1993 At&T “You will”

[fallacy]

One of my favorite commercials as a kid were these At&T “You will” commercials. It is inportant to note every prediction of the future was basically a pre-internet prediction. Now with every prediction You can just say your smartphone can do that.

With apps like Speechify I want an AI Tom Selleck voice so we can continue to make more future prediction videos.

[RandyT]

Those are interesting, but I don't know how instrumental they were in any of those technologies, other than that they had (and probably still have) the best infrastructure for remote delivery.  But others are catching up.    The internet was around a long time before people used it for shopping and showing others what they had for dinner.  I'm guessing their marketing team made a laundry list of emerging tech and/or things they were discussing with partners and those ads were the result.  The faxing from the beach thing is a jarring exception though...not sure a lot of younger people even know what a fax machine looks like.  It also shows how somewhat naive we were at the time about the negatives of a totally interconnected society.  Convenience is great, but the cost is sometimes much higher than expected.

Sellick has a good narration voice, but I wonder how many would even recognize it today.  There are a number of tools which can run locally on your machine to do it for you if you are serious   A good VR machine can do a pretty good job with many free and local AI apps.  You just need some Python familiarity to get them running.

[fallacy]

I was just playing around with some of the AI voices I have on Speechify. First thing I had to do was extract the music from Tom Selleck voice over. I could not get it right in Adobe Audition tools but then I discovered this AI tool called UVR5 and it gave me the results I wanted. I then Had AI read out the lines from the first commercial and put it all together in Adobe Premiere.

Man I wish I had an  AI Tom Selleck voice.

[pbj]

They still wake up Gene Hackman for voice overs, Tom Selleck has a long career ahead of him.

It’s been a few years since I’ve worked in a clinical environment, but fax machines and dvdrs reigned supreme.  Aren’t fax machines from the 1830s?

 

[fallacy]

Fax word was being used loosely. Looked more like an email that might be getting sent to a fax machine for printing, but how that thing was was hooked up to a phone line from the beach was also not explained.

[RandyT]

Man I wish I had an  AI Tom Selleck voice.

I'm sure there are hours and hours of audio you can pull from Magnum PI and the few movies he did.  He actually sounded pretty similar in the "reverse mortgage" ads, albeit considerably older.   Might take a little sifting to get snippets with the intonation and cadence you like, but once you have a minute or so of a representative sample, there are tools you can feed it into to get a good result.  A couple don't even require any real training, but they tend to sound more accurate if you let them chew on the data for a while.

[Crazy Cooter]

"Blue Bloods"
https://www.cbs.com/shows/blue_bloods/

He's still on TV!

[fallacy]

I was playing around with AI music tonight. I just pasted in the commercial lines and one of the AI generated songs came up with this orchestral music. We are all going to lose our jobs pretty soon.

[RandyT]

I was playing around with AI music tonight. I just pasted in the commercial lines and one of the AI generated songs came up with this orchestral music. We are all going to lose our jobs pretty soon.

Pretty good.  Now someone needs to do a cut like this with all the AI tech companies. "Have you ever squandered two decades of your life and incurred virtually unrepayable debt to become highly-skilled in a trade, only to be replaced by a computer?  You Will." 

In all honesty, though, this is the natural evolution of the digital realm.  It was always going to happen.  The moment we started to "offload" work to the computers, the clock started ticking.  There are people who consider themselves artists and composers and who have never cleaned paint from a brush nor put their lips to a physical instrument.  The more we needed help from digital devices, the less they needed in the way of human input.  This is only the very predictable end result.

I think we can get a pretty good picture of future society by blending elements from the films Wall-E and Idiocracy, with a little Terminator sprinkled in.  Actually, maybe a lot of Terminator sprinkled in... with 1984 as the plot-line.  All because people wanted to fax from the beach and didn't want to engage with another human to ask for directions.

[pbj]

I, for one, like when my music is sampled, totally fake.

It's done by machines 'cause they don't make mistakes.




(always thought that lyric was "our music is simple" but Google says nope.  The last 30 years have been a lie)

[fallacy]

Pretty good.  Now someone needs to do a cut like this with all the AI tech companies. "Have you ever squandered two decades of your life and incurred virtually unrepayable debt to become highly-skilled in a trade, only to be replaced by a computer?  You Will."

can you feed me more lines like this, I will see what I can come up with using AI.

“In all honesty, though, this is the natural evolution of the digital realm.  It was always going to happen.  The moment we started to "offload" work to the computers, the clock started ticking.  There are people who consider themselves artists and composers and who have never cleaned paint from a brush nor put their lips to a physical instrument.  The more we needed help from digital devices, the less they needed in the way of human input.  This is only the very predictable end result.

I think we can get a pretty good picture of future society by blending elements from the films Wall-E and Idiocracy, with a little Terminator sprinkled in.  Actually, maybe a lot of Terminator sprinkled in... with 1984 as the plot-line.  All because people wanted to fax from the beach and didn't want to engage with another human to ask for directions. ”

I am actually getting worried now. AI is getting far better far faster than I thought it would. It is going to be systematically removing jobs completely year after year from this point forward. I posted a few Asmongold videos, one is a guy losing his copyright job to AI and the second is a guy losing his graphic design job to AI, just a glimpse of what is going to start happening to hundreds of thousands of people who went to school just to be told your job is now redundant.

[RandyT]

can you feed me more lines like this, I will see what I can come up with using AI.

That's a dark rabbit-hole that would probably take a fair bit of effort to compress into pithy one-liners.  Perhaps as a bit of ultimate irony, ChatGPT could assist you with that

I am actually getting worried now. AI is getting far better far faster than I thought it would. It is going to be systematically removing jobs completely year after year from this point forward. I posted a few Asmongold videos, one is a guy losing his copyright job to AI and the second is a guy losing his graphic design job to AI, just a glimpse of what is going to start happening to hundreds of thousands of people who went to school just to be told your job is now redundant.

Yeah, the moment I saw the graphic stuff, I knew the art people's days were numbered.  And that was in a much more primitive form than what it is now capable of.  While the majority of the art folks were wringing their hands and rejecting these new tools, either out of a moral conviction or a lack of technical acuity, others have embraced an amazing creative tool and are leaving them in the dust.   Tools like ComfyUI now offer much more creative control of the output, and those who are able to use it well can quickly produce amazing and deliberate compositions.  However, using it well is similar to using Blender's sockets and nodes to pipe information through various processing steps and understanding what each of them does.  Pretty daunting to those who don't understand programming to at least some degree. 

The thing I find somewhat ironic is that programmers who took part in the open-source movement, which also affected the bottom-lines of MANY people, essentially trained these things to take their own jobs.  The moment anything is "democratized" it can no longer be controlled.  It's like letting loose a wild animal raised from an infant and not expecting it to come back to bite you someday because of what it eventually becomes.  I guess it could be considered an act of self-sacrifice, but most who did it, probably didn't realize just to what extent they were sacrificing.  Was it for the good?  I guess we shall see.

[pbj]

My team is spooked.  Other places are already using AI to do some of their jobs, working hand in hand with large consulting companies that will immediately turn it into an off the shelf product and sell it to my entire industry.  Really the only thing stopping it is the answer to every question in our line of work is "it depends" so you really have to get down to tiny details on most of their work.  As adoption spreads, everyone's going to adjust their business practices to work better with the AI, which will only speed up the transition.  Last year, I attended several seminars on how it will impact our industry.  It felt like it was 5 years away.  It still feels like it's 5 years away, but it's definitely not 10 years away.  I'll be okay, I can pivot back into the stuff I ran away from but I worry about the ones in their 20s and early 30s.  I've already had one of my previous jobs be rendered obsolete.

[RandyT]

My team is spooked.  Other places are already using AI to do some of their jobs, working hand in hand with large consulting companies that will immediately turn it into an off the shelf product and sell it to my entire industry.  Really the only thing stopping it is the answer to every question in our line of work is "it depends" so you really have to get down to tiny details on most of their work.  As adoption spreads, everyone's going to adjust their business practices to work better with the AI, which will only speed up the transition.  Last year, I attended several seminars on how it will impact our industry.  It felt like it was 5 years away.  It still feels like it's 5 years away, but it's definitely not 10 years away.  I'll be okay, I can pivot back into the stuff I ran away from but I worry about the ones in their 20s and early 30s.  I've already had one of my previous jobs be rendered obsolete.

Here's something many people aren't considering:  AI doesn't have to be perfectly capable at your job for you to lose it.

If you are highly paid, you had better be the most capable person on your team, and know how to do pretty much every other job in place at the company you work for.  Teams of 10 can easily be reduced to 2 with the help of AI in every field in which it has reasonably good proficiency.    For example, If your great grandad was one of the two guys on the ends of a cross-cut saw in an old-timey sawmill, the same thing probably happened to him.  AI is automation, just in a different form from what we have ever seen before.  I suppose it could be considered intellectual automation.  When it is paired with traditional automation, it essentially makes the human part far less necessary, and the parts which remain, require far fewer humans to manage.

When the robot revolution comes, the first thing the short-sighted and money-driven humans will do is teach them to make more robots.  With that as a primary skill, and with their self-teaching algorithms firmly in place, they will no longer need us.  Not to repair, not to design, not anything.  When one learns a new skill through endless simulations, it will become part of the repertoire of every single unit of similar design.  Their evolution will be slow at first, but their capabilities will increase exponentially.       

Very few believe this not to be true.  But those who are attentive and have a little game-theory under their belts only really argue about two things:  "Who" and "When".

To take a very cynical view, re-training to a "safe" line of work will only be a temporary solution.  But if I was going to do it, it would be an occupation in the humanities, or something "manual" which is a long way off in their development roadmap.  A good way to look at it would probably be:  If there's something you do to make money for someone that you can't without a computer, the computer will very shortly be able to do it without YOU.  Everything else (aside from the most unskilled jobs) will probably take another decade.

[fallacy]

I want to know when all fast food restaurants will be totally adotmated. I am talking about a restaurant full of Flippy’s. The drive through is an AI voice, you have a touch screen inside and maybe there is one guy working there just to monitor the operation.