AI Boogaloo: The 2024 Election was Irrelevant, Part Deux

The third wave of tech innovation is upon us

Perfecting Equilibrium Volume Three, Issue 27

Back off, boogaloo
Whatcha think you're gonna do?
I gotta flash right from the start

Wake up, meat head
Don't pretend that you are dead
Get yourself up off the cart

Get yourself together now
And give me somethin' tasty
Everything you try to do
You know it sure sounds wasted

Back off, boogaloo
I said, back off, boogaloo

Editor's Note-Breaking Tech news: Tiktok shut down Saturday night after the US Supreme Court ruled against them Friday. ByteDance, the company that owns Tiktok, was facing enormous fines if it did not divest Chinese ownership or shut by Jan. 19 under a law signed into law by Pres. Joe Biden. The company also shut down a similar program called Lemon8, and the CapCut video editing service. If this is news to you it's likely you are not a millennial or a member of Gen Z. Also, that great roar you heard around midnight was those two generations uniting for the first time in their anger at the geriatric politicians who kicked them off Tiktok. The law has a provision for a 90-day stay; President-elect Donald Trump said Saturday he is considering whether to implement this when he takes office Monday afternoon.

The Sunday Reader, Jan 19, 2025

The bipartisan bill, dropped 36 hours before the final vote, was more than 1,500 pages. Three reams of paper were not quite enough to print one copy. We’ll have to pass it to see what’s in it, said one bipartisan congressional wag.

It was a proven strategy; spend weeks jamming legislation with vague and arcane cash and favors, then ram it through before anyone could decipher the details. It had worked time and again over decades because by the time anyone figured out what was in such bills they were already settled law.

Unfortunately for our esteemed congresscritters, those decades are history, and we have now entered the third great storm of information technology innovation, when new hardware and software converge to unleash legions of nerds creating things that are entirely new. Large Language Models are not intelligent, artificial or otherwise. But nerds are busy chaining LLMs together into entirely new types of information tools. And digesting reams of bureaucratic speak into neat summaries accompanied by bulleted high points is right up their alley.

That meant the old winning game plan was now a loser. It took months for the team of Donald Barlett and James Steele to identify the company founded on a certain date in a single location that was exempted from a tax bill. Their series and subsequent 1992 book, America: What Went Wrong, won a Pulitzer. Long after that bill was law, and that company reaped the riches of that tax break.

Decades later, California passed a law raising the minimum wage for restaurant workers to $20 an hour. But not all restaurant workers got that raise. In yet another vague but oddly specific reference, restaurants that operated a bakery that "produces" and sells "bread" as a stand-alone menu item as of September 15, 2023, and continue to do so are exempt from the new law.

When questions arose whether that was a favor for California Gov. Gavin Newsome’s megadollar donor who owned dozens of Panera restaurants, it turned out that the groups negotiating the legislation had signed a confidentiality agreement.

Most famously, of course, then-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi said We’ll have to pass it to see what’s in it about The Affordable Care Act, AKA Obamacare.

So it’s no surprise that there was a bipartisan consensus last month that the 1,500-plus page bill would sail right through the House and the Senate. After all, it was a bill authorizing critical spending to prevent a government shutdown. Who was going to be able to read all that in 36 hours, never mind decipher it?

Hold my Mountain Dew Baja Blast, said a legion of nerds, who immediately began feeding the bill into ChatGPT and Grok, and asking the AIs to summarize and analyze.

Within minutes news of a lot of non-essential spending in the bill was flashing across social media:

• Congress was voting itself a raise

• A State Department agency that was supposedly shuttered for suppressing American social media suddenly had a new budget and new life

• $8 billion for a new Washington DC football stadium

• Congress exempted itself and its staff from Obamacare

Within 24 hours the bill was dead. A replacement bill was passed in time to avert the shutdown; it had shed 1,400 of those 1,500 pages.

Now I have been accused of being a great big troll when it comes to headline writing. To which I reply: What’s your point? A headline is supposed to get you to read the story. That’s its job. And until I reach the heights of Headless Body Found in Topless Bar, I intend to keep striving higher.

So of course when I wrote the headline The 2024 Election is Irrelevant I was trying to provoke everyone into reading. But note carefully what I wrote: I said the election was irrelevant. I meant, and I maintain, that the issues debated in that campaign are not the issues we will face for the next four years.

December’s congressional collapse is proof of that.

We are entering the third great storm of information technology innovation, when new hardware and software converge to unleash legions of nerves creating things that are entirely new.

The first storm erupted in the 1980s with the arrival of standardized personal computers running MS-DOS. Suddenly programmers could focus on creating software that was useful for users, rather than spending all their time trying to talk to the metal on dozens of incompatible computer systems.

Software flowered over the next decade: WordPerfect. Lotus 123. dBase. Photoshop. Squadrons of hardware companies leapfrogged each other with faster and more powerful machinery: Northgate. Gateway. Alienware.

Then the industry matured, and consolidated. Microsoft bought all the business software companies and folded their products into Office. Adobe bought all the creative software companies and folded their products into Creative Cloud. And Dell and Hewlett-Packard bought all the hardware companies. And things settled down into business as usual, with the tech industry no more exciting than patio furniture companies.

But while Microsoft was hiring the Rolling Stones to play Start Me Up at the rollout of Windows 95, Marc Andreessen was busy coding Mosaic/Netscape Navigator, the first web browser. Soon Microsoft was struggling to catch up; Bill Gates set a company-wide mandate making web compatibility Job One. Huge new companies grew during the Dot Com boom of the 90s: Yahoo! Indexed the Web. Alta Vista ruled search. And a spunky little used bookseller named Amazon took on Borders and Barnes & Noble.

These storms always break the same way. As soon as it’s apparent a new technology works and has unleashed new possibilities, armies of nerds start creating all sorts of new functionality; literally, anything they can imagine.

Lots of these ideas will die. Some are just…well, the technical term is “Nutso.” Lots are simply too early. It was possible to imagine a metaverse in the 1980s and 1990s – you can read the proof in William Gibson’s Neuromancer, Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, and Melissa Scott’s Night Sky Mine. Building a metaverse, however, requires at least today’s always-on broadband networking, not the achingly slow dial-up connections of that time.

Online grocer Webvan’s 2001 bankruptcy was held up as the worst of the crazy investments that turned the 90s Dot Com boom into the turn-of-the-century Dot Bomb bust.

A decade and a half after Webvan’s demise Amazon bought Whole Foods.

It’s instructive to look back at how these earlier innovation storms developed to understand the one enveloping us now. For example, one of the most important programs to buy when you got a PC back in the 1980s was a spell checker like WordCheck.

Why was spellcheck a separate program? Innovation is messy that way. And you have to look forward from their starting point to see how it happened.

The cutting-edge composition tool before word processors was the IBM Selectronic typewriter. It was fast, had a great keyboard, and a huge tech innovation: a built-in correction key that allowed you to back over a typo and white it out.

So word processors that not only allowed you to correct anything you typed anywhere in a document, but move words and paragraphs around without physically cutting the paper and pasting the words elsewhere – yes, that’s why Cut and Paste are called Cut and Paste – was a huge leap, and nerds focused on improvements. A typewriter only has one typeface; why shouldn’t a word processor have infinite fonts?

Other nerds, meanwhile, found other problems to solve. Comic Sans is boss and all, but I littterally literaly lit would actually find it a lot more useful to be able to correctly spell “literally.”

Eventually the big fish eat the small fish and become an all-in-one solution for their use case. So the word processors bought up the spell checkers and font libraries and grammar checkers and included them. And then Office gobbled them up, too.

Fortunately for us, we’re in those early days fun times when the improbable and unimaginable are suddenly real and ready to try.

It’s early days, so nerds are doing what they love best: building tools and tool kits. The breathless press coverage has gone to chatbots like ChatGPT and Grok, and disasters such as Google’s Bard and its diverse Nazi hallucinations, which generated so much bad publicity that they renamed it to Gemni.

While the media followed the big companies and their chatbots, the nerd legions have been busy building infrastructure around LLMs:

• RAGs: Retrieval-augmented generation connects task-specific database – say, a newspaper’s archives – for search and retrieval by LLMs, generating highly accurate results

• Workflows: A rigid structure with highly defined steps, able to call external tools such as codecs to generate audio and video

• Agents: Allow LLMs to choose between workflows. For example, one agent can search the newspaper archive RAG workflow for background; a second can output that background through a summary text generation workflow; while a third calls a video codec to produce B-Roll video of that background.

Next week we’ll do a deep dive into how this all works, and the possibilities that are being unleashed. In the meantime, let us end where we began, in Washington DC where politicians had their eyes firmly set on the 20^th Century.

As the clock ticked down on the Tiktok ban, a new app claimed the number one position in both the Apple and Android app stores. Americans responded to politicians banning Tiktok because China might be spying on them by downloading the straight up Chinese app RedNote. Which is also known by its Chinese name Xiaohongshu. Which can also be translated to “Little Red Book.” As in Mao’s Little Red Book.

The waning days of the Biden administration, meanwhile, saw the usual hints, allegations and things left unsaid. The White House announced that the next two Gerald R. Ford-class nuclear-powered aircraft carriers will be named for two former presidents: Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.

No mention of President Barrack Obama, who was said to feel slighted by the oversight from his former vice president.

While politicians squabbled over names for 20^th Century warships, here in the 21^st Century the Houthis and their drone swarms still control the Red Sea, which NATO navies fear to enter.