Shallow HAL 9000

🦞🥞 Vol. 2, No. 1

Aug 18, 2024

Sunday Bunch is a weekly digest of current happenings and fascinations, compiled and published free.

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Welcome back, faithful readers, as well as all you first timers.

A quick note for those of you who read last week’s “check your spam folder if you don’t see the next email come through” then thought today’s late delivery might mean today’s edition did indeed get intercepted, I appreciate your devotion and attention to detail. It is always nice to know folks are reading closely.

FWIW, the delay was at least for a good cause: I got carried away writing and wound up having to table half of what I was working on for next week. Lots of good stuff (and hopefully fewer delays) on the horizon.

Finally, before I get started: happy birthday wishes to my good friend Ice Choobies, who piloted our high school basketball team to glory despite having to rely on me and my post presence or lack thereof.

Now, on with the show…

All the way back on March 12, 2011, I gave a talk at South by Southwest called #BOTLOVE: Relationships in the Intelligence Age.

For better or worse, my slide design skills have progressed a lot since 2011.

My goal was to explore our relationship to technology, charting the converging lines from myriad future scenarios depicted in science-fiction, and the modern analogs that were taking shape at the time.

The presentation highlighted real-world examples and in-depth studies into humans emotional connection to technology in projects like Joseph Weizenbaum’s ELIZA and the Human-Robot Interaction studies conducted by researchers at Stanford in the 1960s and ‘70s. Even in those early cases with rudimentary technological facsimiles of humanity, there were signs of how we might forge emotional bonds with simulated consciousness through basic gestures, glances, and conversations.

Through all the research and looking at the progress made in artificial intelligence and robotics at the time, I arrived at the hypothesis that we were approximately a decade from maintaining “real” emotionally tangible relationships with simulated humans.

Two years later, Spike Jonze ~~stole my idea~~ released the movie Her, and famously explored what a near-future where we might swipe right on a digital companion (until getting ghosted for the A.I. equivalent of a guy in finance).

Last week, I saw this headline from Wired:

OpenAI Warns Users Could Become Emotionally Hooked on Its Voice Mode

You should go read the full piece for yourself but, as you might imagine, this bit jumped out at me:

Anthropomorphism might cause users to place more trust in the output of a model when it “hallucinates” incorrect information, OpenAI says. Over time, it might even affect users’ relationships with other people. “Users might form social relationships with the AI, reducing their need for human interaction—potentially benefiting lonely individuals but possibly affecting healthy relationships,” the document says.

Hey Kyle from 2011, it’s me from the future:

You speculated that it might be about 10 years away from “falling in love with a bot.” The correct answer was approximately 13 years.

Congratulations, you’re a full-on futurist now. Watch your back, Shingy.

(But whatever you do, don’t get the brain implant and don’t let them scan your eyeball.)

By now you’ve surely overdosed on Paris Olympics coverage and wrap-ups and, from the time Tom Cruise–who I feel like was only there for the zipline–made his appearance and handed off to the Chili Peppers, Billie, Snoop, and Dre in ~~Venice~~ Long Beach, you were probably already sick of LA28.

That’s good, because I want to talk about what comes after Los Angeles in 2028 (besides people trying to leave events stuck in their cars until March 2029).

In 2032, we know the games will land in Brisbane which I am guessing many of you, like me, primarily know as the home to Bluey and the Heeler family. Brisbane seems like a beautiful place that will make for a great host while going wildly overbudget in the process.

After 2032, things get interesting.

There are rumors of everyone from Seoul (who hosted in 1988), Riyadh, Doha, and Cairo, but the current list of cities who have confirmed they’ll submit bids would all be first time hosts:

Santiago, Chile
Istanbul, Turkey
Ahmedabad, India
Nusantara, Indonesia

After staying within a fairly homogenous set of Western cities, with the occasional trip to Japan, Australia, and single trips to Korea and China, the Summer Games seem likely to migrate to new locales in the future.

Obviously there is still a lot to be worked out and other bids may come for 2036 or beyond, but the future of the Olympics will almost surely not look like the past.

Is your city thinking about making a bid for a future Summer Games? Now you can download the 136-page Olympic Brand Guidelines and get started on a logo today.

Watch the trailer for "The Money Game," LSU's new streaming series on Prime Video

NIL came about after the 2021 ruling that said college athletes had every right to monetize their name, image, and likeness just like every other living person.

In the upcoming documentary, produced by Axios Entertainment and Shaquille O’Neal, we’ll dive deep on the topic through the lens of one of the NIL powerhouses, LSU. With a list of recent athletes including Heisman winner Jayden Daniels, NCAA Womens Basketball Champions Flau’jae Johnson and Angel Reese, and gymnast slash social media megastar Olivia Dunne (who opens the trailer with the fitting quote “Can I see how I look before we start?”), LSU is the perfect place to look at the dawn of a new era in college athletics that is still just getting started.

The Decline of America’s Public Pools

This one made me sad as someone who (1) spent most of his summers at community pools–some public, some less so unless you knew how to jimmy a weak lock open–and (2) is now fortunate enough to live near one of the great public pools, Barton Springs (pictured below).

Photo Credit: Nick Simonite / Texas Monthly

I especially hated this part, a perfect example of how bureaucracy gets in the way of the public good:

New York City Mayor Eric Adams’ administration went a step further in June and cited climate change as a direct reason for a capital investment of more than $1 billion to improve and build public pools in the city. But some urban climate wonks are focused less on public pools and more on a buzzy concept called the “swimmable city,” a proposal that would allow heat-afflicted residents to plunge carefree into the rivers and natural waterways that run through their neighborhoods. Vivek Shandas, the founder of the Sustaining Urban Places Research Lab at Portland State University, points out that the waterways have to be clean for the idea to work, which is a pretty costly and complex way of improving water access in cities: “Why don’t we take care of what we have before we go in and invest billions of dollars in cleaning a river?”

You know one place you don’t have to worry about pool availability?

Dorm rooms for adults.