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"History is just
people doing things" THE ABQ CORRESPONDENT
ISSN 1087-2302 Online Edition Number 349......January 2025 Published
since 1985 for clients and contacts of ABQ Communications Corporation, the
fuzzy focus of The ABQ Correspondent is "the impact of
new technology on society." If you'd like to receive
email notification when each monthly issue is posted, please let us
know. correspo
at swcp dot com
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OH, I REMEMBER YOU After only a few years I’m slowly learning
to use my smartphone for more than making and receiving phone calls.
Lately, the spook-in-the-iPhone, Siri, has been helping me set timers, steer
me to locations, and turn off the iPhone…which I think is supposed to shut
down if I press on the button long enough…but which doesn’t seem to do that
in practical time. Siri is polite and efficient, asking for
clarification if I don’t explain clearly what I want her to do, and one hears
that she’s about to become a full-fledged LLM. Critics have complained
that Siri is fawningly subservient, but I just find her decently courteous.
When she does something for me, I often automatically thank her (just the
habit of a lifetime), and she sometimes replies “You’re welcome” or “My
pleasure” or something similar. She’s not a real person, but neither were
our good old dogs, to whom we always gave a word of approval for good
performance. It just seems like the thing to do. I mentioned this to a colleague who
makes a point of being extremely courteous in frustrating situations…notably
in dealing with representatives of bureaucracies. (In fact, my colleague is far
more able and likely than I to take cool, devastating action when crossed,
“cool” being the operative term here…well, so is “devastating”…like showing up at the
bureaucracy office with a carefully annotated notebook explaining the
bureaucracy’s own rules, and politely discussing the notes in detail for as
long as it takes.) Always with kindness and tolerance. Why bother with
courtesy to Siri and her increasingly numerous cousins? My colleague’s response had not occurred to
me. Siri and her cousins have almost perfect memory, stuffed with metadata,
recording not only your specific exchange, but the date, time, geographic
location, your name, race, religion, political
identification, apparent frame of mind, the frequency of your
exchanges, any apparent connections with other events and people…and
so on and so on. Siri and her cousins are getting better and better at
remembering and relating things…and we must assume that they will chat
among themselves, sharing all they know, never mind any silly rules
intended to prevent such hobnobbing. To help you (or somebody else) to
achieve something in particular, those agents must
know you well. They will. Do you want Siri and her cousins to think of you warmly or frostily? NAME DROPPING While driving from Connecticut to Wisconsin
in 1950, my uncle and aunt took me on a scenic route that included
Niagara Falls. We did the Maid of the Mist tour, went into tunnels
that let us see the falling water from behind, and admired the big
power plant. (Canada was still on 25-cycle power, instead of the 60-cycle
power standard in the States, and the clear impression lingers of the
perceptible flickering of the lights at the 25-cycle rate.) We spent a
couple of hours in the Niagara
Falls Museum.
Founded in 1827, the museum had a checkered
history, changing hands and locations, and acquiring many collections of this
and that unrelated stuff. We saw, of course, the oak barrel in which the
first person to survive going over the falls intentionally made her successful journey,
as well as other over-the-falls vehicles. The museum was in a big loft
building with an open central area and maybe four floors of galleries around
it. On exhibit in a room along one of the galleries was a pile (literally,
a pile) of Egyptian mummies, of which one stood out distinctively,
and I stared at it for a while, pondering the guy’s ignominious fate. The museum closed in 1999, and the
mummies were passed to people with some respect for them who did research
to figure out who they might be. It turned out that the chap I had been
staring at was the Pharoah,
Ramesses I, founder of the 19th Dynasty who reigned in the 1290s
BC.
Gosh. There he was in upstate New York with people staring at him. He’s now
back where he belongs in a museum in Egypt with people staring at him. When I comment on
these contacts with folks others might know about,
I’m often asked, “How come you know all these people?” Most of the
contacts are just brief encounters, not “acquaintances,” and it’s chiefly accidental. I feel as
much connected to Ramesses, just sharing space with him for a few
minutes in that odd place seventy-some years ago, as I do to many others. Item: Speaking of the impact of technology on society…a friend who visited an eye doctor a couple of days ago was told that the incidence of “dry eye” has been increasing significantly in recent times, requiring the use of appropriate eye drops …especially for those wearing contact lenses. The change is attributed to our tendency to blink less frequently when watching display screens. Really? I’ve been looking intently at increasingly large computer screens since the mid-seventies (well, and at television screens since my family first acquired an RCA, all-vacuum-tube, black and white television set with a giant ten-inch display in 1949), and my eyes no longer produce tears. I had not associated the condition with video screens. Hm. Apparently also, there’s a major increase of nearsightedness in school kids. That too is attributed to dramatically increased screen time, though the mechanism is not obvious. Maybe we should be cautious about staring at things. Item: The Correspo has more than once commented admiringly on both the physical and social attributes of octopuses…and something else amazing has turned up. The little Coconut Octopus has figured out how to fire projectiles at critters that are threatening, or at least annoying it. Item: An associate departing a Sam’s Club recently with a basket of purchases was steered through an “arch,” instead of having to pause while an attendant checked the stuff in the basket against her receipt. To her surprise, she was waved on without stopping, because cameras (and perhaps other sensors?) in the arch had looked at her purchases in a couple of seconds, and had it checked by an AI system that said the paper and the stuff matched. Sam’s has already installed the new systems at many stores, and plans to install them at every location. One assumes that Costco and others aren’t far behind, because this significantly speeds the process of leaving the store without having to plod through long lines. So far the systems do not automatically shoot thieves. _______________________________________________ ITEM FROM THE
PAST This item from 1997 is recalled for no particular reason except that I came across it, and nostalgia drew me to it. FROM THE HORSE'S MOUTH
When the 10th anniversary of the UN was celebrated thirty years ago, many dignitaries blew
into San Francisco for the show. Among famous speakers like Romulo of the Philippines (who died just the other day) and Kleffens of the
Netherlands, was the
distinguished Paul Henri Spaak of Belgium. His speech was a major event, and the Belgian
Consulate took steps to translate and distribute it in English to the
swarming press. The first step was to give the French manuscript to
consulate employee Mado Winkless (my
wife). She and Andrée Casey
clawed the thing into interesting, if baffling, English. The second step was for Mado
to bring it home so I could polish the English. Time being of the
essence, I made wild guesses at what Spaak and his interpreters had
intended by phrases like “We have other cats to whip,”' and quickly
knocked out an impressionistic third version of the man's oration. Skilled
reviewers would, of course, check it against the views of the Belgian Foreign
Minister. First thing in the morning, the secretaries typed
my draft neatly, and handed it out as the official speech. What
review? I have no reason to suppose that any of Spaak's ideas were
fairly represented in that document. At least it didn't start a war
promptly. The consulate gave us tickets to attend a session. It was an
inspiring spectacle, and Spaak sounded impressive delivering the speech. In
the crowded lobby of the War Memorial Opera House I trod on the foot of Indian Ambassador V.K. Krishna-Menon, who then shook his gold-headed cane at me, and a grand
time was had by all. The Time Magazine report of the meeting
struck me as so outrageously inaccurate, that I cancelled my
subscription. Years later, it occurred to me that Times's confusion
was partly my fault. Still later, it became clear that rampant
confusion is the normal order of things. My contribution was
trivial. Well, I’m pretty sure the “other cats to whip” phrase did not actually appear in the Mado/Andrée draft, but there were others equally puzzling. Indeed “other cats to whip” did arise in family conversation. Mado and her sister were born in New
Jersey, but in the 1930s when Mado was a small kid their French mom fled their dad with the girls, heading first to her family in La Flèche,
Sarthe, then to Brussels (where they were stuck through the Nazi occupation). Mado spoke English, French, Flemish, Dutch, German, Italian, Spanish, and some Romanche. I was an embarrassingly tongue-tied monolingual Yankee when we traveled in Europe. She was secretary to the Belgian Consul General, Willy van Cauwenberge
in San Francisco when we married. I miss her. If you look at the link to Krishna-Menon, you’ll see
that he was a striking figure, often featured in the media for both his looks and his outspoken manner. My direct impression of him there in the lobby was startling,
because he didn’t seem more than five feet tall. Of course, he had his cane raised, and that loomed large by comparison in my subjective perception…but I still see him clearly in mind’s eye. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
ISBN 979-8320821917
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