everwas

a blog by Ian Kennedy

Category: Current Events

  • Sports Rivalry

    Sports Rivalry

    How do you squeeze that extra bit of effort when you’re already at the highest levels of a sport? Top athletes have a competitive streak that they can tap on demand to push them beyond. Having the ability to summon that competitive drive and harness it to drive you to further heights is the secret to a sustainable athletic career. A top athlete must respect the power of competition and that begins with respect for your opponent who is the source

    We saw this respect the other night as Jimmy Butler and Grant Williams locked horns in the final minutes of Game Two in the playoffs at Boston.

    Listen to Jimmy Butler’s response to a reporter asking about the incident and the respect he has not only for the power of competition to drive him further but also the respect he holds for his rivals that he pushes against to get him there.

    And here’s Grant Williams on the other side,

    I have such admiration for those that have the confidence to transform adversary into motivation. It’s not about right or wrong, good or evil, it’s about driving each other to be better. We could all learn for this.

    I am really looking forward the next chapter tonight at 8:30 in Miami. #goceltics!

  • Sotetsu Line Tear Jerker

    Sotetsu Line Tear Jerker

    In America, it used to be AT&T that made the nostalgic TV commercials that would bring a tear to your eye. In Japan, a Yokohama train line is pulling on that thread.

    The Sotetsu line was the train I took to my Japanese grandmother’s house in Wadamachi from its terminus in Yokohama. It was the first train I took by myself when visiting Japan when I was 12.

    Their television commercials have gone viral for their nostalgia. 100 Years Train shows various couples missing each through the years before finally getting together at the end. This commercial was made to celebrate the train line’s 100 year anniversary.

    Here’s Dentsu’s write up on the thinking behind the campaign.

    Last month, Sotetsu updated this theme to celebrate the line’s extension to Tokyo. Father & Daughter follows a father and daughter over the years as the father takes his daughter to school. In the beginning, the daughter looks up to her dad and says that it’s so far away. In the end, the daughter stays on the train to go away to university, presumably in Tokyo, which she tells her father is not that far away.

    More background on the story here.

    Be sure to watch the “behind the scenes” video below which is really quite amazing. Instead of using CGI, the entire commercial was shot in one go with identical-looking actors and hand dollies to simulate the movement of the train.

  • Something Different

    Something Different

    Yasumura has been polishing his bit for years back in his native Japan. Now he has taken his act internationally to Britain’s Got Talent, changing his name to Toni Kaku and leaning into his mangled Engrish.

    Don’t worry. . . he’s wearing . . . PANTS!

    Izumi dug up a video of him from eight years ago. It’s a bit rougher and I have no idea why the women are in their underwear either but, you know, Japanese TV.

    Yep, same as it ever was.

  • Underlined or Crossed-out?

    Underlined or Crossed-out?

    Last night’s episode of Succession hung in the balance on the interpretation of a memo left in Logan Roy’s safe and the collective interpretation of a single, wobbly pencil line left by the family patriarch.

    Just when you think it can’t get any murkier, the clouds roll in.

    Sarah Snook sits down with Host Kara Swisher to unpack episode four, “Honeymoon States.” in the HBO Succession podcast.

    UPDATE: Jesse Armstrong points out the obvious thing none of us thought about. “If you were crossing something out, you wouldn’t start underneath.”

  • New York Media Obsession

    New York Media Obsession

    I’m looking forward to when we can spend more time talking about challenges in front of us than crime and corruption from the past..

  • Succession Riffs on Media

    Succession Riffs on Media

    Season Four of the HBO drama Succession is underway and the writing is so good that I am memorializing some of it so it’s readily available later, especially the dialog around media.

    Episode One: Munsters

    Kendall, Shiv and Roman are off spinning up their own new media startup. As they spitball new concepts, the writers have crafted some cringe-worthy bon mots about what the Logan Roy offspring think is the future of media.

    Branding slide for The Hundred: The global media start-up is a digital hub delivering all the essential information needed to navigate the now. The world’s leading experts provide humanity’s most invaluable knowledge in bespoke bite-sized parcels, designed to improve the lives of subscribers and the world in general. The antidote to the modem malaise of empty-caloried Input-overload.

    Kendall: The Hundred is Substack meets Masterclass meets The Economist meets The New Yorker.

    Roman: I feel like we said iconic, and you guys are leaning ironic.

    Kendall: An independent bespoke information hub with the hundred greatest top writers, experts and minds in every field from Israel-Palestine to A.I. to Michelin restaurants. It’s a one-stop info shop, with high-calorie info-snacks.

    Roman: It’s like a private member’s club, but for everyone. It’s like clickbait but for smart people.

    Kendall: We have the ethos of a non-profit, but a path to crazy margins.

    Logan Roy: What are people? They’re economic units. I’m a hundred feet tall. These people are pygmies. But, together, they form a market. What is a person? It has values and aims but it operates in a market. Marriage market, job market, money market, market for ideas, et cetera, et cetera.

    Episode Two: Rehersal

    Now that Kendal, Shiv, and Roman have made a play for the old media brand, Pierce Media, they bounce around some ideas on how to spiff things up.

    Shiv: I gotta say, the upside is huge if we just broaden out and stop over-indexing to college professors.

    Roman: Sorry, I just can’t seem to tear my eyes away from the bald man talking about NATO. I have a boner.

    Kendall: So, my floaty kinda semi-pitch would be hardcore international news from global-global to hyperlocal. Maybe focus on Africa? Every day, just what is happening in Africa? The Maghreb. Sub-Saharan East, Sub-Saharan West. I would watch that shit.

    Roman: You would not watch that shit.

    Shiv: That sounds like Homework: The Show.

    Kendall: The point is, it’s global reach. It’s a network that teaches you how to watch it.

    Roman: Or, shove all your foreign report melatonin news hour info dumps in the daytime. Primetime, we go full Clockwork Orange, you know?

    So good. Looking forward to what drug-addled craziness awaits this Sunday.

  • The Challenge Ahead

    The Challenge Ahead

    Generative AI presents a challenge for media companies that can no longer rely on Google for “discovery.” The chat UI commoditizes everything it indexes so every source in its index is reduced to a mere footnote.

    The article (or media artifact) construct will exist tangentially to chat, but with less importance to the reader experience and more important as a reference source. The media brand will surface as a validator in the chat experience, a signature of quality like “Intel Inside.” Only the most recognizable will have value. Evergreen content, like the hundreds of articles of the “how to stop a bleeding nose” variety will languish. Personal, timely, authoritative POV will do much better. 

    The few media companies that cross the line between content and data provider will find valuable new opportunities in the chat world. A rich, faceted database of all the roofing providers, senior living centers or drug conditions will find a way to capture value connected to AI and upstream of clear economic events. Similarly, marketplaces that represent a unique catalog of products will do well. Value increases with proximity to a transaction.

    Can Media Survive the AI Onslaught

    The challenge for publishers is to build a sustainable editorial voice that remains a destination alongside a readily available AI resource that will expand to meet any and all curiosity-driven demands. Focus on attracting a readers with a unique community and nourish that community with a unique and entertaining stories.

  • Art is by humans, for humans

    Art is by humans, for humans

    I thoroughly enjoyed the final cut of Everything is a Remix which, if you’ve seen earlier cuts, has been updated to include a chapter about AI and its impact on Art.

    The conclusion is uplifting, affirming the triumph of human creativity over the robots. Kirby Ferguson completed this multi-year project, manually curating an impressive number of clips (that he readily admits was done without permission) to make this masterpiece and clearly speaks from his soul.

    His concluding message in part four, about the threat of Artificial Intelligences to Art, is inspiring,

    Of all humanity’s technological advances, artificial intelligence is the most morally ambiguous from inception. It has the potential to create either a utopia or a dystopia. Which reality will we get?

    Just like everybody else, I do not know what’s coming. But it seems likely that these visions of our imminent demise will someday seem campy and naïve – because our imaginings of the future always become campy and naïve.

    AIs will not be dominating creativity because AIs do not innovate. They synthesize what we already know. AI is derivative by design and it is inventive by chance.

    Computers can now create but *they are not creative.* To be creative you need to have some awareness, some understanding of what you’re doing. AIs know nothing whatsoever about the images and words they generate.

    Most crucially, AIs have no comprehension of the essence of art: living. AIs don’t know what it’s like to be a child. To grow-up. To fall in love. To fall in lust. To be angry. To fight. To forgive. To be a parent. To age. To lose your parents. To get sick. To face death.

    This is what human expression is about. Art and creativity are bound to living, to feeling.

    Art is the voice of a person. And whenever AI art is anything more than aesthetically pleasing, it’s not because of what the AI did. It’s because of what a person did.

    Art is by humans, for humans.

    Everything is a Remix
  • The learned grammar of humanity

    The learned grammar of humanity

    Thank you Noam Chomsky for pointing out the key difference between generative AI and human “intelligence.”

    The human mind is not, like ChatGPT and its ilk, a lumbering statistical engine for pattern matching, gorging on hundreds of terabytes of data and extrapolating the most likely conversational response or most probable answer to a scientific question. On the contrary, the human mind is a surprisingly efficient and even elegant system that operates with small amounts of information; it seeks not to infer brute correlations among data points but to create explanations.

    Noam Chomsky: The False Promise of ChatGPT

    Rather than a brute force, pattern-matching auto-correct on steroids that cannot distinguish between right and wrong, the human mind can infer and draw connections on incomplete data and generally has the moral compass to guide it to make ethical decisions that benefit the society in which we live.

    As a child of two cultures, I visited Japan several times when I was still learning English. I attended Japanese kindergarten during the summer while visiting Japan with my mother (my aunt was a kindergarten teacher).

    I would struggle to explain how my mind would *click* into Japanese. As native English speakers, we all intuitively “know” when something sounds right. There is a rhyme to the language and we all learn what a grammatically correct sentence sounds like even if we cognitively cannot tell you the rules that make it so. If you went to kindergarten in the US and you hear the first bars of Mary Had a Little Lamb, you all know how it finishes. I believe the grammar of a language is the same way, there is a rhyme that is picked up easily by children who can take it in and absorb it while older adults are limited because their learning is filtered by what is possible in their native language.

    All this to say, no, humans are more than pattern-matchers and that there is a long way to go before we see Generalized Artificial Intelligence.