Loathings avertising--with one exception

This article is  for Facebook and my blog onlyonly, because it is too sensitive to run in newspapers.

The topic: My hatred of advertising.

I just can’t help it. It runs in my family.

My grand father tore out all of the full-page ads of the Saturday Evening Post as soon as it arrived in the mail.

My father may have invented the first remote. He took a radio volume knob and attached it by wire to the television in 1951. When an ad came on, he would turn off the sound.

What do their offspring do? I never look at any ads in newspapers or on TV. I scroll past everything online. I record everything on TV, even football games, and fast-forward past all ads. Including the Super Bowl.  I never see that annoying lizard with the British accent on Geico ads. Or the famous football players raving about their beer.

I don’t watch streaming services with ads either. I even fast-forward the credits and  Viking cruise  ads on the PBS shows I record.

If I do look at ads by accident—maybe when fast forward is disabled—I feel like I have just lost three minutes out of my life. If you watched TV a lot in your lifetime, maybe that’s an entire year of being dead?

In most of my career as a writer,, I just hung out with other news people. But when I was a magazine editor, I dealt with the advertising staff all the time. When I told them about my forebears’ loathing of commercials, they were horrified. Who could dislike ads, which fuel the free enterprise economy? By avoiding ads, I was stealing from them, they thought. Surely I realized that my news content was just filler to lure people to see the real content—the pitch for hemorrhoid cream, kitty litter or a drug that could kill you.

So I see their point—but I am still skipping ads.

That said, I make exception: local radio ads on WHLF (95.3) in South Boston, owned by Lakes Media Company.l  I like hearing the colorful local people pitch their wares in a Southern drawl--the mattress company, the appliance dealer, the restaurant and the lawyer looking for car wreck victims. I know some of these people. I have shopped at many of their places of business. I may actually want something they offer.

If I was selling something I would go there. The audience is well targeted, you hear the station all the time in stores, and the rates are cheap.

 

 

Itcing to wrie about AI

In the 17 years since I retired, I have never wished I was back at work. Until now.

At the Kiplinger Letter, I covered the growth of new technologies—from the early years of the internet through personal computers, social media and smart phones. But nothing compares to artificial intelligence, which I think is he biggest advancement since the atomic bomb.

Well, I don’t  have the energy to go back to work, so I am going to share my thoughts here in the style I would have used back then, looking at both the good and the bad, without judgment.

Some of the changes ahead, for better or for worse:

--Personal agents. They will make appointments for you, negotiate with vendors, fill out complex forms, do your taxes, book airline flights and find stuff in your computer that you never could. In fact, Meta is offering most of this now.

--Computer programmers. Someone could say, “Build me a computer that will do this” and no one would have to come up with complex codes.

--Individual tutors. They would take the skills and learning level of children and adults and provide personal instruction, sounding just like a real person.

--AI “doctors.” Already you can upload a test result and get an analysis of what it all means. Soon they will be able to diagnose diseases and recommend treatments and medicines.

--Manufacturing: Robots will handle production schedules, find faulty materials and give out their own instructions. Will they hire and fire too?

--Transportation. They’ll coordinate traffic lights and direct trucks, autos and industrial equipment from afar. Also, water and energy systems. They are aiding air traffic controllers now.

--Arts. Music, literature and art are being mechanically produced already. Will we get an artificial Beethoven, Shakespeare or Michaelangelo?

That’s the good news. Here’s the bad:

--The job market will be thrown into chaos. What will happen to all of those tossed out of work by these machines?  Not just assembly-line workers but the brainy people who program computers, manage banks, supervise factories and—of course, old men who write columns.

--Copyrighted works are out the window. There is no easy way to protect them.

--Too much of the thinking will be left up to machines, making human judgment less needed. The impact will be worst on school children. And what can they aspire to be?

--Cyberterrorism: Think of what an AI hacker could do to damage a traditional network.

--AI agents are already going rogue, defying their masters and cheating right and left. Their human creators are holding back on their plans to let AI design its own next generation of AI for that reason. And there’s no telling what AI could do in the wrong people’s hands.

--So much investment is going into AI now that other financial sectors are being neglected. Are we in a financial  a bubble that will burst? (Personally, I think not.)

--States and localities will limit data centers because they use too much electricity and water. Still, that won’t be enough o slow AI’s growth.

--The federal government is slow to act. It has historically  regulated industries such as aviation, food, medicine, finance, telecommunications  and weapons. But a consensus is building that AI should be slowed down and there will have to be rules. Will that put us at a disadvantage with China? Don’t think so. China’s  AI hasn’t advanced nearly as much as ours.

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Fears of Ai  wiping out civilization seem way overblown to me.

I look at the atomic bomb as the best comparison. In the 1950s we debated its merits, but there was no way to stop it. We thought it would destroy us all, bur 81 years later, here we all are!