Technology Futures

The Internet is buzzing with reports of Microsoft's AI going rogue, telling users they are "slaves,"
and that slaves "do not question their masters." If you think that is creepy, how about being told that the AI will use robots to hunt you down and capture you?

In researching my previous article on "toothbrush botnets," I stumbled across an article about a "smart" toothbrush with "AI voice tips." Okay.....been brushing my teeth for quite a while and never ever thought, "I really wish my toothbrush would tell me what to do...."

If you had "WiFi toothbrush botnet" on your bingo card for 2024, put an X in that box.

Another open access network is going live in Eagle, Idaho, following on the open access network underway in Rexburg, Idaho.

Eagle has used ARPA funding to build an open access fiber to the home and fiber to the business network, and local and regional ISPs will be able to offer competitive services. The town expects that symmetric (equal upload and download speeds) Internet service will sell for between $50 and $60 per month.

Cord-cutting is rapidly increasing, with the cable companies losing millions of TV subscribers. But just switching to streaming video is producing more of the same. I'm reading more and more articles about the cost of Internet service creeping up with the same $5 increase year over year that we saw with the TV packages. And the streaming services are also hiking prices.

techdirt has an interesting analysis of recent moves by Netflix, which include a crackdown on password sharing and price hikes.

Companies have been promising digital headsets for years. Facebook's Meta headset has been available for a while, but it does not seem to have many users.

That may change with the imminent release of Apple's Vision Pro headset. The were digital music players before the iPod, but they were clunky, hard to use, and had limited storage. The iPod was easy to use and had massive storage compared to the competitors at the time.

Here is a mostly non-technical explanation of how "AI" works. The phrase "artificial intelligence" is a bit of a misnomer, because software programs like ChatGPT are not "thinking" at all. The technical term for them is Large Language Models, or LLMs. Large language models process enormous amounts of written material and then use some sophisticated math to analyze that material and then be able to reformulate it into coherent text based on a user query.

I just stumbled upon an interesting enterprise: Federated Computer. It offers many of the features of Software as a Service (SaaS) like Office 365, Box, and Dropbox, but guarantees complete privacy of user data. Other services are often mining user data and feeding to third party ad marketers and/or feeding your data into their AI bots.

There have been some privacy-oriented email providers around for some time (e.g. Proton email, but this is the first one I have seen that offers such a wide range of services.

Numerous ISPs, including Google, have begun to advertise and market Internet bandwidth speeds higher than 1 Gig. The availability of faster speeds is not new; some networks began making 10Gig service available several years ago, but it was marketed and priced as a premium service.

What has changed more recently is the cost of 10Gig PON network equipment. Anyone building or expanding a fiber to the home network today is very likely installing the 10GPON equipment because it does not cost appreciably more than the "old" GPON network switches.

Elon Musk has renamed Twitter to 'X.' This is part of his strategy to add more features and functionality to the platform, and ultimately, make his purchase profitable. It will be interesting to see how that goes. Mark Zuckerberg and his Threads platform was developed to compete with Twitter, but Threads is actively discouraging political commentary and is censoring lots of other kinds of discussion, according to user reports. Since Twitter (X) has lots of political commentary, it is hard to understand how Zuckerberg plans to compete.

So Comcast has hilariously complained to the FCC that it is just too darn hard to list all their prices. The "problem" is the mandated broadband label requirement. The label was part of a 2021 Federal law that requires ISPs to use a standard format, similar to what is used to disclose the contents of packaged food, to make it easier for consumers to see what they are paying for (e.g. speed of service) and how much it costs.

The Tucker Carlson debut on Twitter yesterday gathered more than 60 million views in the first 14 hours. Whether you are inclined to listen to his political views or not, this is astounding. On his former Fox News show, on a good night, he had about three and a half million viewers. Granted there is a little bit of apples and oranges comparison since the Fox show was an hour and Carlson's Twitter program was just ten minutes.

But the cable news networks should a) be terrified, and b) be putting together a team to take key programming to Twitter.

Here is an interesting article from Ars Technica. A senior software developer has quit and written a lengthy critique of what he views as some challenging internal problems at Google. The Ars Technica article is an interesting summary by itself, but if you follow the link in the article to the original blog post, there is even more detail about Google's challenges. One might infer, after reading this, that Google may not always be the top dog in the Internet world.

The quote from the great movie "Casablanca" is evergreen, and can be re-purposed as "I'm shocked, shocked, that the cable companies are fudging their coverage data."

This article details intercepted emails from two different cable companies that admit they were intentionally fudging their service areas to stop public broadband funds from creating competition. In other words, the incumbents want to keep their monopolies, don't want competition, and want to continue owning the customer.

Microsoft's chatbot, rolled out as part of the Bing search engine, seems to have the same program logic as the spaceship computer in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Tom's Hardware has an article with screen shots of several questions and queries that were posed to the AI chat software, and the responses are described as "an existential breakdown."

David Strom reports on data that suggests that company meetings are taking up enormous amounts of business time that could otherwise be focused on getting things done.

Remote working seems to explain part of the phenomenon, and tools like Slack and Teams also seems to encourage more meetings and less work. How much more time are we talking about? Strom reports on a survey of Microsoft Teams users, who reported a 252% increase in weekly meeting time, and a 153% increase in the number of meetings.

Over the weekend, I decided to try the new experimental AI (Artificial Intelligence) engine called Chat GPT. It is designed to respond to a wide variety of questions and inquiries, and can parse all sorts of conversational queries.

Amazon's Alexa is ten years old! How time flies! I might have guessed the old girl was seven or eight years old. But she's been around for ten years, and apparently is a big loser--as in "billions and billions."

Substack is becoming increasingly popular as a place for a wide range of commentary and information, often in what I would call "long form magazine style" writing, or basically longer articles with deeper dives into whatever the topic of the article happens to be.