Reflections on technology and Black Mirror

I think I feel comfortable with doing two voice notes a day in the mornings about two different topics. I think that works well for me. I just finished what was about 16 minutes so I do apologize if you listen through all of that.

It was a little long.

But I keep a little log in standard notes of topics I wanted to get into and I wanted to combine the dead time of like exercising and walking with voice notes because this has huge value for me because I can transcribe it automatically transcribes this audio and I can take that text or I can eventually if I can't do it today connect into an API at voice notes and grab all this and these audio and the text and I can transcribe it or it will be transcribed take the sentiment from it and continually train a virtualized AI on my stuff which sounds really interesting.

I've just been banging on about AI so you might want to go and listen to that one but this one indirectly is about Black Mirror season seven. Oh my god if you haven't seen it already I'm not going to try and spoil it for you by telling you too much about it but I think we're on the last episode now episode six we watched five last night which was fantastic the I think it's called Eulogy but I wanted to briefly talk about the first one which I don't want to get into too much details about but it was about subscriptions effectively it was about subscriptions and uh you know I heard and I can't remember who said it that you won't own anything and you'll like that

like literally just be subscription to everything and that mildly terrifies me because you are literally transferring all of your governance self-governance into the arms of a provider be a technology provider be it like a team of a hundred two hundred people thousand ten thousand people to take care of that particular thing of your life.

Now we have these things already in our day-to-day maybe you have an Amazon subscription where you get I don't know pampers for your child or diapers or whatever right and you get that subscription and it automates and every four weeks a robot looks up that database line and says oh yeah it's been four weeks and the little robot goes and fetches your pampers sticks them in a box an oversized box by the way because they haven't got to that bit yet of like you know not damaging the climate with the tiniest thing in a massive box um and they send it out automated subscriptions fantastic like time saver I don't have to worry about it bang here's another box of diapers um and it really really hit me

because you know it was an emotive episode because of the way that the subscription came about I'm trying to be mindful about it because I don't want to ruin it for you but it really really hit me in terms of the subscription side of things in terms of how things move out of our control very quickly right they they're they're almost uh access to those things get augmented very quickly from a subscription to a subscription plus to a subscription ultra so a subscription premium and every time those things change there's a monetary impact from that the price normally goes up and the support service probably goes down

you know it's like this scale of needing to have more people on the subscription plan to make it work the problem is we live in a world now where we have infinite choice it feels like or different providers who offer different things you know it's a bit like all of these boomer industries or boomer businesses that are in the elderly years now and they have a lot of capital tied up in these businesses and it's just you know you can add a tiny little bit of technology to these businesses and you can improve them

you can you know cut down on the costs and maybe make it more productive make it more efficient uh make more profit from it but theAnd the subscription thing really got me because it kind of like takes out of, it feels like it's taking control away or what little control we believe we have on a daily basis from the actual learning of the tooling.

So that's kind of left me in a state of like, well, what do I learn? And for what period of time, if eventually an algorithm can learn this, like what is, what's the point in spending my earth hours learning or interacting with an algorithm if eventually my input is not going to be needed because it can ascertain or make decisions or suggest decisions to me in a fast way.

So that black mirror hit me pretty hard. I'd been thinking about that for a long time, subscriptions. Some things make sense. But for instance, like gaming, if everybody had like super fast gigabit, one gigabit, two gigabit, gigabit connection, and they were connected into a server, a piece of hardware, like you'd want them to upgrade the server on their end, right?

You'd want them to upgrade and fix and improve and add in more, better hardware so that you're up to date. That stuff costs money, massive money. And also like you've got bots, again, AI algorithm, AI bots, scraping websites, looking for the latest, uh, and video RTX, let's say a 5090. And while Nvidia can do a flash video and say, yeah, we're going to do it for $499.

By the time you get, get around to getting one off Amazon, there's seven or 800 because people are like jacking up the price or scalping people. Um, same problem in festivals. You can't like just get a ticket for a festival these days because the bots jump in as soon as they're available and, and, and allocate them and then upsell them on different platforms.

So we're in this kind of algorithmic arms race. And if you, I feel like if you ignore it and if you don't understand it, or if you don't have the ability to adapt to it around it or within it, or use these tools, then like a lot of industries, uh, or a lot of things that have happened to humans since the beginning of time, we're going to get left behind, you know?

And so AI is very omnipresent and I can't believe I've got onto AI again, but cause that's not what I was intending to say on this, but black mirror season seven, uh, usual case of technology's bad technology is going to do this to us. But the subscription one really, really hit me, uh, because, uh, I don't, I don't want to just outsource elements of my life.

Like the, the beauty and the elegance and the comfort and, uh, consistency and, uh, and, uh, excitement of the world. I don't want it to all of it to be automated. I don't want everything to be a subscription model. I didn't have another train of thought about the subscription, but I feel like I forgot it. It was just a shame because it would have been valuable to add.

Yeah. I don't want to live in a world where like anything I earn value wise, just go straight into a pot to pay for an algorithm, especially when it comes to health. I think that's terrifying. Maybe, maybe Charlie, Charlie Brooker is just, you know, it's a lot of people have, have really slated series seven. It's like more morbid outlooks about AI. And I get that. It makes sense.

But maybe he's just like trying to shock. He's been trying to shock tactics. It was for a long time now about the trajectory of this stuff. And we're here, we're in it. It's exactly where he said it would be. So yeah. Uh, check that out. Season seven. Definitely watch it. You can't not watch it. I think you should watch it.

It's a big wake up call to where we're at, where we're going to. You still get to decide as of today, how and when and what, what you allow access to your data, the data you produce from your interactions with the cloud. And, uh, there's things you can do that from security and privacy point of view, do consider those, do learn those things. I think they're going to be valuable in the years to come.

I think a big industry is going to be.the verification, the validity of a human person at the other end instead of a bot. I think we're going to see a lot more of like reputation management and uh yeah don't just put your whole life on auto-repeating subscriptions. I feel like as a human being on planet earth I still need the warm comfort of another human soul instead of having everything automated.

I think there's things that we can use to improve things, optimize things, but there's limits you know. I'd love to hear your feedback about series 7 of Black Mirror, which episode you like. I think we've watched the first five now, we've got the last one tonight to watch which is the Spaceship, Spaceship One, Callista, yeah USS Callista.

Last night's was very good um and again that one was more tuned to legacy and memories which I kind of subscribe to, but I still think we need a solid code of conduct ethics, data security, because I think a lot of this is just out there now you know it's just an arms race to have the better one, the faster one, the more coherent one, the one that wins.

Um and we've really got to keep things in check because these things are just burning through power you know. I want I want us to build things that are negative carbon negative to the world, highly optimized, that's why I love like arm technology so much and uh you know the power usage of it and we have systems that can produce power from the sun, not a lot of it, but if we're running low power computing then we can kind of use what's already there rather than digging up stuff and burning that to take my chat GPT request about how to fix my script and use a ton of power and coal and stuff in the process.

Oh my god it's a beautiful red-breasted cardinal just flew by, absolutely love it here, there's just so much nature that I've never seen before. Imagine being in your 50s and seeing birds that you've never seen before, it's kind of wild dude you know.

Right I'm heading back, I've had a 30, 35, 40 minute walk, gonna get back get some breakfast, some eggs going, little wraps, a little bit of sriracha on there, life's good. Hope you're doing good wherever you are in the world, hope you have a really fantastic Friday, keep safe, enjoy your life every single day, hug the people you love that are close by near to you and contact and keep in touch with the ones that you don't get to see very often too.

I've been slacking on the area and I need to improve on that but again if I can automate certain parts of my life, the bits that take up a lot of time, it gives me more time to be present you know.

All right I'll see you soon, bye.