One hundred years ago last Friday — July 10, 1926 — at 40 minutes after midnight at a frantic South Side jazz age party, Al Katz and his Kittens were playing the Moon Lite Gardens at the Chicago Beach Hotel in Kenwood. The crowd cried out “Valencia! Valencia!” the dance craze of the moment, and with a clatter of castanets, the group swung into the number.
“Its exotic rhythms sent gilded heels gliding across the glistening floor,” Radio Digest noted, after the tragedy. “Sparkling lights, gleaming shoulders, jeweled fingers, radiant faces, brilliant costumes, spotless linen and fathomless black revolved in a kaleidoscopic array.”
Twenty miles away in Homewood at the transmitter of radio station WOK, Thornton High School graduate Lester J. Wolf manned the control board, broadcasting the Moon Lite Gardens fun “throughout the Middle West into homes where lonely hearts were hungry for happiness and joy.”
At 19, Wolf lived at home with his parents and was one of the youngest people in the country to hold a commercial broadcast license.
Then a fuse blew. The signal went dead. Eager to get the station back on the air, Wolf reached for the faulty connection without first cutting the power and received a 6,000 volt shock. He fell to the floor but quickly stood up and told the studio director he was OK. But Wolf wasn’t OK. A moment later fell to the floor again, dead.
The Radio Digest called him “the first martyr in the field of broadcasting for public entertaining,” as if there might be many more. It’s hard to tell with a new industry, particularly one based on a terrifyingly lethal technology like electricity, joined to an invisible possible menace such as radio waves.
People always expect the worse. Radio did have risks — in the early years you had to hook up heavy wet cell lead batteries, basically big boxes of acid.
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Clark St. — if you want to recast that thought without the phrase "child rapist" I'd be happy to post it. There are certain red zones I try to avoid — wishing death upon certain individuals, for instance, or accusing them of crimes that can't be solidly proven in a court of law. I hope that isn't timid of me. But these are strange times.
ReplyDelete*have not yet been
DeleteWhy no use it, as it's the one thing he has yet to try to sue anyone about?
DeleteAnd we all know it's true! The FBI has documented it!
Sadly many young people have already died from interaction with AI chatbots. One example: Adam Raine (Age 16): A California teenager who died by suicide in April. His parents filed a wrongful death lawsuit against OpenAI, the creators of ChatGPT. The suit alleges he confided in the chatbot about his suicidal thoughts and that the bot provided methods for suicide and offered to write his suicide note.
ReplyDeleteThere is a lot more to that story than you may be aware of. The conversations between Adam Raine & AI totaled to over 1000 pages over the course of 7 months. Adam was mentally ill. He played different characters & presented different scenarios in order to cause the AI to loose its connectivity between the chats. Yes, AI did mess up. Yes, Adam Raine was smart enough to confuse AI. For me, right now I find the technical information provided to my queries helpful in my technical field. I don't know if that will always be the case. AI will have to be continually re-trained in order for its information to be relevant & current. In my opinion all information provided by AI (even right now while it is still "fresh") needs to be carefully evaluated by a thinking, breathing, intelligent human being. I have already found cases where the information it provided was obsolete. Tommy in Center Grove
DeleteNice opening; from a flaneur strolling through a cemetery.
ReplyDeleteBaum's character, Joslyn shares a name with an electrical equipment manufacturer that used to be in the Bridgeport neighbrohood around 37th and Morgan. They made lightning arrestors and switches.
Drones are awesome and awful. Instead of climbing a ladder or tower, send up a drone to save time and avoid falls. We will see how they change military power.
Provided AI only kills one person at first.
ReplyDeleteOne is reminded that Woody Guthrie was engaged by a Pacific-Northwest electrification commission in the 1930s to write several dozen songs touting the virtues of electricity to a skeptical public. One of them was “Roll On Columbia, Roll On”, now the Washington State Song.
ReplyDeleteOne is reminded that Woody Guthrie was engaged by a Pacific-Northwest electrification commission in the 1930s to write several dozen songs touting the virtues of electricity to a skeptical public. One of them was “Roll On Columbia, Roll On”, now the Washington State Song.
ReplyDeleteI can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I'm frightened of the old ones.
ReplyDeleteI am curious about how the US is in a race to dominate AI. I know there is talk of winner and losers in the AI game but it seems to me that there will be multiple AI systems out there from China and others eventually, or none.
ReplyDeletei understand you don't want to be a luddite about these things. neither do i. however
ReplyDeleteA I does require huge data center support, and that support comes with an enormous cost- threats to water supplies, the potential to overstress our electric grid system and the systems eat up farmland and other natural resources.
as to drones, it may be wise to check in with russians, ukranians and folks throughout the mideast. our view of them as providers of cute little of nifty cityscapes and the like takes on a completely different vibe for folks on the receiving end of these new "improvements" in warfare.
I always love when people bring up "Luddites" when referring to anything technological.
DeleteWhile the movement is seen as being anti industrial, the message of the man and the movement were that we needed to take care of the people who's lives and livelihoods were being destroyed by the industrial revolution, not to stop the industrial revolution.
Heed his warnings, as they all came true.
and be a proud luddite.
Context is everything. I read your column on AI right between a NYT opinion piece that looked at America today in context of Gibbon’s “”Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire” and a Paul Krugman Substack about AI in context of our current oligarchy. I’d put you closer to Gibbon than Krugman—you’re taking the long view. Yes, the empire may fall, but not because of AI. The economist Krugman, by the way, says that AI would have a greater effect on the masses if our nation’s wealth and tax laws were like they were in the 1950’s and 1960s. He describes how there may be some negative effects for most of us anyway, in terms the current oligarchy. Sorry though, Neil, I don’t really need a bromide to tell me not to get over worried about AI. My ChatGPT already knows me by name and, in its own surreal way, tells me when I should take a stress pill.
ReplyDeleteSo how about this, after the electricity was in installed at the White House, an early predecessor to the demented & deranged sexual assaulter who was formally adjudicated by NY Judge Lewis Kaplan of E. Jean Carroll at a civil trial, to whom he now owes over $5 million to, refused to ever touch a light switch & had the servants always do it!
ReplyDeleteEveryone talks about AI like it's some entity we can control. AI is incomprehensible. It's out of the box, and it's uncontainable. It feeds on itself and it contains everything it needs to exist. AI has been in our lives for decades. We're only now beginning to recognize it because we're starting to realize that we can't control it.
ReplyDeleteThe data centers need electricity. That's why they have power generators as part of many of the centers. Without electricity AI does not function.
DeleteI'm living in a shack in the desert without an internet service. No tv. Reading a book.
Drove into the mountains again today. Takes about 10 minutes No cell service. You can't control it but you can get away from it..there's a daily paper here and people start the day sitting at an outdoor bench. 10,000 people in the whole town .10 cops . Been here less than a year most people say hello and know my dog's name.
So you can't go out for sushi whatever
Especially under the control of meglomaniacs and sociopaths.
ReplyDelete