If you can imagine it, you can create some sort of version of whatever you dream up using today’s technology. I was sitting around with a group of people, doing a bit of barley-derivative imbibing, and someone asked the group if technology could offer services that were available now in real life, but currently not available online. In other words, were there any real life problems, applicable to a large part of the population, that could be solved with a bit of tech creativity? It is these sorts of questions that spawn startups and other business ventures. I keep track of these ideas, because true innovation (or revenue streams) come from the fusion of diverse ideas and problem solutions.
The creative process for innovation was defined by an amazing book that I had the pleasure to discover some years back. It’s called “A Whack on the Side of the Head” by Dr. Roger von Oech. Let me quote the Amazon book blurb: “Over the years, A WHACK ON THE SIDE OF THE HEAD has been praised by business people, educators, scientists, homemakers, artists, youth leaders, and many more. The book has been stimulating creativity in millions of readers, translated into eleven languages, and used in seminars around the world.”
The book is an excellent tool for beginning your own innovation process. However in the case of this post, the creativity came not only from the group that I was chatting with, but also from the plethora of web scrapings that I am accumulating in my private knowledge base. So on with some digital life features that you might see soon.
Internet Busking
This was proposed by a bus driver who really wanted to be a full time singer-songwriter. He has put out several albums on websites like CDBaby and song streaming services. He lives in a city with a decent amount of tourists, so when he is not driving them around for money in a bus, he goes to the town square and busks. The old line of “What's the difference between a busker and a pizza?” doesn’t apply to him. (The answer is “A pizza can feed a family of four.”) This guy averages about $200 a day singing on a sidewalk in the sun. But he has dreams of doing it online fulltime.
The way that my busker friend described it, is that if he can stream busking on Facebook or Youtube, why can’t he put out a virtual tip jar to collect money from web-surfing passersby. Here is how he sees this incarnation. Some bright IT person writes a browser extension — the Busker Extension. It has preferences so that you can busk at popular websites. For example, CNN is a popular website. With the extension, when you go to the site, a notification shows you that one or more buskers is/are available. You can choose to listen to the busker in a small window, and if you like what you hear, there will be the facility to make a small micropayment to the busker. All of this has to be predicated on the fact that the fee for making the small micropayment doesn’t exceed the amount of the micropayment. You have to be able to throw the entertainer the equivalent of a bit of pocket change.
If someone were to make this busking micro payments system, it could be used for any online content creation, including text, audio and video. You can bet that it will spawn a bunch of “street corner preachers” on a soapbox, always ready to take up a collection. God loves you, but he wants your money.
AI Jury Selection
A high school classmate of mine is a lawyer. His choice of career was a surprise because he was a bit of a class clown (or maybe that is a prerequisite for being a lawyer). He defends criminal cases. Because of that, I didn’t suspect a deep intellectual curiosity. I always thought that it went counter to the lack of cognitive dissonance when you know that your client is guilty as hell, yet you still put up a vigorous defense.
AI in the legal field is becoming a thing. We have all heard of the AI startup that can successfully get you off you violations in traffic court. We have also heard about the lawyer who lost their case by using ChatGPT, when it hallucinated and started making up case references that the dumb lawyer thought was true.
My lawyer classmate wants to use AI for jury selection. Specifically he wants AI to generate questions for potential jurors to show a bias either for or against the defense that he wants to present. He asked me how such a thing can be constructed so that it was a fairly usable tool. He had envisioned feeding and training the machine on case law jury verdicts, and was looking for a faster, less expensive, more reliable way.
Of course, I had a solution for him — training the large language model on metadata that was one level of abstraction above case specifics. This is one area that is majorly lucrative because of the large sums of money that are transacted in law suits. This very scenario was the genesis (and bane) of the popular TV show Dr. Phil. Oprah Winfrey was being sued by Texas cattlemen for saying that beef was bad for you. How now, brown cow? She hired a psychologist, Phil McGraw as a jury selection consultant. She was so impressed with him, that he guested on her show several times, before he was spun off with his own show and we have suffered the banality of it ever since. My ambulance-chasing buddy wants his own virtual Dr. Phil without the attitude for his business.
Chat Bots for Social Isolation
A woman that I know has just institutionalized her father because of progressive dementia. The man could no longer maintain his own apartment. He was put into a home. The trouble with some dementia sufferers, is that they have enough lucidity to understand their situation, but not enough to realize that they can no longer function independently. Or they rail at the supervision that they require. The other issue is that dementia worsens with lack of social interaction. In this woman’s case, her father can no longer operate the multi-featured push button phone that is in his room at the home. He can no longer independently phone his daughter. The irony is that if he had an old technology rotary dial phone, he could probably manage.
The solution that was proposed would be an AI app for an Alexa-like device, or even integrated in Alexa or Siri. One could program it for regular intervals so that it would ring like a telephone. Once it attracted the attention of the person, it could hold a conversation with them. It could read the news, give sports results, read and chat about social media posts of relatives or ask and play their favorite music.
In my opinion, the development of this is an imperative.
Podcasts hosted by AI
I have posted often about synthetic media and how we are seeing more and more of it. I see pseudo-synthetic media generated by humans on Youtube. The video makers create a mostly inane script, and it is spliced together with stock video, stock photos that do not even represent what is being said, and audio sounds to try to string together a representation of the purported storyline. Also there is a heavy preponderance of Youtube videos narrated by text-to-speech that are annoying as hell with their disquieting cadences, mispronunciations and poor grammar. Many of those, such as reports from the war in Ukraine, are made by people with poor English skills, which in this case is helpful. (My other pet peeve is videos make by people who do not have the basics of grammar and/or have a heavy regional or bush accents and make videos to “educate”. Also I am weirded out and am heavily distracted by maker videos who have closeups of doing what they do, and their dirty fingernails are chewed down to the quick.)
So, we are a short step away from totally AI generated podcasts. Am I ready for this? No. Will they garner an audience and make money? Yes. Would I ever do it? No !!!
AI Singer-Songwriter on Demand
And a short step from AI generated podcasts is the singer-songwriter on demand. Need a song to apologize to your partner for something? Make them a song with your message that sounds like Taylor Swift or Ed Sheeran. To be honest, I cannot name any Taylor Swift or Ed Sheeran songs. I do not listen to pop music. I cannot name a Beyoncé song, but apparently these entertainers are very popular in the wilds of the world’s population. (I listen primarily to prog rock, classic rock, classical music especially Mozart and when I am coding, nothing gets the juices flowing like classic heavy metal.)
But with AI being the ideal mimic, soon you will be able to have a one-off custom song for any occasion in any style without the bother of a creator, band, royalties, musical instruments or any of that stuff. I can even see complete radio stations with AI generated music on the fly for every song. It would be the popular allure — a song never to be heard again. (I wish that sometimes that would happen to pop music).
To start off this trend, I asked ChatGPT to write me a song in the style of Metallica about AI generated music:
(Verse 1) In a world where wires entwine, And circuits pulse with eerie shine, A symphony of ones and zeros collide, Metal hearts with melodies inside.
(Pre-Chorus) From the depths of algorithms they rise, AI-generated music, a digital prize, But can it truly touch our souls, Or just cold patterns without control?
(Chorus) Metallica's here, we shall defy, Unleash the fury, reach for the sky, In this age of AI, we'll raise our voice, Proclaim our love for the human choice.
(Verse 2) Binary whispers, electric dreams, But where's the passion, where's the screams? We crave the raw, the imperfect tone, Where the heart and soul truly are shown.
(Pre-Chorus) The algorithms may learn and adapt, But they can't capture the fire we've had, Music needs a soul, a human touch, Emotions that AI can't clutch.
(Chorus) Metallica's here, we shall defy, Unleash the fury, reach for the sky, In this age of AI, we'll raise our voice, Proclaim our love for the human choice.
(Bridge) So let the guitar wail and drums explode, We'll resist the digital overload, The human spirit will never fade, Our melodies shall never be betrayed.
(Guitar Solo)
(Chorus) Metallica's here, we shall defy, Unleash the fury, reach for the sky, In this age of AI, we'll raise our voice, Proclaim our love for the human choice.
(Outro) In the end, the human heart prevails, In a world where AI-generated music trails, Metallica's roar will forever remain, A testament to the power we retain.
It’s not bad. I would change one line though. Instead of saying “We’ll resist the digital overload”, I would say “We’ll resist the digital overlord'.”
Throwaway Identity Dispenser
My blockchain colleagues preach that one of the benefits and value of blockchain is the establishment of global identity system. They preach this with the certitude and conviction of a biblical tenet of faith, without real evidence for that belief.
Of course the need for bona fides in identity disclosure is real, but with modern methods of identity theft, impersonation, hacking and such, a global transparent system would be open to both misuse, loss of privacy and a tool for democracy degradation. (What if your country of citizenship kept track of everything that you do globally?) No thanks.
What this world really needs, is an ad hoc identity dispenser. Any interaction online is mined for data, information and knowledge that can be used against you in many ways — usually to sell you something. There is no more personal privacy.
To fix it, you need a throw-away, single use identity dispenser, the Pez of identity dispensers. Every time you need to transact online in a trivial way, you could do it with a non-exploitable identity.
One of the pillars of identity management is a physical address. Your address is considered vital and is loaded with metadata about you. From your address, a data miner could determine income, social status, political leanings and wealth of other demographic data. Back in the postwar day of my grandparents day, you could send a letter to anyone without knowing their address. You just addressed it by their name, and to General Delivery at their nearest post office. The post office would hold the letter indefinitely until someone asked for it. No ID required.
In a strange twist, Dominos Pizza is doing something of the same thing. They have just announced a delivery system to anywhere. When ordering, all you have to do, is pin a location on a map and it will be delivered there. It could be a beach, a park, a funeral home — anywhere.
Now if we had the same thing for general identity, we wouldn’t have to worry about digital privacy, companies being hacked and your particulars sold on the dark web. An ad hoc identity dispenser would allow me to be Frank with you.
The Self-Driving Data Conundrum
Experts tell us that self-driving cars are unsafe. We need millions more miles of data collection to ensure the safety of the systems. Some even say that we need human trials with the possibility of driver death to prove the system out.
Well there is a solution. Back in the day when I worked as a military systems circuits designer, we needed to know the processes of naval electronic warfare and how it integrated with the operations of the warship’s systems. We built a DCU - a data collection unit stuffed with sensors and human inputs. It was a primitive form of process mining.
Suppose that there was a DCU data collection unit that could be installed in passenger cars and drivers were paid to have this in their vehicles. The data would be used to train self-driving cars. Uber drivers could supplement their income by turning on the unit while doing their taxi shtik. Other drivers would have it installed to supplement their incomes. Delivery fleets could boost their revenues just by going about their business.
In no time, you would get millions of miles worth of data. You would see the edge cases like bad drivers and accidents. You could have training sets of different roadways, so that the cars could download the particular data for that road set, so that they would “know” the road before driving it.
This would add a whole new dimension to data brokers. And the development of self-driving cars would be a boon — especially for the eventual day when I am way too old to qualify for a driver’s license, but still keep the personal freedom of driving anywhere. In my case, I would hope that it would be to visit my 29 year-old girlfriend.
Thanks for reading.