Before we start, I need to correct a wrong. Richard, someone who I don’t know, who reads unCharles, emailed me (for the first time ever) to point out that the 1972 ad I said was for a Lincoln Continental was actually an ad for Ford’s mid-tier moniker (not to be confused with their mid-tier, Monarch), Mercury. I guess I should know better than to reference a line from a site called Mange Merde. Richard sent this link if you want to see the real 1972 Mercury Marqis Brougham ad ad in all its grainy goodness.
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Now we’re in.
When Jamie Dimon says JPMorgan Chase is, “All in” on AI. He means the AI that watched one million hours of YouTube… to get smarter. I know what you’re thinking. How will watching guys get hit in the gnads with rakes make synthetic intelligence smart enough to, as Elon Musk said on the same day, “Overtake human intelligence… next year.”? It's a mixed up, muddled up, shook up world. But I get it.
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With little due respect to today’s off-screen movement, many of my earliest childhood memories are of watching TV. The hours I spent seeing Wile E. Coyote fall through a black dot into oblivion or Bugs Bunny befuddle an organ grinder or Michigan J. Frog sing, “Hello my baby…” taught me things. Life things. Things I still use every day.
Case in point, my very first slide in my very first slide deck to pitch my very second start up featured Mr. Coyote chasing his road-running foil. It was a metaphor for something I long since forgot. But it worked.
I could deduce — sorry, synthesize — from Bugs decimating a well-shaven, man midget he was babysitting that there was a real, and quite possibly, famous baby-faced bank robber.
Most of what I know about economics comes from Elmer Fudd dressed as an elf explaining re-investment to some random dude. While Sylvester gets pummeled in the background. That short is, you guessed it, on YouTube. Maybe that’s how AI will know what to spew when a kid in middle school prompts it with, “Explain economics and reinvestment.” For the analyst at JPM, AI will mix a little of that with writings by Keynes and Smith and offer it up in a style more akin to Jamie Dimon’s TV interviews.
Let’s follow this along for a moment. If I learned what I know by reverse engineering TV from decades earlier, what will today’s kids know and how will they think when they’re my age?
Kids are interacting with machines in ways I never did. I walked up to a 12-channel dial and turned it until I got a show I wanted to watch. I had a limited TV guide in my head.
Well, the content is still the content. The Stooges still hold up. Economics is still economics. But the content is fed algorithmically at kids now. Kids seem to know that what they like changes their world. They re-watch things to inform their feed. Following and unfollowing accounts signals the algorithms to works differently. They understand these things innately. Like I knew Gilligan’s Island, 4pm, channel 6.
I actively learned from passive TV content. The next generation will activate their intelligence partners in ways I can’t even imagine.