Real hard forks
Hmm… NiemanLab: NPR, the quintessential audio news brand, adapts to a video-first future. Specifically, “NPR … landed Machine Gods, the new video-first podcast from veteran tech journalists Casey Newton and Kevin Roose.”
I subscribed to Casey and Kevin’s old podcast, Hard Fork, and I’ll subscribe to Machine Gods too. But I doubt I’ll watch it—Just like I don’t watch the Netflix feeds of The Ringer podcasts… or much of anything but the road when I’m driving, my tools and plants when I’m gardening, the scenery when I’m walking around, and my espresso machine and its components when I’m making coffee in the morning. Those are places where I do most of my podcast listening. If I’m at my computer or watching my TV, there are many things I’d rather see than a podcast.
But,,,,, There seems to be a budget of time that people in modern civilization devote to staring at glowing rectangles: some number of hours per day. TV got us into that, starting around 1950. Some of that appetite spread over onto computer screens starting in he 1980s. Smartphones and tablets took some of that over starting in the late ’00s. Now that we have ambient connectivity and rectangles in our pockets, the division of that budget of hours is divided between—
- What we watch for entertainment on TV (mostly on-demand streaming)
- What we watch during work on our computing devices (including news and business-related stuff)
- Gaming and other non-work stuff on our personal rectangles, some during work hours
- What we listen to when we’re doing something else.
NPR has always been in #4. With Machine Gods, it wants to be in #2 as well.
Anyway, three things about this:
- Podcasts are audio. The first time I hear “wherever you see your podcasts,” I’ll be willing to widen podcasting’s definitional scope. Before then, nah.
- If Machine Gods is anything like Hard Fork, it won’t be a news show. It’ll be in the Technology list of Apple Podcasts and in Spotify’s version.
- NPR sees the writing on the Internet’s wall. Over-the-air broadcasting is a dead field walking. I’ve been following that trend for years here, on my Trunkline blog, and in more than 6000 photos on my Flickr site that follows infrastructure. NPR is living off stations now (wholesaling programming that stations retail to listeners), but radio has two giant problems:
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- Over-the-air requires special devices called transmitters, antennas, and receivers. These days, only cars have those, and old-fashioned radio functions are buried deeper and less accessibly in dashboard infotainment systems.
- Apps on phones can act as virtual radios, but how long will apps last? Look downstream at where Apple’s new App Intents will go. Try not to see apps disappearing the same way they do when you say to a phone or a smart speaker, “Play KQED.” This means that stations will become streams for live programs, and podcast sources for other stuff. How will NPR’s revenue model work with all that?
What happens to news is a big issue that it seems (to me, a geezer) only older people care about. NPR has always been a news organization. News needs currency: liveness, or close enough. With “what’s on” fading away, that’s a tough challenge.
Will U say Si to SI?
Last Tuesday, in his speech to the UN, the US president said this:
Hereinafter officially called superintelligence, changing the name, and that the use of the word artificial makes intelligence fake. It makes it sound fake. And it is not fake; it’s actually amazing, but we have to be careful. In fact, it is exactly the opposite of what it purports. From this point forward, all of United States documents, and hopefully the world’s, will be changed to use the much more accurate term Super as opposed to Artificial. So, it’s Superintelligence. In other words, welcome to the new world of Superintelligence — SI. SI; let’s see if that goes. It sounds much better; it is much better and it’s much more accurate. Let’s see if I have any power. Maybe I do, and maybe I don’t. We’re going to find out pretty soon. Superintelligence — every major new technology brings challenges, and Superintelligence is no exception.
“Artificial Intelligence”is itself an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms. There have always been better names. “Machine Intelligence,” for example. But AI is what everyone in the field, and the world, calls it. A Google keyword search for “AI” returns “About 10,140,000,000 results.” A search for “super intelligence” gets “About 2,390,000 results.” I guess that’s a start.
The Onion‘s American Voices gets these three responses to “President Trump directed U.S. agencies to rename AI to “super intelligence” on all official documents, claiming that the term “artificial” made the technology sound fake. What do you think?”:
- “Even the Constitution?”— Anton Pastranak, Systems Analyst
- “Why didn’t AI think of that?”—Will Stratton, Manifest Reader
- “There goes my one last objection to it.”—Cordelia Huestes, Retired Shipwright
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