Can you be "unplugged"? (Joke)

   The Matrix was prophetic in many ways. In fact, it was quite amazing that such a movie was even made. Maybe the hope was that most people would not understand. Enjoying the special effects and completely missing out the hard truths which were coming the ones after the others. 

  The first two movies where superb, the last one absurd, except for one detail: The stunning monologue of the architect, where complex concepts were dispensed at such a speed that it takes at least 2 or 3 hearing to understand what is being said.

  In fact, the 1990s marked the beginning of the end for Hollywood. A long agony followed, where original movies were one by one replaced by absurd superheroes and woke monstrosities. But even without this veering into the ditch, it is unlikely that high quality movies like the Matrix, presenting dangerous ideas would have been made again. And guess what? In spite of the success, there were not. 

  Now Hollywood is dying. A dearth of ideas combined with the arrival of AI will probably signal the end of Tinseltown. Well, thank you for 100 years of fun and so long cowboys!

 

Hedge Fund CIO: "Trump Has Decided To Go For Broke, And Pump This Economy Into A Boom To Grow Our Way Out Of Debt"

  Unfortunately this article on Zero Hedge is behind a paywall, but it is still interesting enough to comment. 

Hedge Fund CIO: "Trump Has Decided To Go For Broke, And Pump This Economy Into A Boom To Grow Our Way Out Of Debt"

 "He’s saying, ‘gimme everything now,’ and if there’s inflation next year, the Fed can always hike."

 In fact, Trump is saying what every demagogue, which would include most governments these days have said before him... and which has NEVER worked in history, ever! 

 You simply cannot outgrown a recession, and not because people haven't tried. It is just technically not possible. As you increase the money supply, the velocity of money will slow, automatically. In other words, new investments will have a lower return on capital and consequently the debt will grow faster than the GDP. This is a hard core law of economics. If there was any way whatsoever to bypass it, it would have been found by now. It has not. 

 Then why is there this illusion that it can be ignored? Well, because all this is true within the context of the liberal system under which the West is suppose to be working. But there are of course "other" ways to run an economy. The Soviet system was one. It was not the price of capital deciding what was possible but the plan or civil servants. The result was that you could indeed grow an economy that way but by creating huge distortions and inefficiencies which in the end proved existential. There is another possible way, which we could call the Japanese model, or repressing interest rates. That too works for a while. But then you end up with a similar dreadful allocation of capital and likewise catastrophic economic results.  

 Why is it so popular then? Well, because, briefly, very briefly, you can force a short term boom and just like a drunkard, the economy will feel good before it feels dreadful. 

 In fact, if you remember the 1980s, you know that all this was tried, and worked, for a time. After raising interest rates sky high, the Reagan administration opened the floodgates and engineered a boom. They could do it because America was not indebted yet and they could therefore afford it. It was also the beginning of the descent to hell and over-indebtedness. 

 Today with 37 trillion dollars of debt, this is simply not possible anymore. Lowering interest rates significantly at this stage would create a rush out of the dollar which would quite rapidly go down relative to other currencies, creating significant inflation. The FED understands this which is why they are resisting Donald Trump. 

 But in the end, it may be that the dollar will fall anyway and that high interest rates will bankrupt the Big Beautiful Bill, or rather budget, anyway. So what should the FED do?

 I don't know, and it could be that the FED also doesn't know. That's what happens when you are painted into a corner. Trump didn't create these conditions but he also didn't even try to slow down the painting process. Now, one way or another he will have to walk all over fresh "paint". It might get dirty soon! Trump already sounds unhinged when he is not panicked. What will he sound like when he is?

Facebook Is Starting to Feed Its AI with Private, Unpublished Photos

    The real problem with AI is not when it will become sentient and want to destroy us, it is that we are already in unknown territory. The capabilities are almost infinite and the consequence could be dire. The Internet represents a treasure trove of human knowledge and an immense repository of information.

   The current AIs are almost done with the sum of ALL knowledge available on the Internet and in databanks, believe it or not. The next frontier, the one which requires the huge data centers being built right now, will be meta and synthetic data, which means data created out of other data by linking, deducting, computing AND understanding. 

   Let's imagine the impossible: You have uploaded a picture taken in the street last year. A AI can now enhance the picture, localize it very precisely, recognize any person on the picture, and triangulate the information with ANY other information available. A completely unknown person can now be localized in a specific place at a specific time on your picture. Multiply this by billions of pictures and movie cameras and you can create an almost perfect movie... of every single living person on Earth! 

  This is an almost infinite universe of data, but when you think about it, a frightening one where no privacy can survive very long. China is already there. The West will discover this brave new world more gradually but soon enough.

Via: The Verge:

For years, Meta trained its AI programs using the billions of public images uploaded by users onto Facebook and Instagram’s servers. Now, it’s also hoping to access the billions of images that users haven’t uploaded to those servers. Meta tells The Verge that it’s not currently training its AI models on those photos, but it would not answer our questions about whether it might do so in future, or what rights it will hold over your camera roll images.

On Friday, TechCrunch reported that Facebook users trying to post something on the Story feature have encountered pop-up messages asking if they’d like to opt into “cloud processing”, which would allow Facebook to “select media from your camera roll and upload it to our cloud on a regular basis”, to generate “ideas like collages, recaps, AI restyling or themes like birthdays or graduations.”

By allowing this feature, the message continues, users are agreeing to Meta AI terms, which allows their AI to analyze “media and facial features” of those unpublished photos, as well as the date said photos were taken, and the presence of other people or objects in them. You further grant Meta the right to “retain and use” that personal information.

Big Data (Joke)

   This is often the way big data is built. Not as obvious as this of course but similar in the end. Which is a good thing when you think about it, otherwise "they" would already know too much! (Although AI will change that rather quickly... )