July 27, 2020,
Technological innovations in the world are happening as we sleep.
All of the time.
Should we be concerned? Aren’t there experts and government people paid to keep a watch on these things while we’re on vacation at Disneyland or pouring ketchup on our hamburgers at fast food restaurants? We sure hope so because we have more important things to do.
Please pass the remote. Good. There is something on all the time regarding technological innovations that occurred while we were sleeping.
Halt and Catch Fire is an American period drama television series created by Christopher Cantwell and Christopher C. Rogers.
It aired on the cable network AMC in the United States from June 1, 2014, to October 14, 2017, spanning four seasons and 40 episodes.
It had one of the reputations as being one of the best shows that no one ever saw.
Understandable. People sleep a lot.
We sure didn’t see it. We’re trying to figure out why anyone else who did see it, cared.
Taking place over a period of more than ten years, the series depicts a fictionalized insider's view of the personal computer revolution of the 1980s and the growth of the World Wide Web in the early 1990s.
The show's title refers to computer machine code instruction Halt and Catch Fire (HCF), the execution of which would cause the computer's central processing unit to stop working.
In season one, the company Cardiff Electric makes its first foray into personal computing, with entrepreneur Joe MacMillan (Lee Pace) running a project to build an IBM PC clone with the help of computer engineer Gordon Clark (Scoot McNairy) and prodigy programmer Cameron Howe (Mackenzie Davis).
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Halt and Catch Fire debuted to generally favorable reviews, though many reviewers initially found it derivative of other series such as Mad Men.
In each subsequent season, the series grew in acclaim, and by the time it concluded, critics considered it among the best shows of the 2010s. Despite its critical reception, the series experienced low viewership ratings throughout its run, with only the first episode surpassing one million viewers for its initial broadcast.
We suspect the reason why the latter occurred is because even though it was well-done and depicted an important beginning of the computer age, we’re still left with the troubling question of why should we care?
Probably for reasons that are not readily apparent.
We do care about winning and losing, especially those engaged in what we feel is a hero’s journey.
The creators wanted Halt and Catch Fire to explore what it meant to be considered a success or a failure. There was an interest in the pejorative connotation that the term "loser" carries in American culture, and they sought to redefine how success could be measured beyond binary terms to give their characters more humanity.
In response to their failures, the characters are forced to undergo transformations, both personal and professional. Life reinvention is a major theme of the series.
Which brings us to this new technology called deepfake.
Have you heard of it?
Deepfakes are synthetic media in which a person in an existing image or video is replaced with someone else's likeness. While the act of faking content is not new, deepfakes leverage powerful techniques from machine learning and artificial intelligence to manipulate or generate visual and audio content with a high potential to deceive.
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Deepfakes have garnered widespread attention for their uses in celebrity pornographic videos, revenge porn, fake news, hoaxes, and financial fraud. This has elicited responses from both industry and government to detect and limit their use.
If you are asleep, please wake up.
Why should we be concerned?
Deepfakes have been used to misrepresent well-known politicians in videos.
That certainly has our attention.
Audio deepfakes have been used as part of social engineering scams, fooling people into thinking they are receiving instructions from a trusted individual.
In 2019, a U.K.-based energy firm's CEO was scammed over the phone when he was ordered to transfer €220,000 into a Hungarian bank account by an individual who used audio deepfake technology to impersonate the voice of the firm's parent company's chief executive.
The team at businessinsider.com enlightens, “It's not hard to imagine how this could be misused — a video of former President Barack Obama insulting President Donald Trump doesn't actually exist, but one was created using deepfake tech.”
We can imagine the repercussions of that one.
The informative news and information source cnbc.com adds, “Deepfakes are raising a set of challenging policy, technology, and legal issues. In fact, anybody who has a computer and access to the internet can technically produce deepfake content.”
The business insiders at forbes.com alarm, “Today we stand at an inflection point. In the months and years ahead, deepfakes threaten to grow from an Internet oddity to a widely destructive political and social force. Society needs to act now to prepare itself.”
Some major players are trying to do just that.
Global corporations such as Facebook and Microsoft have taken steps to detect and remove deepfake videos. The two companies announced earlier this year that they will be collaborating with top universities across the U.S. to create a large database of fake videos for research, according to Reuters.
That is somewhat comforting. We wish them much success. For all of our sakes.
On a personal level, yours and ours, imagine the day that you come home and the police are waiting for you because they have hard evidence, deepfake video, that you just committed a murder.
Yes you might eventually be exonerated but look at all of the headaches in the meantime.
With massive social unrest, global pandemics and economic collapse being a very real current problem, do we really need another major threat to civilization?
No we don’t, but it appears we do have one. As little as a month ago, we certainly never heard of it and now deepfake has certainly gotten our attention.
We tried staying engaged with the now expired series Halt and Catch Fire, We just couldn’t. For us, the characters came across as too self-absorbed. Yes the world was on the verge of major innovation but in watching the show, it seemed too much about them as individuals.
We checked out early. Might give it a second chance later. After we go to sleep.
Now if there was a well-written series on Netflix about the very real threat of deepfake technology, which is just in its embryo stages, we would awaken from our slumber and binge watch.
~ ~ ~
OPENING PHOTO grapplingstars.com, femcompetitor.com fciwomenswrestling.com articles, photo-via-MIT-Technology
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halt_and_Catch_Fire_(TV_series)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deepfake
https://www.businessinsider.com/deepfakes-of-famous-movies-youtube-channel-2019-5
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/10/14/what-is-deepfake-and-how-it-might-be-dangerous.html
https://fciwomenswrestling.com/
https://www.fcielitecompetitor.com/
