and for all purposes, reasons, and applications everywhere across the seven continents. We are solutions. You are a solution. Everything we do is a solution. Every breath we take comes out as a solution. All things everywhere are solutions.

Solutions on the half shell. Solutions, paper, scissors, and rock. Scissors Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Solutions and Justin Bieber. Solutions and Kim Kardashian. Solutions and Coppertone. Solutions and solution = a solution + solutions. Solutions are existential. Solutions are supernatural. Solutions eat solutions for breakfast.

The more I ran into this madness, the more I wanted to take Mr. Clean liquid solution and wipe away all solutions from the lexicon of business to business communications.

“If we call this a solution, it doesn’t communicate anything about the value of the product or service,” I would say. “Solution is just a word. It doesn’t connect with humans on a visceral level that would make them resonate with the benefits they could gain from using this product or service. If competitors call their stuff solutions, then how can you expect your customers to be more interested in your stuff if you call yours the same thing?”

My questions never resonated with them. I must have used the wrong tone when I asked the question, or maybe I didn’t read the rooms correctly. Probably a lot of both especially the latter.

In news release after news release for decades, marketers would review my drafts and insert the word “solution” into the text after I had taken it out and included more specific and enlivening words. I would again take it out. They would embed it back in.

It was a game of word chess, a literary power struggle, mental combat.

“News reporters don’t care about solutions just because you call something a solution,” I would tell them. “They crave compelling stories.”

When I would say this, marketers would often look at me with disinterest and as if they were puzzled why I could ever think they wanted to hear any of this. They didn’t care about what reporters wanted. They sure didn’t care what I wanted. I didn’t know what I wanted but I sure knew I didn’t want any part of a solution.

All they cared about no matter what anyone else wanted, no matter the product or service or business strategy, was making sure to label their product or service a solution.

Think gargantuan groupthink, long-standing lunacy played by a band called the Lame Thinkers. Picture a PR guy losing his marbles and sense of self-worth. You will then surely understand why he was always racing to McDonalds and order two Big Macs and three large fries to cope because he didn’t have any solutions.

Imagine you have conversations with 100 different people over your career over this same topic and they all keep saying the same thing: We want to call this a “solution.”

“But why?” I would ask.

“Because, well, we just do.”

I could never get them to explain their reasoning further other than “just call it a solution” because we say so.

Above everything else, the boring conference calls, the bossy and belligerent bosses, the super-uncomfortable performance views, my utmost career takeaway has been crummy conversations about one wimpy word: solution.

When I entered the workforce after college, I could have imagined many different scenarios playing out, being the head of state or a great orator or an inventor of some way type of solution.

But I never anticipated I would spend the preponderance of my career quibbling about the use of a stupid, vague, uninspiring, and ineffective word. All the so-called “ solutions” were nothing but problems as far as I could tell.

From a wide range of companies in a diverse spectrum of high-tech industries, this semantic discussion wore on like an intractable march into a sell-out to solution salvation. Hours and hours of discussions lasting days, weeks, years, and ultimately an entire career distilled down to a single-minded doltish desire by masses of people to use the word solution in news releases.

Forever misaligned, we never settled on a solution. We kept battling but never resolving. We talked past each other. We didn’t empathize, synthesize, or compromise.

Unlike guitarists, we never riffed off of each other’s ideas. Harmony and rhythm rocked nowhere. Dissonance and discord dominated our dopey dialogues.

A resolution was never heard. It was so absurd.

Surely it’s time to seek another scintillating solution.

Confused By Cloud Computing? Float Right Up

April 20, 2020

You’re probably heard by now the term cloud computing.

But what is it and why is it important?

You’ve come to the right place. Let me explain.

Cloud computing happens when you elevate into the clouds and do computer tasks there. From this lofty location you send emails, create PowerPoints, do Zoom calls, punch in numbers to Excel, write blogs, and spam people.

Rather than sit at a desk, in the clouds you float around. There are two reasons for this: Because there are no chairs to sit on in the clouds, and because you’re closer to the Moon where astronauts also float around. The closer you get to the Moon, such as in the clouds, the more likely you will float around. It’s an atmospheric axiom.

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There will be other people up there doing the same thing as you, spamming and floating. This is because cloud computing has blossomed into a big trend and is bound to expand even more over the next several years.

But pay the others up there with you no mind. They, too, are confused about cloud computing and won’t be able to help you. Misunderstandings about cloud computing run rampant. Embrace the bewilderment.

When planes fly by you in the clouds, you’ll notice the noise level rising. Bring ear plugs. Sometimes you will need to grab your computer and float to another location to ensure the jets flying at 600 miles per hour don’t hit you. That would end your life. You don’t want that. You’ve got important cloud computing to get done that’s due by close of business every day.

To give yourself ample time to prepare for the jets, Google on your computer to figure out when they zoom by. If you’re worried about an American Airlines plane hitting you, for instance, type in “American Airlines,” check their flight schedules, and get out of the way when the planes go by. If you don’t, you’ll be in trouble.

To figure out where you are in relation to the planes, you will have to know your location in the clouds. Type in GPS on your cloudy computer and it will tell you where you are. But don’t spend the whole day worrying about when the planes are coming by.

You would have to do some physics calculations to nail the match. There’s no time for that and the chances of your calculations being incorrect are considerable.

Focus on sending emails and creating PowerPoints. Add some images of clouds to the deck. Stay focused on the task at hand even though you’re in the path of aircrafts.

There’s something else you need to keep in mind. Clouds are large groups of air filled with condensed water vapor. You don’t want your computer to get wet because that will damage the electronic circuitry inside you PC. Then your cloud computing won’t work. You’ll be stuck in the clouds with nothing to do.

Bring a towel with you. If your see condensation appear on your keyboard, wipe it off immediately. You may have to do this 10-to-20 times a day. This task is an occupational hazard you must endure to gain benefits of computing in the cloud.

You also need to be cognizant of thunderstorms. When they hit, the clouds will get dark gray. It will be tough to see your computer screen. Bring a flashlight and candles and matches in case you the battery runs out. Regardless of clouds enveloping you, it’s your responsibility to continue being productive so you can bolster America’s gross domestic product.

Be sure to have an umbrella. When the storm lets loose its gushes of rain, you will get drenched. Nevertheless, don’t let your computer get wet. Water wrecks electronics. Cover the PC with your hands or shoulders, or put it under your shirt or blouse until the storm passes.

In choosing where to set up shop in the clouds, you will need to know about three different types of clouds. One, called cirrus clouds, sport wispy strands; the second, cumulus clouds, look like delicious mashed potatoes begging to have gravy poured on them; the third, an off shoot of cumulus clouds, are stratocumulus clouds. These look like clouds draped across the sky in sheets.

If you like mashed potatoes, plant yourself in the cumulus clouds. Don’t expect to be fed mashed potatoes there – nor anything else because clouds are not farms. But at least you will be in a place that looks like a food you enjoy eating. For food you’ll be on your own to scrounge around.

If indifferent to mash potatoes, station yourself in the cirrus clouds. There you will probably get more work done because you won’t be distracted thinking about mashed potatoes.

One final tip: Birds fly around in the clouds. Feel free to watch them from time to time. But don’t get so caught up with bird-watching that you forget to finish your cloud computing assignments on time and within budget.

Computing in the clouds is not a free pass to have your head in the clouds.

My First Encounter With Blockchain Was Insane

April 14, 2020

When I first heard the term blockchain, I had no idea what it meant, what it was, or who might be involved. It sounded like a wild and pugnacious black cat was strolling into my home office to haunt me and make me feel bad about my intellectual capacity.

Nevertheless, I had to deal with blockchain because when you’re in the tech industry you must understand all new tech things before you can do anything with them such as write blogs. I couldn’t chuck it out the basement window like an old flat tire or something random and useless like that.

Like a black cat, blockchain had begun to torment me, forcing me to grapple with a new, abstract, and intensely cerebral technological phenomenon.

All I really wanted to know about blockchain was whether I could make serious cash using it. Money makes the world function. Had that been the case, I could have hoarded and ingested a Winnebago full of Lucky Charms. This breakfast cereal tastes better than any other food except maybe homemade lasagna depending on who cooks it.

My first imaginations of what blockchain could be were of cinderblocks on a construction site laced with chains like the ones you see on the back of AAA trucks. You know, when the guy hooks up your car and tows it to the local gas station because your tire is flat or your red engine light is on for probably no good reason at all and you end up paying $900 for them to fix it. But you never get clear what they fixed and what else they said was screwed up with your car.

“Yeah, your belt hook is old and frayed,” says the cryptic mechanic (they’re all cryptic). “And your carburetor is leaking like a sieve. And, oh by the way, your car overall is a hunk of junk. You should get a new one. Aren’t you embarrassed riding around in that thing?”

Blockchain. Hmmm. Sounds odd and ominous and probably some other words that begin with the letter “O” -odious? orthogonal? Blockchain sounded like something I didn’t want to get too close to. It was that feeling you get standing next to a pool in the Northeast in late May when you know it’s freezing in there but you have to dive in anyway and feel the pain because you have to survive.

Feeling uncomfortable, I went to the Internet and watched a video by futurist Don Tapscott in which he opened by saying blockchain would be the biggest technology breakthrough since the Internet.

That got my attention. Ain’t no fad this here Internet. The Internet is getting to be important.

I watched the video and noticed all sorts of curly and swirling visuals of things latched together. It reminded me of a Disney movie when characters float around in the water sort of like in the box office classics “The Little Mermaid” and “Finding Nemo.” The blocks were kind of like sharks darting around going to eat the whale.

Poor whale. Sharks always spear them then eat them. What a way to die. One day you’re big and powerful and strutting around the ocean like you’re the big man around the deep-sea campus of creepy characters.

The next day a shark’s razor-blade teeth slice through your abdomen. Blood spews out of you like out of Tony Montana in the final gun scene in “Scarface.” The shark rummages inside you belly and starts chewing your innards like it’s just another day at the lunch table.

Let’s bring this into your kitchen. This would be like you standing in your kitchen and a tiger the size of the one in “Hangover” comes in and takes a bite out of your stomach. You bleed to death on the floor as the tiger continues to chew on your insides. Bad situation.

Tapscott didn’t talk about whales, sharks or tigers. The weird things flying around on the screen looked more like minnows in size. But the same concept applies: Indiscernible objects floating and flying around on some sort of connected string or chain.

This image reminded me of the images on the board game Chutes and Ladders. The contraption on the video holding everything together looked like a ladder like the one people climb on when their house gets flooded up to the second floor and they’re being rescued from their roof by two men from FEMA.

The idea Tapscott kept harping on was that things get attached to each other. It made me thing of sticking the ends of band aides to each other underwater, and some ladder things flying around as if it needed to be adjusted to put out a forest fire blazing all around the ladder.

People were nowhere to be found in this video. This made it hard to understand why anyone would care about blockchain. Ladders, band aides, sharks, whales, and tigers are inanimate, unfeeling objects. They lack soul. They don’t emotionally connect with humans on a visceral, psychological, or thermodynamic level. So, I was having trouble resonating with how this blockchain thing could be as important as the Internet.

Maybe I could have connected the dots had the video depicted three or four firemen on the ladder even if they weren’t putting out a fire and just hanging out on the ladders watching YouTube videos on their smartphones. That would have made me feel more emotional about the video.

Tapscott threw out all sorts of spellbinding statistics about blockchain. His thrust was that something like ten billion people would be connected to the blockchain in five years.

And twenty billion pieces of data would be stamped onto the blockchain like a stamp on an envelope. Zero people could do anything to stop this from happening. And ten billion people would one day be connected to the blockchain whether they wanted to be or not.

It wasn’t clear from the video how much money I could make if I joined the blockchain. I wanted to know if I signed up for the blockchain whether I could go to the blockchain and take $10 million out of someone else’s bank account and live happily ever after on a beach.

Then I would have really cared about blockchain. Everything else Tapscott said that didn’t involve me stashing bank was technological hype and nebulous noise.

Underwhelmed by the video and no surer of what blockchain was than what goes on in the mind of an octopus, I came to this conclusion: Blockchain is insane. And after we all get consumed by it, life would never be the same.

Who is to blame?