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"History is just
people doing things" THE ABQ CORRESPONDENT
ISSN 1087-2302 Online Edition Number 350......February 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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The very first ABQ Correspondent was published (on
paper) in March 1985…so the February 2025 issue rounds out 40 full years of
this miscellany. I expect to crank out an issue for March…and presumably for
as many months that follow as health and semi-sanity permit. HUM A FEW BARS… What with all the recent stir
about “drones” flitting about over New Jersey and other spots of interest,
one recalls a minor story from what must have been late 1963. I was
working as a none-too-competent Production Coordinator for a TV commercial
production studio, FilmFair, in Hollywood, and we
had a batch of commercials to produce, promoting Mattel’s Chatty Cathy doll. Chatty Cathy was not equipped with as-yet-unknown
solid-state technology, but with an honest-to-goodness teeny-weeny record
player. If you wound up the spring and released it, Cathy would say one
of several randomly selected short phrases. The thing worked...not as well
as the smartphone now in my pocket, but it won the hearts of many little
girls. One panel on each of the storyboards for the television spots said
something like “Just pull the cord on the back of Cathy’s neck, and she’ll
speak to you.” …except that “cord” was spelled “chord.” suggesting that
the storyboards had been laid out by a musician. One of my tasks in preparing
for the shoot was to find, somewhere in LA, a highly reflective wall, so
that we could photograph an actor walking next to it along with his/her
reflection. The official comment was “We can always do it at the airport,
but that has become trite; we want something fresh.” Well, I must have looked
at a hundred promising walls all over town, shooting pix of many with a great
big old Polaroid camera that was also a wonder of technology in those days,
and I couldn’t find anything suitable. Time was running out, and on
a cold, rainy, nasty afternoon, I called the spot’s producer at the
Carson/Roberts agency with the news. He sighed, and said he’d pick me up,
and we’d run down to admire walls at the airport. He turned out to be a
pleasant young guy about my age, named Bob Emenneger, a musician as well as a filmmaker.
Aha! We both hated
the airport on inspecting it…and I can’t remember what we did about a
reflective wall. BUT the connection with recent events is this;
creative Mr. Emenegger went on to be a
director/producer/composer. He also authored a book UFOs: Past, Present, and
Future, which he turned into a 1974 documentary film that has become a classic reference
in the UFO/UAP/UAS world in the years since. The story is more intriguing than
many. I think we have an
ancient Chatty Cathy or two somewhere
around the house. We don’t have any
UFO memorabilia. Shhhhh,
JUST KEEP IT BETWEEN US Back in the ‘70 I published a piece or two
suggesting that robots could become warm companions and helpers to old
folks like me now. I was insanely optimistic about the time schedule,
assuming that these critters would be among us by the ‘90s, but fortunately,
nobody took me seriously. They are just now beginning to look really
practical as LLM technology booms. One of the inhibitions, apart from
concern about the uncanny valley, is the amount of energy and storage
required by these systems. You have to know a lot to be useful to
others, to anticipate needs and understand the limitations of the party
you’re trying to assist. Dogs seem to be equipped by Nature with
companionability, and many can learn a lot, often more than we realize. Dogs
learn a different class of skills from those we expect in our robotic
companions. For example, they can’t read aloud the contents printed on
the label of a can of soup. (Does it really contain that much sodium?)
The robots oughta be able to do that…as well as
taking the can from a shelf, opening it, and warming the contents on a stove
(remembering to turn off the burner afterward). The problem is not just the
size of the necessary robot brain, but the need for the critter’s
discretion. To be useful, the robot must learn continuously…about
everything and everyone it encounters We probably don’t want it to
share with the rest of the world everything it knows that’s important to us
personally. Some folks are working on that, Nvidia,
for example.
They are reportedly building a “$3K AI-powered desktop for researchers and students; system
allows users to run many AI models locally instead of relying on cloud
computing.”
And others are developing super-efficient software that may squeeze an LLM into your smartphone.
(Yes, you’ll need lots of energy to run it for more than a few minutes, but people are working on that, too.) The part we haven’t solved yet is making
the robot as caring as a dog. We shall see. Item: Long-ago associate Larry Bellinger
(the only guy I knew who was pushed out of an airplane over Panama by a
crazed crew member) commented about 1996 that he saw a short future for the
cellular phone business. Why bother with cellular, he asked, when direct
satellite communication with personal phones will shortly be
feasible? Well, it took a while, but Starlink is reportedly providing service to currently-on-fire Los
Angles as this is written. This wireless palm-sized robot…it comes in a kit…walks and jumps using a kind of locomotion that is apparently becoming more popular becoming more popular. See this scuttling table. Item: Musical instruments are quickly becoming digitized, and sounding pretty good in the bargain. I can’t play my few chords on a guitar my guitar any more, but have hope for making satisfactory sound with this remarkable device. It may not even be necessary to develop calluses. _______________________________________________ ITEM FROM THE
PAST This item from 1993 is recalled by the current to-do about the use of computer generated images…and sound…well, almost real people in movies. WOOF Brock has
reported from the wilds of Hollywood about the stresses of operating
a realistic dog puppet in a production whose real performing dogs were owned
by a trainer who was pathologically jealous of the puppet. "My dogs
can do all the action the script calls for," he said. The dogs couldn't,
but the guy threatened to walk out if
the interloping puppet was allowed to do anything. Without those dogs
the production would shut down, because they couldn't match the animals
exactly. Brock was less concerned
about that than about having the guy come in and shoot the puppet with a gun.
They got through it by photographing everything with the real hounds, and smuggling the puppet shots in at night.
Brock did not expect exactly this hazard in showbiz. He recently puppeteered a wolf in a
film called…um…Wolf. He hopes he's
not canine typecast. Reminds me of a
session years ago in Hollywood when we
were shooting a television commercial for a Minneapolis bank whose logo
featured a small girl standing next to an immense protective dog.
We simulated the logo with a real girl and a real dog...actually three or
four identical Great Danes. Dogs get bored and moody in a hurry on set, so
the trainer typically maintains a fleet of interchangeable animals, and
brings several to the shooting session. At
one point our director, Hank Ludwin, gestured with a stick while
explaining something. The dogs
instantly took note. Their ears went down, and they dropped to attack
positions. The trainer and his helper flung themselves on the dogs,
shouting. "Drop the stick, drop the stick!" Hank did, and the dogs
relaxed. The trainer explained. "These dogs just came off Disney's Swiss
Family Robinson. They've been trained to take swords away from pirates."
(Swiss Family Robinson was on television
this afternoon, and the sight of the dogs brought it all back.) By the way,
Brock commented that the director of Wolf
was really good, smart in his use of the puppets, appreciative of what the
puppeteers were able to accomplish, and fun to work with. "His name is
Nichols," said Brock. "Mike Nichols?" I asked.
"Yes, have you heard of him?" said my son, the Hollywood expert.
He hadn't. Gad. The resentment of imitation dogs by the trainer is matched currently by the resentment of special effects critter creators who see their business slipping away. When a director tries a special effects shot several times, is dissatisfied, and finally says “Never mind, we’ll CG it,” those words are chilling. While it was hard to imagine in 1993 that CG would become as practical as real 3D props, the reality is upon us in 2025, and lots of people are greatly upset. One assumes that CG “avatars” can be trained with AI/LLM techniques so well that they will simulate real people, living or dead, to become such capable, cooperative, game, inventive, interesting performers that their living models will become less useful and will be paid or otherwise encouraged to disappear. Not recommending this. mind you, just pointing out its practicality. Coincidentally, last time I visited family in LA (their neighborhood hasn’t yet burned down, though many of their friends have lost their homes) I watched Brock’s excellent brother Garth, who manages a special effects studio, directing creation of a puppet dog. I paid close attention but did not spot an angry man with a pack of real dogs coming in to shoot this puppet. We lost good
old Brock to MS in 2015. Doggone it. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
ISBN 979-8320821917
See on Amazon __________________________________________________
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