Category Archives: Web Article Review

record adoption rate for ChatGPT

I mentioned recently that I had couldn’t remember any technology being adopted into widespread commercial and public use as fast as the large language models. Here is some empirical confirmation of my impression, from Reuters:

ChatGPT, the popular chatbot from OpenAI, is estimated to have reached 100 million monthly active users in January, just two months after launch, making it the fastest-growing consumer application in history, according to a UBS study on Wednesday.

The report, citing data from analytics firm Similarweb, said an average of about 13 million unique visitors had used ChatGPT per day in January, more than double the levels of December.

“In 20 years following the internet space, we cannot recall a faster ramp in a consumer internet app,” UBS analysts wrote in the note.

Websites and apps are not exactly technologies, and the large learning models are more than just websites or apps. What about cell phones themselves, or radio, or electricity, or toothpaste, or the plough, or the wheel, or fire? I think the adoption of all these critical technologies probably had a half life measured in years at least, probably decades or even centuries the further back you go. I’m sure there are many scholarly studies out there.

health insurance cost inflation

I seriously have the best of intentions not to be overly political in this blog, but it’s just really hard right now as the U.S. government is making absurdly ignorant policy choices that are not even consistent with their barely coherent stated goals. In this case, after stating a goal of bringing living costs down for “ordinary people” (maybe we could take that to mean the middle 50% of the income distribution?), there is a good chance Republicans will raise health insurance costs massively for people using the Affordable Care Act. (They are no longer talking about repealing that act, just adding “Un” in front of affordable.) The article I link to is from my home state of Pennsylvania, and estimates what the Good Ol’ Boy Party is proposing would raise costs more than 50% for a family of four with a household income around $125,000. Actually, they don’t have to propose anything, or even do anything at all – all they have to do is let sunset provisions in existing laws expire as they probably planned all along.

So basically, Trump and cronies assume that Americans are too busy/distracted/uninformed (I never say “stupid”) to notice that their health care costs explode if at the same time the price of everyday spending on things like gasoline and groceries were to slow down a bit. That, and they may hope to break the Affordable Care Act on purpose, point out it is broken, and then try to eliminate it. This is like intentionally breaking your own personal car and then arguing that this proves cars are not a workable technology for anyone to get from point A to point B.

Foreign Policy’s 2024 election roundup

Foreign Policy has a useful roundup of election results from around the world in 2024. Despite the rightward lurch in the United States, there doesn’t seem to have been a clear ideological trend globally. The narrative this story puts forward is that voters around the world rejected incumbents in favor of whoever was offering an alternative, and a lot of this was fueled by the sudden and shocking reductions in disposable income that affected massive numbers of people around the world. I learned something from this – inflation, assuming it outpaces wage increases, is worse politically than unemployment. Where unemployment has a profound affect on a small number of voters, inflation has a less acute but still profound enough affect on a majority of voters. And this happened around the world (which analytical, rational people, who seem to be in short supply in the U.S., might realize can’t be blamed on Joe Biden. If anything, Biden’s downfall was that he first raised expectations by cushioning the blow early in his presidency, and then let it hit people below the belt right at the worst time, politically speaking, a little after the midpoint of his presidency. Anyway, here is the FP roundup:

  • Iran voted out a conservative president in favor of a more liberal minded one, at least by local standards. Of course, they still have an unelected supreme leader for life (but only one, compared to the nine we have here in the United States).
  • India’s right-wing religious nationalist party lost ground and had to form a coalition government.
  • While I have heard (United States of) American women say in interviews that they don’t think a woman will be taken seriously as leader of a country and they have never heard of such a thing, and are shouting brainless slogans like “drill baby drill!”, famously tough-guy dominated MEXICO has elected a FEMALE CLIMATE SCIENTIST president.
  • A decade or so on from the Steve Bannon-engineered Brexit fiasco, the UK has for the moment at least reverted to a center-left government.
  • Indonesia has elected a right-wing paramilitary leader suspected of crimes against humanity.

will 2025 see the rise of the AI agents?

Despite all the AI hype, we (at least the general public and most workers and middle managers) do not have AI agents we can assign to do our bidding. This is going to be a game changer, for better and for worse. This article is about shopping, which seems to me like one of the most frivolous use of these agents, but of course one that businesses will look to as a way to extract even more value from all of us.

In 2024, venture funds invested an estimated US$1.8 billion in AI agent projects. Deloitte’s latest Global Predictions Report argues 25% of companies that use generative AI will launch agentic AI projects in 2025.

Research firm Gartner predicts that by 2028, 15% of day-to-day work decisions will be made by AI agents.

I’m trying to think of uses for AI agents in my personal and work life. They should be really good schedulers and calendar managers. I can imagine giving them limited autonomy to schedule appointments for recurring home maintenance, for example, giving me a checklist to fill out confirming that the work has been completed satisfactorily according to industry standards and legal requirements, and paying the contractor if it has. if it hasn’t, my agent might engage in some kind of preliminary negotiation with the contractor’s agent and be allowed to settle within certain bounds before taking up the time of us valuable humans. You can see where I am going with this – there are all kinds of applications in project management, construction management, operations management, and (gulp) tourism and hospitality management. Companies have been trying to automate these tasks for decades, in fact, with very unsatisfactory results and a lot of human time wasted. Smarter AI systems should be able to reduce some of this friction, handling routine tasks while just keeping humans minimally informed, and understanding when a human being needs to make a decision and exactly what information they will need to do so.

I can imagine a helpful AI looking over my shoulder as I make small daily decisions and telling me whether they are likely to help or hinder me in meeting my long-term goals. For example, will my eating and shopping choices increase or decrease my expected life span? Will they increase or decrease my expected net worth at retirement age? Good AI agents might be able to help me counteract the bad AI agents out there that are going to be trying to get me to make bad choices.

real Terminator-style augmented reality in 2025?

From this Wired headline, you might think 2025 will be year I finally get directions superimposed on the real world through my glasses. But read farther and it sounds more like this is still hard and 2025 will just be a year I can listen to podcasts through my glasses, if I wanted to do that for some reason.

  • Apple Vision Pro and Meta Quest 3S – These are full-on virtual reality helmets I think. I can see this being cool on, say, a long-haul flight, but not walking around a city. Magic Leap is still out there, somewhere, doing something.
  • Ray-Ban Meta – Seriously, this is just making phone calls and listening to music through your glasses. Fine, but not augmented/mixed reality in my opinion. There are some other similar ones from Oppo, Swave, and Emteq and some others that failed on the launchpad or are still in development.
  • Meta Orion, Snap Spectacles, Google Android XR – These are supposed to be the real deal, but are still in the R&D phase. So not too hopeful they will burst onto the commercial scene in 2025.
  • Form – “smart swim goggles”. I can see this – swimming can be boring, and nobody has invented a truly foolproof set of swimming headphones/earbuds that I am aware of.
  • XReal – “focuses on mimicking a big screen display right on the lenses to let users feel like they’re watching media on a big screen”. Again, could be cool on a plane, train, bus, or self-driving vehicle.
  • Emteq – basically sounds like a Fitbit in glasses form. Maybe less dorky than when you see joggers with phones strapped to their arms.

You would assume Apple has some augmented/mixed reality R&D work going on, but they usually seem happy to skip the first couple generations of a new product category (think AI) and let it mature a bit before they join the fray. So the lack of any public hype from Apple is probably a sign that the technology is not going to mature in the next 12 months.

So there you have it – I personally am still looking forward to the (mildly dystopian) world of Rainbow’s End, but it doesn’t sound like 2025 will be the year we get there.

The Gospel, Lavender, and Where’s Daddy?

An article in “+972 Magazine” makes some very attention getting claims about the Israeli bombardment of Gaza. On the one hand, it is based on anonymous sources, and if any of it is true it is surprising to me it has not turned up in more well known media outlets. On the other hand, it really makes a lot of logical sense to me in that it seems 100% consistent with facts on the ground. So I am summarizing it here as it is summarized in the magazine, and I encourage you to consider it seriously but with a healthy dose of skepticism.

First, they describe an Israeli program to identify likely Hamas associates based on statistics. People are assigned a score from 0 to 100, based on their likelihood of being associated with Hamas. The statistics are trained on cases known for sure to be associated with Hamas.

The book offers a short guide to building a “target machine,” similar in description to Lavender, based on AI and machine-learning algorithms. Included in this guide are several examples of the “hundreds and thousands” of features that can increase an individual’s rating, such as being in a Whatsapp group with a known militant, changing cell phone every few months, and changing addresses frequently. 

“The more information, and the more variety, the better,” the commander writes. “Visual information, cellular information, social media connections, battlefield information, phone contacts, photos.”

Since the October 7, 2023 attack, this story goes (I am going to stop saying this from here – I am relaying the story as this source explains it), a few things have changed. One is the increasing automation of the process, producing large numbers of potential targets. Second is the lowering of the threshold from the highest scoring targets to lower scoring ones.

He explained that when lowering the rating threshold of Lavender, it would mark more people as targets for strikes. “At its peak, the system managed to generate 37,000 people as potential human targets,” said B. “But the numbers changed all the time, because it depends on where you set the bar of what a Hamas operative is. There were times when a Hamas operative was defined more broadly, and then the machine started bringing us all kinds of civil defense personnel, police officers, on whom it would be a shame to waste bombs. They help the Hamas government, but they don’t really endanger soldiers.”

One source who worked with the military data science team that trained Lavender said that data collected from employees of the Hamas-run Internal Security Ministry, whom he does not consider to be militants, was also fed into the machine. “I was bothered by the fact that when Lavender was trained, they used the term ‘Hamas operative’ loosely, and included people who were civil defense workers in the training dataset,” he said.

The system is believed to be about 90% accurate, meaning 10% of the targets identified do not have links to Hamas, and Israeli leadership judged this to be acceptable collateral damage. But whatever you think of the morality of that judgment, it was the tip of a very large and very cold iceberg. Because the leadership also decided that to take these people out, it was acceptable to take out their extended families by leveling their homes in the middle of the night. The higher value the target, the greater number of innocent civilians the leadership judged to be acceptable to kill.

In an unprecedented move, according to two of the sources, the army also decided during the first weeks of the war that, for every junior Hamas operative that Lavender marked, it was permissible to kill up to 15 or 20 civilians; in the past, the military did not authorize any “collateral damage” during assassinations of low-ranking militants. The sources added that, in the event that the target was a senior Hamas official with the rank of battalion or brigade commander, the army on several occasions authorized the killing of more than 100 civilians in the assassination of a single commander.

So it kind of makes a very cold, calculated kind of logical sense from a certain point of view – the leadership believes it is under an existential threat, and they judge that killing 15-100 people for every combatant (which they are about 90% sure of) is acceptable to remove the threat.

I have to say this high a ratio does not seem morally acceptable to me. You can say “what about” the Allied bombings of German and Japanese cities in World War II, the score counting of “military aged males” in Vietnam, and whatever went on in Afghanistan and Iraq, the U.S.-enabled Saudi bombing of Yemen, etc. And you would be right – all of these are very likely immoral, in my view. Millions of wrongs don’t make a right.

A lot is made of the AI angle here, and that makes it a bit more chilling to me. Basically, technologies developed for marketing (by U.S. firms in many cases) are being applied to evil causes the Nazis, Stasi, the KGB or the Spanish Inquisition could only have dreamed of. I think the Israeli leadership believes what it is doing is morally justified, even if most reasonable people in the world might disagree. It’s horrible to imagine what a truly horrible, ill-intentioned regime might do with these technologies.

pandemic flu preppers

A major pandemic flu is coming…someday. Today? Tomorrow? Within the next four years while the United States government is staffed (I am not going to use the word “led”) by fools? Within the next 20 years? Nobody knows. Let’s hope it’s not the H5N1 “Captain Trips” variant. Anyway, the CDC was allowed to put out some useful educational information as recently as 2017, and there are lots of preppers out there talking about stocking up on camp stoves and what-not. One suggestion is to “give the gift of preparedness” during the holiday season. Not a bad idea, even if the people you were giving the gift of preparedness happened to think you were insane.

co-living – dormitories for grownups

Co-living “refers to buildings in which residents have their own lockable living and sleeping space but share a kitchen and other facilities”, according to smartcitiesdive.com. This would seem to make sense as an affordable housing option, but apparently is often prohibited by zoning.

These types of arrangements could also be set up by employers. In Asia, I get the sense that one reason unemployment and labor rates can both be low at the same time is that employers provide dormitories for workers who want or need them. It might not be glamorous, but if a relatively low-paying job comes with room and board, that could solve a number of economic and social issues that we don’t really seem to have much of an answer to here in the “western” world.

is the Chinese government suppression of Uyghurs real?

Max Blumenthal says the Uyghur suppression is based on a very small number of unreliable sources. Well, I first read about it in Der Spiegel, I think, and it has also been covered by the Guardian. My understanding is that it is a somewhat sinister use of technology to track large numbers of people, identify and preempt potential Islamic extremism. The Chinese government officials probably think it is justified to head off the potential for violence, and yet it probably meets the UN definition of cultural genocide. So I don’t have a verdict here, but I certainly don’t think it is made up. I do suspect we will see heavy surveillance and tracking regimes like this popping up elsewhere in the future, such as Gaza for instance.

why “free-flow” car sharing isn’t working in the U.S.

This article describes several attempts to create “free flow” car sharing services, where you can pick up and leave a car anywhere within a certain zone. This is in contrast to Zipcar’s “fixed model” where you have to leave the car where you found it. The article says the free flow model isn’t working well because the people it benefits most are lower-income people who do not otherwise have easy access to private or public transportation. But this market just does not have enough demand to cover the cost. This model is working well outside the U.S., and the article suggests one reason it does not work in the U.S. is the massive subsidies we have in place for private vehicle ownership with massive public funding for roads and parking. The car-highway-oil-sprawl industry propaganda is so entrenched that we can’t see these massive subsidies hidden in plain site. Take your red pills, people!

In October I passed the “car ownership free for 20 years” mark, which I am very proud of. I made it to the milestone through the stroller and car seat years, which was sometimes difficult. But I will say I have a Zipcar membership which I rarely use, and there are really two reasons. First is living in a walkable, public transportation oriented community. I simply don’t need a car most of the time, and I suspect the people who might currently be interested in car sharing are also the ones who value public transportation. But second, ride hailing has just gotten so convenient and it is much cheaper compared to Zipcar, so I really only use Zipcar if I am hauling something. It occurs to me that once cars can drive themselves (okay, they can now, but once the various institutional/legal/policy barriers are sorted) there will be less distinction between the two models, and car sharing will eventually go away. Public agencies can subsidize ride hailing if they want to, and I am actually concerned this will put downward pressure on the demand for traditional public transportation (buses, trains) and lead to doubling down on our poor low-density land use choices.