The Weirdest Episode of Seinfeld

 I'm in the process of watching the episodes of Seinfeld again.  So two days ago, I watched the episode where George has decided (just out of the wild) to date his cousin Rhisa.

It's clear out of the blue.....you never had seen her before, and wouldn't ever see her again.  

The portrayal?  Laurie Taylor-Williams did the acting job, and what you get is some dazed cousin of George....who seems to have burnt a few brain cells....drank a fair bit of wine in life, and probably smoked a bit of cannabis.  

It's about eight minutes into the piece that you get introduced to Rhisa.  

George needs some gimmick to get his dad to react in a certain way of 'disapproval', and he's figured....if this cousin relationship was exposed, he'd achieve results.  

George and Rhisa then meet at some restaurant, and George is hinting at some suggestive but fake relationship.  Rhisa?  She's sipping wine pretty aggressively and you get the impression this is the 3rd glass in the last hour or two.  It takes less than 30 seconds for Rhisa to agree to the relationship but in her mind....there wasn't going to be fake stuff (George is caught off-guard on this moment).

So you only get two scenes with Rhisa (one at the cafe, and one at the van in the woods at the end of the episode).  

This whole storyline with Rhisa?  You could have built this up and had her in forty-odd episodes, but they never bring her back.

This episode?  It came early in the 9th year, and you just have to wonder if they'd done it in the second or third season....maybe the story would have expanded out.  

The Sleep Story

 If you follow the President's trip to Scotland ('save-the-Earth' conference)....at some point yesterday, he was falling asleep (noted via news teams).

Accurate statement?  Listen, you take a 78-year-old guy....fly him to Europe and give him zero time to recover from jet-lag, and then hustle him into a fairly boring conference situation....he's got to nod off.

Most guys who are 78....will tell you that five days out of the week....they take a ninety-minute nap in the middle of the day, and their hectic schedule involves mostly reading the newspaper....hanging out at flea-markets, telling Vietnam war stories, and repairing the 36-year-old toaster that breaks down weekly.

So I'm not really that shocked or annoyed over Joe falling asleep.  

AI

 I sat last night and watched a segment on German PhD computer engineers working on Artificial Intelligence (AI), and basically teaching a system to 'think'.  Their angle?  They wanted to teach a system to recognize 'fake news'.  

So they were at a point where the computer was responding back and now asking questions to the engineer.  

The engineer would suggest 'x' was real news, and 'y' was fake news.  Basically, the questions came back....'WHY'.

The computer, if you go and think about it....was trying to build a logical 'math-like' statement.  If you filter in ten bits of information....there should be a sensible math assignment here where x-number of facts are fake....thus rendering the news item 'fake'.

The more I saw....the more I was amused.

At some point, AI will read each single line of a news item, and then value it.  The line might contain one fact, which the AI draws three math sequences.....one being positive....one neutral....and one negative.  It'll eventually trust one above the other two, then move to the second line of news.  

Because of computer speed....you might be able to read through a sixty-line news piece and eventually reach a point where the forty sentences are each assigned a score (within 3 seconds).  So it might come to value a story as being mostly 'fake', when the human might score it as perfectly legit.  

What if you reversed the situation, and asked AI to write the news story?  I would imagine that it'd review the whole situation...where a human would write a 40-line story (either fake or true), but the AI would write a 5-line story.....just the facts, with no slant or agenda.  In this 'world', you might end up with a four-page newspaper (instead of twenty pages), or a newscast of six minutes instead of 30 minutes.

Somewhere down the line....maybe even in five years....I suspect some newscast or newspaper will exist....with only AI writing or producing it.  Competition against CNN, Fox or the WaPo?  Obviously.

The question is....would we go and procure this news ahead of everyone else, and just dump slanted news entirely?  

There's a bold new era coming....probably within a decade, and a number of news people are going to reformate their resume, because AI assumed the majority of jobs.