Antony Currency Joyride edition
"A person's chaotic thoughts spilling out into the real world"
Dear Reader,
Take a break from the UK’s economic and geopolitical shit-show and wander into a land of strange futures and a sometimes even odder present day…
Gladiator 2.0
Nick Cave wrote a sequel to Gladiator. You can read the whole crazy, brilliant thing online. According to Cave, Ridley Scott loved it but said, “it will never be made”.
Well, not by human hands… The exponential increase in capability of AI-powered apps to create photo-real images and words suggests that in a possible near-future, a writer could feed their screenplay into an AI-powered app—along with the original film as a reference—and it would produce an entire movie.
What can it do now? Well, taking one of the first lines of the Cave screenplay:
C/U of MAXIMUS, lying, arms splayed, in the mud, unconscious. Rain hammers down. He wears his gladiatorial breastplate and his sword rests in his lifeless hand.
...and putting it into DALL-E 2 gives this:
Not perfect. But for 90 seconds work it’s not bad; a little evocative, even: that red muddy water; the crumpled gladiator.
Incidentally, you can now try DALL-E 2 yourself for free.
Sell the rights to your face
Bruce Willis has sold the rights to having his face and voice used commercially in legitimate deep fakes. According to Ars Technica:
Willis, who has been diagnosed with a language disorder called aphasia, announced that he would be "stepping away" from acting earlier this year. Instead, he will license his digital rights through a company called Deepcake. The company is based in Tbilisi, Georgia, and is doing business in America while being registered as a corporation in Delaware.
“Deepcake” is the absolute best name for an AI company, isn’t it?
Where’s my head at?
Your correspondent got on DALL-E 2 AI image generation app the moment they opened the gates to the public. There’s a feature that allows you to upload an image and then expand it with over-lapping frames. The app guesses what might be in the frame and gives you four options to choose from.
I uploaded this image of me in a café…
…and the prompt “A man's chaotic thoughts escaping his head into the real world” (which could be the streamline for this newsletter, I realise).
Then I added a few frames around it. Once I’d selected the purple head to the right in the café scene, all I got was bald men’s heads, but still… good, weird fun. (Note: The Simpsons-like character on the right looks uncannily like my actual brother.)
How to make your online presentations more stressful
“Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster, and if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.” — Nietzsche.
After a virtual presentation to a faceless, silent audience this week on Zoom—other dissonance-inducing meeting platforms are available—I felt like I have been presenting into the dark, cold abyss. In a way, the abyss would be a better than an invisible audience as it may look back at—or into—you at some point.
After the talk there were some good questions and the same number of people were online at the end as the start. I assumed I’d been able to hold people’s attention and tell them something interesting.
When giving a talk, it’s not unusual in to see some bored looking faces in a crowd on screen or in a room. But a few signs of interest from others—a nod of agreement, a smile, a laugh even, or someone writing down a note—gives a sense that you’re doing something right.
In the psychology experiments described in Amy Cuddy’s Presence (read it now, it’s remarkable), feelings of deep unease and stress are provoked in test subjects by having them present to a panel of people who remain as blank and unresponsive as possible. No nods, no smiles, no facial expressions of any kind. Sheer torture.
It’s not just me: most humans that experience cognitive dissonance (experienced as deep physical discomfort) when deprived of reactions. In future, I’m either going to insist with the organiser on seeing the crowd or find some other ways of getting small reactions and reads from people—pause more often for questions, or polls.
Presenting to a void is a cruel and unusual thing to do to ourselves.
What it’s like inside an fMRI
We’ve been running a four-day week trial in my company and have been taking part in a study by the Neuroscience and Psychology team at the University of Sussex. Coming to their end of their study—we’ll be carrying on with our trial a little longer before deciding whether to continue—it was time for another set of tests on volunteers, including myself at the lab. That’s how I found myself being conveyed into the innards of a huge and incredibly noisy piece of technology to first have my brain scanned and then performing various tasks under the supervision of a researcher. I also gave blood and did some other tests, in an identical exercise to the start of the experiment in early July.
Being in a tight plastic tube for 45 minutes is uncomfortable, to say the least. It takes an effort of will to not ask to leave immediately, especially when you’re there as a volunteer rather than with a medical issue. Like an inner-space astronaut, communicating with ground control in the next room, I often had to carefully calm my body and mind as little surges of anxiety came up.
And it got weirder. The noises the machine made became repetitive after a while and I started to slip into a semi-trance state, the way you might during a long, noisy plane journey or a massage. Kind of conscious, kind of not. The booming, grinding bass of the machine along with preposterous bleeps and screeches formed themselves into a masticated melody that reminded me of an intense but not entirely enjoyable form of techno that was popular in 1990s Dutch club culture: Gabber (pronounced with a scratchy throat clearing noise and then “abba” — like: “Hkkchhhh-abber”).
Have a listen to some here:
(but make sure your headphones aren’t turned up too loud).
And this is a recording of an actual MRI machine.
I can confirm that it sounds like this but imagine it more repetitive and going on and on and on for 15 minutes at a go while you, essentially deprived of any other stimuli, lose track of time… and perhaps your sense of self.
Sit up straight while you doom scroll
I’ve mentioned Amy Cuddy’s Presence a few times now, and it really is a book I would recommend anyone and everyone reads. It will improve your life. Really
The book in a nutshell:
What I most want you to understand is that your body is continuously and convincingly sending messages to your brain, and you get to control the content of those messages.
Stand up straight, shoulders back and head up, and you’re telling your body you’re OK. Good. Powerful, even. Hunch up and breathe more shallowly—you’re telling yourself that you’re vulnerable, afraid, and powerless.
When we hunch up using devices for long periods, you can guess the effect. Cuddy describes an experiment where people used different sized devoices and then were tested for their sense of wellbeing and agency.
The larger the device–the biggest was a desktop computer—the more upright they had been and the better they felt. In one test, the subjects were left a room and told the experimenter would come and get them in five minutes—a clock on the wall was indicated to—and to come and tell them if they forgot.
[…] device size significantly affected whether subjects felt comfortable seeking out the experimenter. In the ten minutes before the experimenter returned, only 50 percent of the smartphone users came out to tell experimenters they wanted to leave. By contrast, 94 percent of the desktop users went to fetch the experimenter. You can see the other results in the figure on the next page: the bigger the device, the more likely subjects were to assert themselves. In fact, not only were the big-device users more likely to interrupt, those who did interrupt did so sooner. We concluded that the smaller the device, the more we must contract our bodies to use it, and the more time we spend in these shrunken, inward postures, the more powerless we feel.
I’ve been trying to have a better posture while using devices since reading that. It’s actually fairly simple to just be a bit more considered in how and where you’re looking at your phone.
Learning by arguing
Steve Jobs had a reputation for being aggressive and argumentative. Jony Ive says he was ready to change his mind whenever he found he was wrong.
A quote from Jony Ive in the Code 22 conference session “The Legacy of Steve Jobs”
“A part of curiosity […] is your appetite to learn, and to learn is more important than being right. You can present with passion a perspective or a point of view, but you’re doing that not to win an argument but just to try and understand.”
BTW — this clip of the interview was easy to create with the Overcast podcast app, which I really like. This is a new feature, but Overcast has always been useful for its ability to share a link to a specific moment in a podcast.
This week I’ve been…
Watching
Don’t Worry Darling (In cinemas now.) The hype and gossip around this film have coloured public reactions to it, according to the media. It’s absolutely nuts, but entertainingly so. Harry Styles doesn’t screw it up and leaves room for Florence Pugh to power the whole juggernaut through an immaculately art-directed mid-century valley of the dolls. It’s reality-warping powers were so strong I felt that joyous disorientation of finding myself having to navigate the real world on the way out of the cinema. It also has one of the finest designs for a poster I’ve seen for a long time. I might get one of these framed…
Other items of note
The worst motivational speaker of 2022
Via Lawrence Freedman on Twitter, a Russian commander explains how he may or may not be accompanying middle-aged conscripts to the frontline in Ukraine, that he himself is getting by on pain meds and that herniated discs, metal plates in the head and other impediments will not get them out of fighting.
Inside Number 10: Tim Shipman’s run down on what happened behind the scenes in the UK government this week (spoiler: it was a shitshow):
By the end of the week, delirious Labour officials were referring to the affair as “the Trussterf***
It was only on Thursday that Truss emerged to confront the issue in a series of interviews on BBC local radio and regional television. Her unsteady performance, complete with long silences, unnerved MPs. Dan Snow, the historian, declared it the “worst provincial campaign of any of our leaders since autumn 1216 when King John . . . caught dysentery in Norfolk, lost the crown jewels in The Wash and died in Nottinghamshire”.
The Royal Family are trying to cover up how much of a grump the new King is...
UK Royals Force News Sites to Delete Embarrassing Video Clips
The worst thing to tell someone who is anxious? Keep calm and carry on:
[...] it’s virtually impossible for most people to shut off that kind of automatic arousal, to abruptly de-escalate it. Not only can we not calm down, but when someone tells us to calm down, it also reminds us of how calm we are not, which stokes our anxiety even more.
A new exhibition on AI at the Bodleian Library
AI Is Not All Killer Robots. It Is Far More Dangerous - Professor Ursula Martin (Oxford University)
And finally, a damn good soundtrack for working…
Thanks to Arjo Ghosh for sharing this trio of mixes you can listen to free on SoundCloud, saying they are perfect for working. Having road tested them I can confirm — very good...
And that’s all for this week. Thank you for reading — if you enjoyed Antonym please do subscribe, share and offer a small prayer to the gods of writing for its continuation…
Antony
It does indeed look like me. Worryingly, seems slightly more healthy. Even with the sickly palour