AI in the Medium and Message

January 2024
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AI in the Medium and Message

22 January 2024

George Rebane

Argentina’s president Javier Milei delivered an important speech at the recent World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. In it he described the history of Argentina’s tragic descent from being one of the world’s leading developed countries, enjoying the fruits of free market capitalism, to a nation today with a destitute and chaotic economy after it began reorganizing itself under various forms of collectivism centered on socialism. The speech is an excellent and well-delivered warning to that annual conclave of true-believer globalists. You can view it here in its entirety – I recommend it.

But perhaps the equally or even more important aspect of the speech was the mode of its delivery. You see, Milei delivered the speech in Spanish to a live audience who wore ear pieces to get a realtime English translation by a human translator. Yet in the above video of the speech Milei delivered it in perfectly accented English in his own voice. The video was generated offline by an LLM AI that correctly coded his voice and modified the video image to perfectly synchronize his lips to express the English delivery. (Here is the follow-up to illustrate the human-translated version of the video.)

The astute reader will instantly understand that this speaker could have been made to deliver any kind of speech desired at that WEF venue. Such translations will soon become realtime in the sense that the actual speaker speaking in language L3 delivering message M7 will be seen and heard on monitors and/or live broadcasts to speak in language L12 delivering message M5. For the latter we will need the source file to contain metadata on facial expressions and, perhaps, gestures etc – all in the realm of today’s offline large language AI models.

For good or ill, in these pre-Singularity years this is what we now have to look forward to from here on. And this election season will no doubt provide us with examples of both.

Posted in Critical Thinking & Numeracy, Current Affairs, Our World, Science Snippets, Singularity Signposts

24 responses to “AI in the Medium and Message”

scenes

22 January 2024

In related news.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2412739-deepmind-ai-solves-hard-geometry-problems-from-mathematics-olympiad/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dOplrIJEYBo

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The Estonian Fox

23 January 2024

Finally, the Dems have a way to energize Joe Biden so that his speeches may become more coherent and more frequent. And he can make his outrageous statements from the safety of the White House’s basement.
So voice recognition for entry into classified spaces will be no good anymore. What about that new-fangled AEye(c) software to duplicate iris-matching, and avoid that pesky iris-ID stuff? Don’t tell me that DNA-ID will be needed? “OK Mr. Biden, just spit into the tube and your results will be verified in 5 seconds.”
How soon can we modify all those old, unused, covid test thingys to duplicate anyone’s DNA anytime?

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Individual Juan

23 January 2024

Might sound good to some,
I can only imagine MAGA nation if the following happened here. They would be calling Melei Biden-del-Sur.
nytimes.com
1 month ago – In Argentina, a country synonymous with galloping inflation, people are used to paying more for just about everything. But under the country’s new president, life is quickly becoming even more painful. When Javier Milei was elected president on Nov. 19, the country was already suffering under the world’s third-highest rate of inflation, with prices up 160 percent from a year before.
But since Mr. Milei took office on Dec. 10 and quickly devalued the Argentine currency, prices have soared at such a dizzying pace that many in this South American country of 46 million are running new calculations on how their businesses or households can survive the far deeper economic crunch the country is already enduring.
“Since Milei won, we’ve been worried all the time,” said Fernando González Galli, 36, a high school philosophy teacher in Buenos Aires.

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Gregory

23 January 2024

https://reason.com/2024/01/18/javier-milei-tells-world-leaders-the-state-is-not-the-solution/
Scary for a high school philosophy teacher.

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scenes

23 January 2024

Argentina in a nutshell:
https://www.ceicdata.com/datapage/charts/o_argentina_money-supply-broad-money/?type=area&from=2011-12-01&to=2022-12-01&lang=en
The obvious solution. Print up a bunch more money. Use the gubmint to ‘invest’ the money. Profit. When you run out of paper, switch to leaves.
There’s nothing like central planning for providing an amusing time.

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scenes

23 January 2024

Luckily, one of Javier Milei’s newly appointed deputies is here to clean up matters.
https://www.marca.com/tiramillas/actualidad/2024/01/23/65afe5dce2704eb7618b456c.html

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Individual Juan

23 January 2024

How would Trump nation react to a 50% devaluation of the Dollar?
Thank you Sir, may we have some more?
Dec 13 (Reuters) – Argentina’s government under libertarian President Javier Milei has unveiled a “shock therapy” economic plan, a radical and likely painful blueprint to stabilize the South American country’s economy which faces its worst crisis in decades.
The plan included a devaluation of the peso currency by more than 50%, which took effect on Wednesday, as well as wide-ranging measures for cutting state spending. The austerity moves have been cheered by markets but will likely hurt Argentines.

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Individual Juan

23 January 2024

¡ay güey! Scenes, I am sure she is popular.

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scenes

23 January 2024

“How would Trump nation react to a 50% devaluation of the Dollar?”
About like they would to a Biden Nation devaluation.
Naturally, it’s insane how people (including our economics expert Mr. Psul) assign the state of the economy to the current chief executive. Even if they were smart enough run the hip, and Nixon was probably the last really intelligent President, the tiller simply doesn’t exist.
I always figured that’s it’s a childlike need to take a complex thing, and a thing with a whole lotta inertia and history, and assign it to a personality. People think in terms of people, not systems. It’s also why beliefs will cluster around a figurehead like Jesus or George Floyd.

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Scott O

23 January 2024

Idiot Juan 12:49 – Like most Americans, Juanita has no idea of what has been going on in Argentina for the last few decades. Since the country has been run into the ground with socialist policies most news sources in this country would rather you not know that a once thriving and wealthy country has been ruined with left wing idiocy. A 50% reduction is actually pretty much par for the course in Argentina lately, but Idiot Juan just found out because the left is horrified that some actual fiscal realities might be recognized, and so the news has to try to bad mouth this attempt to save the country.
Hilarious:
“How would Trump nation react to a 50% devaluation of the Dollar?”
Dunno – it wouldn’t hurt his lifestyle any.
How will Idiot Juan react when the US dollar is no longer regarded as being worth something to invest in?
Here’s one chart that only goes back to 2010 – notice the steady overall decline punctuated with sharp drops in value?
https://static.seekingalpha.com/uploads/2018/6/16/saupload_Arg_2Bpeso_2Bvs_2Badjusted.jpg

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Individual Juan

23 January 2024

Scotto the Sage, You mean these guys?
Nice bunch of folks,
“The military coup initiated during the period known as the “Infamous Decade”, characterized by electoral fraud, persecution of the political opposition (mainly against the UCR) and pervasive government corruption, against the background of the global depression.[29]
During his brief tenure as president, Uriburu cracked down heavily on anarchists and other far-left groups, resulting in 2,000 illegal executions of members of anarchist and communist groups. The most famous (and perhaps most symbolic of anarchism’s decay in Argentina at the time) was the execution of Severino Di Giovanni, who was captured in late January 1931 and executed on the first of February of the same year.
After becoming president through the coup, Uriburu attempted to create a constitutional reform that would include corporatism in the Argentine Constitution. This move toward fascism was viewed negatively by the conservative backers of the coup and they turned their support to the more moderate conservative general Agustín P. Justo, who won the presidency in a 1932 election that was heavily fraudulent.
Justo began a policy of liberal economic moves that primarily benefitted the nation’s upper classes and permitted great political and industrial corruption at the expense of national growth. One of the most infamous decisions of Justo’s government was the creation of the Roca–Runciman Treaty between Argentina and the United Kingdom, which benefitted the British economy and the rich beef producers of Argentina.”

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Individual Juan

23 January 2024

Looks like Milei is taking a page a previous administration during the bygone days of 1966 with his 50% devaluation,
“Onganía’s Minister of Economy, Adalbert Krieger Vasena, decreed a wage freeze and a 40% devaluation of the currency, which strongly affected the state of the Argentine economy, in particular the agricultural sector, favoring foreign capital. Vasena suspended collective labour conventions, reformed the hydrocarbon law which had established a partial monopoly of the Yacimientos Petrolíferos Fiscales (YPF) state enterprise, as well as passing a law facilitating expulsions in case of failure to pay rent. Finally, the right to strike was suspended (Law 16,936) and several other laws reversed progress made concerning labor laws throughout the preceding years.” – Wiki

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scenes

23 January 2024

“Nice bunch of folks,”
Oh well, they always are.
Armchair quarterbacking a place like Argentina seems kind of useless to me. Even if someone here knew about the place, they wouldn’t know about the place. It’s just becomes a silly debate using 19th and 20th C. European political terms. (also, keep in mind that a ‘devaluation’ is a foreign currency concept and is usually done in a big uncomfortable clump after years of built-up pressure).
So how do you run a country that lacks a highly educated, trust-oriented, population filled with work ethic? I couldn’t tell you. No doubt all the fools filling up the city council chambers with Israel vs. Palestine signage could weigh in on how things oughta be.

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Scott O

23 January 2024

Oooooh, Idiot Juan does a lengthy cut and paste of some of Argentine history! Is that how he made it through his college daze?
Juanita never gave a damn about that country until Milei came to power and the lefty press told Juanita and his bobble-headed friends that they should hate, hate, hate that Trump-like person no matter what he does. Obediently, Juanita shows up here with breathless news that a great country full of wonderfulness and economic health is being ruined by a Trumpist maniac.
Oh yeah – did we mention Trump?
It’s really a shame that Milei hasn’t gotten all the problems solved by now. Maybe it’s because the entrenched powers some how don’t want him to succeed.
I personally doubt he will succeed. If the mass of the country’s population don’t want to work and expect some one else to carry them through life, there’s little any leader can do to.

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Individual Juan

23 January 2024

Scenes and Scotto the Sage,
Maybe someone should let George R know about the concept of rushing toward a far right (not my characterization) leader like Milei whom he imagines will be rescuing “the country from a nation today with a destitute and chaotic economy after it began reorganizing itself under various forms of collectivism centered on socialism.”
One thing I got from the Wiki Cliff Notes is that Argentina has been a mess for centuries. It seem naive to think the current strongman is going to fix Argentina. But hey, it is the era of the Strongman.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Argentina

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Scott O

23 January 2024

“that Argentina has been a mess for centuries.”
Shows what you know. There was a time that wasn’t so.
I already knew this, but since you won’t believe me:
“On the eve of World War I, the future of Argentina looked bright. Since its promulgation of the 1853 Constitution, Argentina had experienced strong economic growth and institutional modernization, which had propelled it into the ranks of the 10 wealthiest countries in the world by 1913”.
https://latinaer.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s40503-019-0076-2
Just admit it Juanita – you don’t know shit about human nature, economics, politics or world history beyond what you read from the socially approved left wing news outlets.

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Don Bessee

23 January 2024

Can he get a refund on that rhetoric degree @429?

Reality check –
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/other/oops-replacing-workers-with-ai-is-actually-more-expensive-mit-finds/ar-BB1h8Gbu?ocid=msedgntp&pc=U531&cvid=f0f7d6f4bf544f9e95ecc4601e52e135&ei=184
😉

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Don Bessee

23 January 2024

AI makes me thing of the drones in sac –
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/careers/california-job-growth-falls-by-most-in-the-nation-post-pandemic-report/ar-BB1h9I64?ocid=msedgntp&pc=U531&cvid=f0f7d6f4bf544f9e95ecc4601e52e135&ei=120
😉

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Gregory

24 January 2024

“Maybe someone should let George R know about the concept of rushing toward a far right (not my characterization) leader like Milei whom he imagines will be rescuing “the country from a nation today with a destitute and chaotic economy after it began reorganizing itself under various forms of collectivism centered on socialism.”
“Far right” is Jeff’s characterization, of Milei and many who post here. I find Milei to be fairly centrist but centrist is to Jeff’s far right. Once he establishes someone to be far right, then he’s free to pull their wings off.
Milei’s legislature is beginning debate on Milei’s package(s), he isn’t a dictator. He also isn’t a strongman politician, a very strange characterization by Jeff.

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scenes

24 January 2024

“Argentina has been a mess for centuries.”
Argentina is, what?, 200 years old? So that’s kind of a stretch, but let’s just say that it’s always been a mess.
Some part of my brain tells me that their per capita wealth was once higher than the US, but it’s always hard to trust those numbers. What is wealth exactly? As of late it tends to largely mean moving money from one hand to another and various forms of grift, plus old numbers are inexact.
Generally, I’d say that printed (and computer) money never ends well as short-term always defeats long-term thinking, plus there’s always political reality and hungry friends who need feeding.
Reading something like this: https://mafhola.uchicago.edu/wp-content/uploads/Argentina.pdf doesn’t really tell me anything. Deficits strike me as a symptom, real causes are the lack of useful work being done and the surfeit of money being wasted.
My overall take, call it an armchair philosophy, is that successful countries organically come from high-functioning high-trust nations (a nation is not a country, look it up). Governments, or any other central authority, will fail in the long run, and it’s probably a waste of time to blame them for a job at which they are ill-suited. I’d be happy to consider any kind of existence proof that shows otherwise. It would be fun to watch a high-functioning central authority, say Singapore, attempt to run Cape Town or Detroit.

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scenes

24 January 2024

“”Far right” is Jeff’s characterization, of Milei and many who post here.”
I’ve always liked ‘hard right’.
So far as I can tell, it’s shorthand for ‘stuff everyone thought 20+ years ago’. Coming home from WWII, God knows what my father would have made of Oregon’s abortion law, Sam Brinton and his ‘pups’, the mounds of paper required to build a new house. Maybe those Greatest Generation folks were hard hard hard right.
Speaking of such things, I was reading ‘The Dictatorship of Woke Capital: How Political Correctness Captured Big Business’ and surprised at what a good history of corporate and political thinking it ran through. Usually these books seem dashed out over a long weekend. I do have to wonder if all the usual suspects named were prime movers or simply surfers on an underlying wave of mass behavior (probably both).

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Individual Juan

24 January 2024

“In April 2023, President Alberto Fernandez announced that he will not seek re-election in the next presidential election.[81] The 19 November 2023 election run-off vote ended in a win for far-right outsider Javier Milei with close to 56% of the vote against 44% of the ruling coalition candidate Sergio Massa.[82]”
Here you go Gregor.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Argentina

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Individual Juan

24 January 2024

“In 1860, Argentina would have needed about 55 years to catch up to the Swiss level of per capita income. Today, if it continued its current growth trajectory, it would need more than 90 years to do so. The obvious question is what went wrong?”
From Scotto’s link

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Gregory

24 January 2024

“At the time of Milei’s inauguration, Argentina’s economy was suffering 143 percent annual inflation, the currency had plunged and four out of 10 Argentines were in poverty.”
This is what the leftists (the loser represented a massive coalition from center-left all the way to communist parties) were promising the same-old religion to solve.
Yes, progressives like you have no problem putting down Libertarians as far right. It’s a lie.

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