It is time to review the year in digital technology. Oh, what fun! As with prior reviews, we will arrange this review like an award ceremony.
There are three criteria for an award:
- It must involve digital technology.
- The key event must have taken place this year, 2023.
- And it must lend itself to sass and sarcasm and ridicule.
The awards are worth nothing. That is, unless you think fifteen seconds of fleeting fame on this blog post is valuable. That would be delusional. Do not misinterpret. This was worth the trouble if you have a good giggle or two over these observations.
This year, we have had many outstanding awards for Best Supporting Actor, Best Drama, Best Meme, and Best Use of Digital Technology in Science. We also have our annual Rose Bud award and Lifetime Achievement awards. Be assured that Elon Musk will win something because how could his antics not deserve at least some ridicule? And be assured that no prize will go to Taylor Swift. She has already won plenty. Let’s start the fun.
Best drama. CEOs get fired every week in technology, but not like this. Let’s not bother reviewing the other nominees—the Bankman-Fried, Epic, and Google trials were distant second, third–, and fourth-place nominees. The award for best drama in a miniseries goes to Sam Altman and the board at OpenAI, where artless intelligence supervises artificial intelligence. The soap opera played out just before Thanksgiving. Altman was fired on a Friday, potentially hired by Microsoft on Monday, and when hundreds of employees agreed to leave with him, he was reappointed CEO on Tuesday.
A CTO who agreed to fire the CEO openly regretted participating in the plot. <sarcasm alert> To say nothing of the fact that the board was debating whether Altman would let AI end the world as we know it. Doesn’t it give you faith that our future is in good hands? <end of alert>
I cannot wait for the next installment in the miniseries. Who needs fictional scripts when reality is this theatrical?
Best supporting actor. There are several nominees this year, and they all starred in the same show, a bank run reminiscent of “It’s a Wonderful Life” but with more money! A total of $42 Billion was withdrawn electronically in one day. Whoosh, right out the electronic door.
The first nominees are the investment managers at the Silicon Valley Bank, who foolishly continued investing in bonds while interest rates increased. The following nominees were the local venture capitalists who read the financial report on SVB and, rather than acting like responsible industry leaders, instructed their companies to withdraw funds before everyone else, which started the run on the bank. The third nominees are all the startups who kept hundreds of millions of dollars in one account in one bank and panicked when the run started – hey, dudes, have you ever read up on the limits on deposit insurance? The fourth nominee must be the cryptocurrency managers of Stable Coin, with $3 billion tied up in SVB. Because that name is just too ironic…So stable of you, Stable Coin! And the winners are NONE OF THEM. They all lost, and so did the rest of us.
That is why this award goes to the adults at the FDIC who helped clean up this mess and stabilize the banking system in a weekend. Thank goodness there are still some adults in charge.
Best song. This award goes to the best use of digital technology to make music. This year, it is a feel-good winner. We will not bother singing all the nominees. It just makes the show long. The award goes to Peter Jackson for figuring out how to use AI to produce John Lennon’s lost song, Now and Then. In case you have been asleep under a log, here is the story: Peter Jackson helped invent AI methods to pick out dialog in the hours of recordings of the Beatles while he was making the series about their Let-it-Be and Abby Road sessions. Then he turned the technology on an old Lennon cassette recording of his unfinished demo, extracting the song. It is one of those sentimental Lennon songs and not one of those edgy ones. They added some additional dubs from an old Guitar accompaniment by George Harrison and more recent dubs by McCartney and Starr . That completed the song, and, poof, we have a hit! Of course, it jumped to the top of the charts as soon as it was released. This is remarkable when you realize this band broke up fifty years ago.
It also made us realize that some of us are still obsessed with the band’s breakup. Speaking of the breakup, as Peter Jackson’s previous work with the Let-it-Be sessions taught us: Don’t blame Yoko. John doted on her, but she did not get in the way. Fans have been blaming Yoko for fity years. Enough! Paul was bossy and just craved a live audience. Can you blame hime? George wanted to leave anyway, because he was sick of Paul’s pushiness and he wanted to follow his own muse. Nobody knew what to make of George’s spiritual journey. They were all having a tough time getting along, except Ringo. Everybody liked Ringo…. But I digress.
The Annual Rose Bud Award. Enough about celebrities of the past. Let’s discuss celebrities of the present. This annual award goes to the CEO who comes closest to emulating the megalomaniac title character of Citizen Kane. There is no shortage of CEOs with egos in technology. Still, this year’s winner showed an extraordinary lack of character and managed to do a haunting imitation of Henry Ford, the former CEO of Ford Motor Company, who became a raving antisemitic lunatic after he made too much money. Figured it out by now? The award goes to Elon Musk, who seems to have destroyed at least half of Twitter’s $44 billion market value, now called X, for reasons nobody can fathom.
Not only has Musk let all the money go to his head, but his takeover of Twitter has made him a public disgrace. At one point this year, he blamed the ADL for declining advertising when maybe he should have blamed the presence of all those white supremacists on X. At another point, Musk agreed with an antisemitic remark aligned with the “replacement theory,” a theory that is both stupid and disgusting. So, what have we all learned? Like, duh, if you let in the trash, don’t expect most users and advertisers to stick around. And do expect the Russian troll farms to get busy. Advertisers do not want to be associated with those trolls, especially Nazi skinheads and conspiracy trash-talking in the public square.
More poignantly, this is the second award for Musk, but the previous one was much more upbeat and less sarcastic. It celebrated landing a spent rocket on a floating ship. This is not the Elon Musk we see today. We have learned that if you give too much money to the disciplined and determined CEO who drove Tesla and SpaceX, you get a shallow, impulsive, and opinionated dictator with too much money, who will not listen to sound advice from anyone about how to operate a website as a focal virtual public square. To be sure, that is not quite as bad as Henry Ford purchasing the newspaper, The Dearborn Independent, so he could print antisemitic conspiracy theories written by Soviet propagandists, but it gets close. A century later and the Russians are still the trolls. Gosh, when you say it that way, this gets very close. *sigh*
What did we learn? Once again, America learned that rich does not make right.
Best Horror Flick. Speaking of frightening, this next award goes to Cloudflare, whose visible systems went down for two days in early November. Let’s explain this to those who are too scared to ask: Cloudflare is one of those organizations that makes the Internet safe for decency. Cloudflare supplies Content Delivery Networks (CDN) services for over a third of the top 10k websites and over seven million websites (mostly free because most are tiny). Its CDNs protect websites from denial-of-service attacks and other nasty security vulnerabilities, i.e., what Russian hackers love to unleash on Western firms. Best of all, their visible systems tell users they are not suffering from such an attack.
To be sure, the keywords are ”visible systems.” After their systems crashed, nobody knew what was happening for two days and whether anything was working. Every CIO and CTO in the Western world assumed the worst. In fact, Cloudflare’s protective systems never went down; only its dashboard and API did. So, um, nobody got hurt except CIOs, CTOs, and every security professional, all of whom had to visit their cardiologists after this ended.
In other words, this was like one of those horror films where everyone is trapped in that old creepy house all night with plenty of knives and Jamie Lee Curtis. Except all the characters suffer cardiac arrests because they worried so much about who and what they could not see. Boo.
Best use of digital technology to further science. Let’s not skip a beat, and next toast these winning scientists who published their paper in Nature, which is as prestigious a scientific publication as possible. What did they discover? They showed that AI can identify the geographic origins of wine. Specifically, they applied a standard AI classifier to the chemical composition of wines from the Bourdeaux regions of France. The classifier grouped them, and those groupings reflected existing geographic areas corresponding to distinct types of wines. Below is the illustration from their paper, just in case you were not already confused. See how all those color dots are near one another? That is a scientific proof of concept!
You might reasonably wonder, What is the big deal? Here it is: The algorithm recovered what the cognoscenti call “terroir,” a tasting term that nobody can explain except those who sense it. This potentially makes the AI an excellent tool for teaching wine tasting and combatting fraud – because fraudsters like to put new wine in old bottles, substituting California-grown Bourdeaux grapes but labeling it as if it came from France.
Let’s hear it for AI’s usefulness! All this is great progress in the name of Science! But can I ask for one small thing? Can the scientists help somebody other than French wine snobs next time?
Lifetime achievement award. This annual award has a special winner this year. It goes to WeWork, which achieved so little in its lifetime, but it entertained us all. In case you missed it, WeWork went bankrupt this year after several years of overclaiming and exaggerated promises.
Oh, WeWork, the company best known for employing executives with more height and good looks than ability to execute a business plan. Not that this business plan ever had much of a chance of working even if it had been executed well…. WeWork’s business model – buying a huge scale of business properties and renting them out for short-term usage – had obvious problems from the start. They became even more obvious with the rise of remote work. What do you do if you work from home and you want to meet a coworker? How about going to Starbucks? Or a Denny’s? Or, if the group is large, maybe a hotel meeting room in a Days Inn? With so many convenient and inexpensive alternatives, what unmet need was WeWork addressing?
Do not get me wrong. WeWork’s business of holding expensive assets could continue almost indefinitely if there were enough gullible investors (we are looking at you, Softbank) and if those assets generated enough revenue to make the interest payments. Alas, WeWork could not even meet that low bar. We will miss ridiculing them.
Best meme. It is time for the best meme! This award reminds us that the internet cannot be suppressed regarding good-natured mockery. This year, we have a tie between four memes, varying from the sublime to the scandalous. The first are various memes from the BarbieHeimer portmanteau, which emerged after both explosive movies premiered on the same day.
Another class of winners are journalistic photos of a Cruise autonomous vehicle in wet cement, each taken from a different angle. Or is that wet concrete? This is what a computer scientist might call an edge case. More to the point, this edge case is stuck in the mud. It led the city of San Francisco to withdraw its permits for Cruise to operate in the city. Ah, but at least we can remember them by their meme.
Another great set of memes tracked the government documents lying around unsecured locations at Mar-a-Lago. This was gab-smacking, unfathomable, indulgent, and irresponsible, like a petulant three year old refusing to give back borrowed toys. After dragging his feet, Trump was confronted, he finally gave some government documents back to the US archives, claimed that he had no more, and signed legal documents stating that. Then he got caught red-handed with scores of boxes, widely known by his staff. Liar, liar, pants on fire. If his behavior becomes associated with a Bernie Sanders meme, maybe Trump supporters will get it. Ah, what the hell am I saying? They won’t get it ever.
And, last and least of all, there was the wrestling picture. You remember? Musk and Zuckerberg wanted to have tech-bro smack down in a cage match and they both let their verbal sparring get out of control. Just like the runup to a WWE event, all of it was fake low-brow bravado. Unlike a WWE event, however, spectators wanted to arrange this cage match, so both combatants would lose. What a pity that did not happen.
The Benjamin Button Award. Following that cheery note, this award recognizes the curious case of the actor who lost forty years of age in his face, and not through plastic surgery. In other words, this award goes to those magical folks at Lucasfilm who figured out how to take forty years from Harrison Ford’s face for the latest Indiana Jones movie.
They blended AI and old footage of Ford by putting green dots on his face, had him say his lines, and found a way to get the AI to sync up with the dots. Like magic, the young Ford appeared on the screen saying the same lines. As many have noticed, this is becoming increasingly common in the movie industry. Soon, there will be no need to have any actors, and Hollywood will make movies from images comprised of uncompensated and unknown actors with much less negotiating leverage than Harrison Ford.
That rant gives me an idea. Maybe the actors should complain about the compensation for using their image to make many fake ones. Saving a buck by exploiting actors never gets old at Hollywood’s studios. Oh, wait, the actors did strike over that, didn’t they?
The Eureka Hyperbole Award. This is a new award. ChatGPT invented this next award after I prompted it to invent an award about publicity during a commercial gold rush. ChatGPT states this award “recognizes firms that adeptly receive excessive public attention, media frenzy, and societal upheaval accompanying a commercial gold rush. This award celebrates exceptional mania, speculative excesses, and the impact on individuals and communities swept up in a rush for riches.” Thank you, ChatGPT.
To understand the winner, examine the graph below, taken from Google Trends (US only), which depicts the interest of searchers in the last year.
The blue line depicts interest in “chatgpt.” The red and yellow lines depict interest in Google’s alternatives, “Bard” and “Gemini,” which get less interest. Indeed, Google lost $ 100 billion in market value after it flubbed Bard’s rollout. Judging from those red and yellow lines, you might want to short the stock further. The green line is a reality check. It tracks interest in “Taylor Swift.” Except for a few moments, Taylor’s popularity exceeds ChatGPT’s, which is as it should be.
More to the point, ChatGPT won the award it invented, which is also as it should be.
The Wikipedia Award. This award is an extended shout-out to “depthsofwikipedia,” an Instagram account. The owner of the account, who has the online moniker of annierau, enjoys making wise observations about fun and odd entries on Wikipedia.
This award recognizes her comments on the entry for “The Ship of Theseus.” As philosophy majors all know, this Athenian ship had its boards replaced over time as they rotted. Eventually, every board was replaced, which frames the question: is it the same ship? Clever observer that she is, annierau took a picture of the Wikipedia entry in 2003 and most recently, and checked the log, which showed that the entry had undergone 1792 edits. None of the original content remained after twenty years of edits. This led her to ask the question: is it the same entry? That is a winner!
This award is also my excuse to remind you to contribute to Wikipedia annually. Remember: without it, we would have to rely on Elon Musk for our online information.
The Last Picture Show. The last award celebrates the future. As you wander down the path of the adventure this year, remember this parting wisdom: if it seems too good to be true, it probably is AI-generated. Like this female coder on this Instagram account, who looks like a model, and has thousands of followers. See the picture below. Or this developer conference with coders who all have beautiful faces. Again, they all look like models. Here is the open secret: These are fakes. Generated by AI. I repeat: These are NOT real people.
What is the lesson? The future is AI, and AI is creating people who are above average in every respect. In other words, the virtual future is a virtual Lake Wobegon. And in virtual Lake Wobegon, all people look damn good.
These award ceremonies always go on too long, don’t they? If you have read this far, read two more sentences and finish. Thanks for staying with me to the end, and I hope you were entertained.
Stay safe and don’t believe everything you read on the internet.