INTERESTING TIMES?

Dick Pountain /Idealog 369/ 07 Apr 2025 12:06 

Some 26 years ago (May 1999/ Idealog 58) I opened this column thus: “It's said there's an ancient Chinese curse, "May you live in interesting times!" Actually it's been said by me at least twice before….”  

Well, it looks time to trot it out for the fourth time, though nowadays I can check its truth using my old friend ChatGPT: “No record of this phrase (or anything close to it) exists in classical Chinese Literature: the earliest known attribution is from British sources in the 20th Century, a 1936 speech by Sir Austen Chamberlain (brother of Neville) who claimed to have heard it as a Chinese curse but it seems more like a Western invention made to sound exotic or wise.”  So, I’ve been peddling fake news for a quarter of a century, but I don’t feel too guilty as everyone seems to be doing it. 

The financial turmoil created by President Trump’s tariff barrage purports to be against a whole world ripping off the USA through unfair trade, but we all know it’s really about China. Many of us believe Trump has made a monumental blunder that will ultimately help China to economic dominance: The Wall Street Journal expressed it thus “What a fabulous change in fortunes for the Chinese leader. Mr. Trump has taken an ax to the economic cords that were binding the rest of the world into an economic and strategic bloc to rival Beijing – and at precisely the moment many countries finally were starting to re-evaluate their economic relationships with China.” 

I’ve covered semiconductor fab, Taiwan invasions and DeepSeek in recent columns so let’s not go there again, except to guess that Trump’s shenanigans could cause interest rate, futures and bond market chaos that may bring down the intricate house-of-cards finance of the AI bubble corporations (already under siege from IP lawyers). Instead I’d rather talk about how the ‘interesting’ times are affecting my own everyday activities. 

For many years my online presence, apart from my own website, consisted of Flickr for posting photos and Facebook for chatting/arguing/posing with friends. No longer, as my online self has been shattered into a dozen fragments, none of which have quite the same scope or satisfaction as before. Facebook started to deteriorate for me a couple of years ago as old friends left and un-asked-for content increased, but since Zuck did a Musk on it by removing moderation it’s becoming intolerable, and as a result I’ve begun to work on building a following on both BlueSky and SubStack. 

BlueSky is full of left-leaning refugees from the steaming pit that X has become: lots of excellent, sympa content, in fact too much to read it all and unanimous enough to risk boredom. I joined SubStack years ago hoping to get paid for some of my stuff but that didn’t work out so I forgot it until now, when it appears to be changing into something different. It’s becoming a social platform to rival Facebook, an alternative refuge for X-iters and I actually find it more interesting than BlueSky, but with one huge reservation - its structure and user interface remain totally baffling. Is it a mailing list or a website, a forum or… what?  Do I add posts or notes, and where will the comments arrive? My efforts in computer-generated music are now scattered among a host of platforms including SoundCloud, YouTube, NoisePit, BandCamp and GrungeDump (I may have invented one of those) and it remains stubbornly antiviral on all of them. YouTube is still my main source of entertainment, from genial luthiers to hilarious espresso gurus, Rick Beato’s music interviews to Jon Stewart’s Weekly Show. I even watch some movies there cheaper than other paid platforms (recently found ‘Lonesome Dove’ for free). 

The ‘interestingness’ seems to be spreading from online matters to offline. In recent months my Chromebook finally ran out of support (bought a new Asus CX340, cheap, way faster and nicer). BT announced that it was killing off my analog landline early, meaning a new hub, and that my mobile account should be moved to EE. While trying to surf such unwelcome disruptions several websites started playing up – I became adept at navigating poorly-implemented two-factor authentication schemes that trap you into endless loops of passcode tennis, and discovered a new game called ‘hunt the human’ while traversing the maze of AI chatbots that firms now erect in the name of Help…

Shall I end on a cheerful note, that things can only get better? It’s getting ever harder to believe that. Once the DOGE-days are over, assuming some kind of sanity is restored, then the craven way the big Silicon Valley corporations crowded onto Trump’s rattling gravy-train will haunt and taint them for years to come. 

[ Dick Pountain pronounces DOGE as ‘doggie’, like that creepy Shiba Inu dog meme] 

 

KIND OF BLUE(TOOTH)

Dick Pountain /Idealog 368/ 05 Mar 2025 04:38

I’m literally a one-man-band, by which I mean that I make music using an assembly of electro-acoustic gadgets that permit me to do without the collaboration of other human musicians. (I hasten to add that those gadgets do not include drums or cymbals strapped to my legs, like the blokes who used to entertain cinema and theatre queues). 

I love music, from a wide range of genres, and I’m picky about quality reproduction for other peoples’ music I enjoy. I’m far from being a hi-fi nut (and indeed quite sceptical of the excesses they indulge in) but I do run a nice-sounding system based around a Fosi Class D amplifier connected to vintage British speakers, which sucks in music via wire from a vinyl turntable or CD player, and via Bluetooth from my Chromebook, Samsung tablet and smartphone. (I can also listen to those via Bluetooth headphones and earbuds). It would be handy to incorporate the sound from my Panasonic smart TV via Bluetooth too, rather than SPDIF, but the brute refused to pair with my amp so I bought a tiny cheap Bluetooth sender/receiver from Amazon and plugged that into the set’s headphone socket. It worked fine but the cursed TV then hogged the Bluetooth and had to be unpaired before any other source could use  it, so I’ve learned to live with its (actually quite acceptable) Dolby sounds, and so now had a Bluetooth dongle to spare.

I tried plugging this into my various electric guitars via an adapter, to play them wirelessly: it works but is totally unusable due to latency. Meanwhile in another corner of my music room stands the very analog, one-man-band conglomeration through which I play those guitars: two acoustic, two electric, one bass switched into a small Marshall amplifier that’s encrusted with five effects pedals and a small Zoom drum machine. This is all connected via standard ¼” jack cables, and It’s only taken barely 15 years to arrive at a satisfactory topology, the brainstem of which is a 3-channel passive audio mixer, barely bigger than a Yorkie Bar, which the late-lamented Maplin emporia used to flog for £20 (I bought two). One channel is taken up by the drum machine, a second one by the multi-effects box which the other instruments go through, so one channel remained empty and it was simply irresistible to plug in the Bluetooth dongle. Paired with my Samsung tablet, a whole new world opened up... 

Among the pedals is an Akai Headrush echo/looper I bought 20 years ago after seeing KT Tunstall play one on the telly – this lets me store and replay short clips of music and overdub them with more layers. By logging on to Spotify on the Samsung I can play any tune and store a chunk of it into the Headrush to play over and add to – great fun with slices of Bill Frisell or Julian Lage, or Ron Carter bass riffs. I also have Volcanic Mobile’s MIDI Sequencer for creating backing clips using its piano or brass sounds, and also my own Algorhythmics programmatic system (which I’ve described here before). I can compose parts using BandLab, a popular free Android DAW, with sampled instruments other than guitars. In fact any software that can make a noise on my tablet, phone or Chromebook can now be routed into my guitar amp and chunks saved and looped to play over – which even includes my various voice synths and text-to-speech readers, or mic recordings.

However what I really wanted was to create original soundscapes for use as backdrops to improvise over, an ability that I discovered quite by chance in Pegboard (https://semitune.com/pegboard/). Its publishers Semitune describe this app as “an advanced mobile polyphonic wavetable synthesizer with a virtual analog filter, 12 standard modules and 6 effects modules.” It’s driven by two separate wavetable oscillators that you can customise via a graphic interface in which you drag envelope shapes and make them evolve over time in complex ways for really rich sounds. Play them back via an onscreen keyboard, either piano-style or an array of accordion-style touch buttons whose layout you can alter to represent a chosen scale or mode. Pegboard isn’t a sequencer so you can’t save whole tunes, just the sounds themselves, but that’s perfect for my purpose, to play short phrases into my looper (it can also work as a MIDI controller, a feature I’ve yet to master).Pegboard is free to play with but you must upgrade to Pro for £18.99 to save sounds, which I very quickly did. Think of my guitar as a pen and Pegboard sounds as washes I draw over to make sound pictures for my one-man band’s audience of one…

[You can see Dick Pountain’s one-man-band rig at https://www.facebook.com/share/v/15xD1dS1UD/ ]

 

  

DEEPCHEEK?

Dick Pountain /Idealog 367/ 06 Feb 2025 09:12

I used to think that a monthly column was a fairly relaxed schedule compared to, say, a daily newspaper, but no longer. I’d decided to do this one about how China upset the USA by doing AI on the cheap, but now every ten minutes I feel a need to check online for whatever new geopolitical atrocity has just overshadowed that. Nevertheless I’ll start with a nod to the original plan, how China pulled down the knickers of the US AI bubbleheads.  

I won’t dive deep into tech details of how Deepseek succeeded in doing what ChatGPT does for a fraction of the price, or how it rocketed to the top of Apple’s mobile-app store hit parade, nor how it did so by parasitising the US AI bros’ own data in just the same morally and legally unsavoury way they got it from us in the first place. No, instead I’d prefer to harp on about something I’ve been harping on about for at least 20 years, namely how the whole AI industry deludes itself because, being lead by sci-fi-addled nerds (one of whom now appears to be the de facto POTUS), it has a severely limited grasp of biology and philosophy.

Two columns ago I forcefully expressed my opinion of OpenAI’s plans for continued expansion in order to achieve AGI (Artificial General Intelligence), which they claim would confer human-level reasoning. One objection was its colossal, antisocial, power requirements, but my real objection is that I don’t believe AGI is even achievable by simply crunching more data. That’s for reasons of biology I’ve explored here many times, namely that though human intelligence expresses itself through language – by manipulating symbols which is all any computer can do – that’s neither its only nor its most important source. 

We’re animals who have been equipped by evolution to succeed at living in a physical world, achieved with the help of many (more than five) senses to sample what’s going on around us. We build, continuously update and maintain a mental model of that world. We have needs – including to eat, drink, reproduce and avoid predators – which are intimately entwined into that model. We’re born with some built-in knowledge about gravity, upness and downness, light and shade, convexity and concavity, that control the model in ways of which we’re not conscious, but which deeply affect our symbolic processing of that world. We’re by no means just ‘rational’. AI has learned how to pretend to be intelligent only by plundering our symbolic representations of the world, texts and pictures, but knows nothing, and can know nothing, of our embodied experience. Sure, it could build imitations of emotions and needs, but they’d just be more static representations, not extracted from the real world by living in it.  

Historically computers arrived thanks to advances first in mathematics, and then electronic engineering, so it’s hardly surprising that the intellectual atmosphere in which they’re embedded is more influenced by science fiction than by philosophy, anthropology or cognitive psychology. It may well be too late now for AI practitioners to go back and do the necessary reading, since they’ve reached a level of megalomania that convinces them they already know it all, and have just achieved power over the world’s most powerful nation to prove it. 

Were I to be asked to set the tech bros some homework I’d recommend first of all my favourite philosopher George Santayana and his theory of ‘animal faith’, which enables us to navigate life’s uncertainties by deploying our intrinsic knowledge and not ‘overthinking’. That leads directly into the more modern version by Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman and his discovery of two modes of thought, the fast, imprecise-but-often-good-enough one, and the slow symbolic one which is all that computers can mimic. Then I’d suggest perhaps George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s ‘Metaphors We Live By’ which explores the actual content of our intrinsic embodied knowledge and how it modulates our language. Oddly enough, smartphones are already more embodied than GPTs because they have senses (hearing, sight, touch, spatial orientation) and hunger (for charging). Fortunately they can’t yet reproduce.

Having absorbed all that, then perhaps they might dip into Chris Frith’s ‘Making Up The Mind’, the best explanation I’ve read of how the brain creates and updates the mind using fundamentally Bayesian rather than Cartesian mechanisms. That ought to convince them they don’t (or most likely don’t want to) know it all, but the final step would be by far the most difficult, to get them to take democratic politics seriously and divert their megalomaniac schemes toward improving life for the majority of the population rather than a feckless techno-elitist minority. Of course they may prefer to go to Mars, which would provide a rigorous education in embodiment…

[Dick Pountain hopes that Elon doesn’t read his column]