Post Pre

Multi-tasking and random access may be fine for some, but for better or worse I have a very linear mind. I do best when I can see things on a continuum and do them in a particular order. I'm happiest if I can start at one place, move through whatever steps are required, and get to an eventual end point.  Doesn't matter if it's cooking, repair projects or exercise. Those who can juggle multiple things at one time, be it conversations or crime dramas, have my admiration even if they might lose me along the way.

The wider world is no different. Trying to understand all that is happening is difficult unless I (and perhaps other simple-minded souls) can place the current state-of-play on some kind of timeline. It's true the delineations are not always neat or definitive, but they can be instructive and helpful as a way of understanding the bigger forces at play. One can even argue that doing so is not just retrospective, in the sense of recording and reporting for the history books, but might also play some role in nudging us in certain directions. After all, if you say the world is no longer pre-AI but thick in the middle of it, you might be more likely to take ChatGPT out for a spin. 

This is easily seen in technology: we are "post" smartphones, iPads and search engines. That doesn't mean that they are gone, just that they have lost their shine. At one point each was cutting edge, and only the cool kids and tech-nerds were using them. Now each is so ubiquitous as to be wallpaper. We don't even think about trying new iterations because each seems to have matured and reached the limit as to what it can do. And so rather than use Google to list vacation spots, we ask Gemini to design a week-long trip to Ireland. However, we (or at least me) are "pre" the "agentic" version of the same, where we make Claude our agent, hand it our credit card and say "book it." It's starting to happen in some situations, though you best check that it's not snagging you a reservation in Little Italy as opposed to Real Rome.

You can apply the same sorting to almost anything. Take finance: we are post ATM's and credit cards, while deep into alternative payment platforms and tap-to-pay. You can argue crypto should be in that "today" bucket, but other than as an instrument for speculation and dark money exchanges (read that as "criminal"), no one has figured out an actual use case for it. While it has its proponents, most of us can mark everyday adoption and ubiquitous use of our bitcoin wallet as "pre", and the whole thing may explode before it ever gets there.

It's no different in other fields. In medicine we're post organ transplant, pre cloning replacements in the lab. In space we're post orbital outpost and pre Mars settlement. We are post electric cars and pre flying ones, post plant-based meat and pre the manufactured variety, post solar and pre fusion. And depending on what side of the fence you are on we're either post or pre our best years as a country, and your perception will likely flip at the next election.

Of course, we each have our own timelines as well, ones that are more granular than global. I am at that awkward stage of post ambitious yet pre retirement. On a more personal level my vision is post 20-20, my knees post flexible, and I'm way post sleeping through the night. The good news is, at least as of this writing, I am pre non-spicy foods, pre mechanical assistance to walk and pre always needing a sweater. I don't believe I will ever be post nap; the only pre for that activity may be length and frequency. And depending on the situation, who I am with and the way I feel that day, I am both post and pre acting my age 

With all that's happening in the world, some say we are becoming post hope and post optimistic. While I'm not ignoring the bigger picture, it's easy to fall into that hole and wallow in it. And so I will do what I can, while at the same time remembering that I am pre the next concert, pre the next lunch with friends, and pre my next ice cream sundae.

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Marc Wollin of Bedford is always trying to classify things. His column appears weekly via email and online on Substack and Blogspot as well as Facebook, LinkedIn and X.

Robo Be The Judge

 Let me say at the outset that I'm not a baseball fanatic. I have no favorite team, can't recite any statistics, know the names of just a few storied players, and have only a passing knowledge of the state of play today. That said, like most American males who grew up in the sixties, I do have some familiarity with the game and rules. I played in Little League, eventually coached the same, watched games on TV and have gone to the occasional one in person. Yes, I did watch Game 7 of last year's World Series, because how many times does that happen, and it was a great contest even if you had no dog in the fight. I would characterize my relationship with The Show as I do with all sports: mild interest and curiosity. Certainly I don't have the same level of commitment to it as I do to naps and chunky peanut butter.

Still, it's hard not to be aware of the seismic change that happened this spring, as robo umpiring has been introduced to the majors. Officially called the "Automated Ball-Strike System" or ABS, it's the same technology used in tennis, soccer and others. It relies on a series of high-speed cameras spread around the stadium that track the ball in space. As needed, those images are compared with a preset set of parameters: in tennis, it's the lines on the court, in soccer it's the goal line. In seconds, that image can be shown to the officials and indeed everyone watching the match or game, to see if a ball is in or out, a goal or not. 

The challenge in baseball is a little different as the strike zone varies, based as it is on individual players and not a physical line on the field. While the width hasn't changed (17", the width of home plate), prior to ABS the high and low was defined as follows: "the upper limit of which is a horizontal line at the midpoint between the top of the shoulders and the top of the uniform pants, and the lower level is a line at the hollow beneath the knee cap." In short, letters to knees, but the wiggle room was obvious, not to mention the umpire's judgement. 

No more: ABS defines that zone empirically as being between 27% and 53.5% of a player's listed height, regardless of how they crouch at the plate. And players couldn't just report how tall they were. They were measured a minimum of two times by lasers and by hand. All measurements took place between 10AM and noon, with players standing straight up with no shoes or baseball caps, and with the measuring tool pressed against the head if a player had thick hair. No fudging the results as you do balancing on the edge of your bathroom scale in the morning.

So far it's been a success, though players, managers, officials and fans are still getting used to it. It's likely that, as with all technology, the more it gets used and accepted, the more it will spread beyond professional sports to us civilians. Just as the space program helped to popularize and normalize everything from cordless power tools to freeze-dried foods to GPS, it's only a matter of time before a robo judge and its unyielding standards gets applied to our day-to-day routines. 

All those things you used to slant in your favor will now be subject to an empirical measurement. The alarms will go off if you even approach the express lane at the supermarket with more than 10 items. Amazon won't let you select a bathing suit if just you "hope" you'll fit into it. And that bathroom scale balancing? Forget it. You'll just walk in to brush your teeth in the morning, and your weight will pop up on the mirror. Cue the gnashing of teeth now.

It is worth noting that, at least at this point, in the big leagues the human behind the plate gets first crack at the call, and the automatic system is only invoked if the pitcher, catcher or batter thinks the ump blew it. In fact, in one early game, Umpire CB Bucknor was challenged 8 times in a single game, with 6 calls overturned. That presages the obvious, a time when the equation flips, and the machines take over with the humans checking them if needed.

You can bet that life will eventually imitate sport. Blanche DuBois may have depended on the kindness of strangers, but soon enough you won't get that chance. You can smile and plead all you want, but before long when you tell it to the judge, you'll have to make sure you are speaking into its microphone.

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Marc Wollin of Bedford was an enthusiastic, though not skilled coach. His column appears weekly via email and online on Substack and Blogspot as well as Facebook, LinkedIn and X.

Try to Remember

I've had to prove I'm human, and I've had to prove I'm me, and the good news is I passed both tests. Because of that prowess I have been permitted to engage with the wider world in terms of buying things from merchants, signing up for offers from various institutions and registering for different group opportunities. And I get it. Each of those operations wants to keep at bay the army of bots being fielded by greedy scammers, diabolical political powers and enemy states trying to gain access. After all, we can't let a bunch of derelicts in WherethehellamIstan take down the economy by placing an order for 10 million lawn sprinklers from Amazon.

But as we are reminded on an almost hourly basis, AI is coming for us all, and it works as well for evil as it does for good. And so it's only a matter of time until ChatGPT and its ilk can fake being a person by selecting all the pictures that have bicycles, or sorting the flowers from the bushes. Of course, it can already do that way faster than I can, but its lack of a physical hand to move the little squares around on my screen is a limiting factor. For now. 

As to the mechanics of proving I'm me, I still have the edge, at least for the moment. In one grubby hand I have my keyboard, and in the other, my phone. When I type on one it sends a code to the other. Match the two up, and unless Claude is sitting behind me holding a mouse to my head, I can verify that the person in the middle is indeed moi.

Go a little deeper than a simple verification, however, and we start to hit a problem. That's because the older I get, the bigger the data set is that defines me. More experiences, more connections, more stuff in my life, all of it adding up to the picture of who I am. By its very design, AI excels at crawling and extracting bits and pieces from that information. But I am exactly the opposite: as my dossier gets bigger and bigger, I not only have issues accessing that information, I'm lucky if I remember any specific piece of it at all. Yet that was the challenge that confronted me when I needed to move some accounts around. On a theoretical level I think it's great that the bank didn't want to just take my word for it that I am me; on a practical level that's where the rub occurred.

I was presented not with pictures of buses on the street or a texted code to my phone, but a series of queries based on, well, me. Given the public data points that are floating around out there, it's not hard to scrape the internet and come up with a series of challenges which I should have been able to confirm or deny. Certainly, Grok or Poe or Gemini could parse it seconds, scanning the many years of phone numbers, motor vehicle records, and LinkedIn listings that might contain a passing mention of my name. But me? I can barely recall what shirt I wore on Monday, let alone where I lived in 1969.

But that type of thing was asked of me not once, but half a dozen times. "Was the color of a Toyota you once owned brown, green, or blue?" Uhm, it was never really washed, so hard to recall. "Which of these six phone numbers was once yours?" I can barely remember my number now, let alone one from 1982. "Did you know any of these five different people?" Maybe. "Which of the following corporations have you ever been associated with?" Either my dementia is more advanced than I thought, or "none of the above" is actually the correct answer to that one.

Thankfully, I have retained just enough knowledge about myself (at least at this point) to pass the exam. Going forward, however, I will have to study up before I contact the bank again, and go through old photo albums and yearbooks to jog my memory. That said, if they really wanted to confirm it was me, they should as ask me the stuff that swirls much more readily in my head: song lyrics, joke punchlines, movie one-liners: "Have fun storming the castle!"

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Marc Wollin of Bedford is sure he is who he thinks he is, he just can't prove it. His column appears weekly via email and online on Substack and Blogspot as well as Facebook, LinkedIn and X.