Apple's Value; An Expert on the Dodo and Can Artificial Intelligence Write TV Scripts?
May 15, 2023 Volume 4 # 3
The Power of Apple
The market value of Apple’s stock dwarfs the total value of major world stock markets.
The Toronto Stock Market and Venture Exchange have a combined market cap of C$27-billion or about US$20-billlion. The Australian Exchange has a market cap of about US$1.5-billion.
Ships Sail to Where There are People and Money
There isn’t much traffic around the southern tip of South America, tempestuous Cape Horn. I just read a book called The Wager about a the crew of a British Man of War shipwrecked in 1742 after being torn to pieces rounding Cape Horn. The Panama Canal solves that problem. Lots of shipping goes around South Africa.
You will notice that in spite of some successful attempts there isn’t much traffic in the Northwest Passage through Canada’s Arctic islands. The route over the top of Russia is much travelled. It’s easier and Russia has nuclear powered icebreakers.
Electric Vehicles Really Do Cut Oil Consumption
The amazing thing for me is that the big savings are coming in two and three wheeled bikes and motorized tricycle-taxis that so pollute Asian cities. The old ones, banned in Bangkok, were two-cycle engines— like old lawn mowers— where you add oil to the gasoline. They are super polluters.
Really Dumb Ideas
The first is an article in the National Post saying Russia should be kicked out of the United Nations. “Russia is a terrorist nation and its president, Vladimir Putin, has been charged by the International Criminal Court with war crimes. Russia should have been expelled a year ago,” writes Diane Francis.
Spectacularly dumb. Better to have someone inside the tent than outside. And it is what the old League of Nations did to Germany in the 1930s, though Hitler probably wanted out so he could re-arm. On top of it all, Russia is one of the powerhouses at the UN: it has a veto. It would be impossible to kick it out. Who to kick out next? China? There are many countries in the UN that we might not like.
Second dumb idea. The CRTC (Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission), the all powerful media regulator, is musing banning Fox News from Canadian cable TV.
People who don’t like it are complaining. I don’t watch Fox News, but some good friends of mine do. How can we be afraid of ideas we don’t like? The CRTC already banned a Russian news channel from Canadian cable. Dumb. Wouldn’t it be better to know what official Russia is thinking? People can make up their own minds. When I was a young teenager my friend Philip Jacobs and I used to tune in to Radio Moscow. The propaganda was so heavy we used to laugh at it. Spread the love and gift a subscription to Fred Langan Business News to a friend.
The Remnants Of Empires
The True British Eccentric
The Daily Telegraph writes the best obituaries in the English language. I would say that, of course, since it is where I first started writing obits 34 years ago.
Ralfe Whistler, expert on the dodo whose projects included pub tables and litter-pickers – obituary
He was quoted as saying: ‘I wouldn’t say I am an eccentric. But other people around here do, including my own family’.
One picture says a lot.
Whistler with model dodos: ‘It must have been a very endearing bird, but its story is really rather tragic’
Along with his interest in the extinct Dodo, Whistler invented tables for pubs, now in wide use, and medical aids for Thalidomide children. There was a Canadian connection: he married Jane McCarthy from Montreal, who he met at Cambridge. He worked in Winnipeg for the Hudson’s Bay Company, was a tax collector in the Yukon and had a spell as cowboy on the Fairholme Ranch then owned by Conrad O’Brien-ffrench ,the 2nd Marquis de Castelhomond aa former member of the Royal North-West Mounted Police in Saskatchewan, and one of the inspirations for Ian Fleming’s James Bond.
Whistler’s great -grandchildren called him Dodo because it was easier to say than Grandpa.
Don’t know if non-subscribers can open this, but click here anyway.
London Tube 1900
Marble Arch. The platform floors are wood. Lots of milk ads.
Interesting Food Maps from Brilliant Maps
There are more than 60 breeds of sheep from England, Scotland and Wales, from the meaty little Southdown…
…to the large black-faced Suffolk.
This map shows the density of where the sheep are. England’s big medieval trade was shipping wool to Europe. It made many people rich, including the ancestors of Earl Spencer, Princess Diana’s brother.
French famers are a bolshie lot. Here is a map of what is grown where. Red is wine.
And this is someone’s idea of disgusting food. I can’t totally agree. I think Haggis trumps deep fried pizza in Scotland. And I rather like frog’s legs.
Essay of the Week
Can Artificial Intelligence Write Movie and TV Scripts?
The world is buzzing with talk of chatbots, the technology designed to think and sound like a human and perform tasks such as writing. The friendly-sounding name of chat masks its darker side; for example, it allows students to cheat and write essays for them. Screen writers worry about how long it might be before this engine driven by Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) starts writing scripts.
One of the most successful screenwriters in Canada says she thinks a powerful computer can think, but that it doesn't have an imagination.
"If you don't have imagination, you don't have art," says Rebecca Schechter, who has written many TV series and was the showrunner on Little Mosque on the Prairie.
A.I.-generated writing "seems to be convincing, but chatbots will never do the really creative work that only humans can do," says Schechter, who was president of the Writers Guild for six years and currently teaches screenwriting at York University. Though there are stories of students using chatbots to write essays, she hasn’t come across any herself.
"I seriously doubt my students are doing this. I don't know how you could get a chatbot to write original screenplays, and if they could, the students would suffer because they are not learning the craft,” says Schechter.
Performers also worry about chatbots, perhaps more than writers do. The same high-powered computer programs can mimic voices, perhaps threatening to put voice-over artists out of work.
One area where computer-generated voices might work is in animation and games.
"For decades, actors have been told that robots would soon be replacing us," says Thor Bishopric, an actor and video game director speaking from an animation studio in Montreal. "We've never really taken it seriously. But now, with computing advancing by orders of magnitude, the threat is becoming real."
It all comes down to computing power. The smartphone you carry in your pocket is much more powerful than the fastest supercomputers of 1985. The iPhone 12 is 5,000 times faster than the Cray-2 supercomputer of that era and 900 million times faster than the computer that sent Apollo 11 to the moon in 1969. The iPhone 12 weighs 5.78 ounces and takes up 1.6 square inches; the Cray-2 supercomputer weighed 5,500 pounds and took up 16 square feet
Source: PC Magazine
Computer-generated voices can already mimic just about anything. "They can create a version of Tom Hanks reading Shakespeare," says actor and screenwriter Sugith Varughese.
But human actors have feelings and can replicate emotions that require an intelligence that is more nuanced than anything artificially produced.
"There's a certain magic in a human performance that is very hard, if not impossible, to program for. Computers will soon be able to flawlessly generate human-like voices and deliver lines of dialogue," says Bishopric. "But the art of the human actor has less to do with speaking text and more to do with subtext. Well-written characters almost never say what they actually mean. Getting a computer to figure that out will require a truly artful algorithm."
There are many uses for Artificial Intelligence and writing. It can't be dismissed.
"Despite concerns, A.I. assistants seem here to stay," writes New York Times lead consumer technology writer Brian X. Chen. "Many A.I. experts and computer scientists agree that these tools can provide a major perk that does no harm: editing our writing."
In fact, screenwriters in the United States recently declared a kind of truce on the chat front, according to Variety Magazine. The Writers Guild of America has proposed allowing writers to use Artificial Intelligence to help write scripts, as long as those writers are credited and receive residuals.
This certainly changes the landscape but the real question remains – can A.I. create original art?
"I don't think so," says Schechter, adding, "A.I. will never do real creative work."