I missed the anniversary by precisely one year. What anniversary? The anniversary of the blog, in which asserted I was "Not Discouraged" by the results of our SETI endeavor. That 2009 blog imprecisely marked the 15th anniversary of the founding of the SETI League, of which I was founder and president. At the time I had no intimation that we were half-way through our temporal existence. Neither did I know that in the remaining 15 years we would be just as successful as were in the first 15. In October of last year I had the privilege and duty of encapsulating my recollections of our three decades and admitting to myself and to the world that it was the end.

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Who else missed this anniversary? The Seal People. No not the Silkie and his ilk, but the Your Name Here anniversary folk who sent me the 15-year seal shown above. I've had to synthesize a 30-year seal since apparently none will be forthcoming from them, possibly because they came to their own commercial end. I do not personally lament the almost total lack of postal mail arriving at my place of striving. In the past several months I've received solicitations from attorneys hoping to appeal our property tax, and a monthly magazine to which I never subscribed, don't want, and have no idea how to stop. At home it was Vote For Me cards, whose number dropped to zero after the various Mes had won or lost. Now the only people who send paper mail seem to be the cruise purveyors, assuming perhaps that people who have time to cruise don't own computers. The Seal People no longer have any substrate to bear their products.

Consumption

One of the main features of Artificial Intelligence, AI, is that it will relieve the drudgery of writing for those who have to commit reports for upper management, ads for the internet, and, possibly, cruise brochures. And it does! You create a short prompt and a chatbot will produce a multi-page document for the intended recipient. This relieves the prompter from crafting a much shorter report or a few bullet points, and gives him the spare time to create multiple documents, reports, and papers. The recipients have to use AI to summarize the documents, of course, since AI doesn't give them any additional time to digest them in their new abundance. My particular time-related curse is incoming email, whose AI-augmented abundance is growing more irritating by the month. But I'm encouraged that I will eventually be able to sic an AI on my inbox and return to me at least that portion of my life.

Who Are These People?

Have you noticed that nobody ever delivers information alone? Whenever there is a news- or speech-delivery event on the television set, it seems to require a crowd of surround-kicks. Other than the guy delivering sign-language transliteration*, wouldn't that crowd of supernumeraries be better employed exercising their prognosticatory craft than by making wind noises or whatever they're doing back there? And the politicians are worse! They can't deliver a campaign speech without rows of flag-wavers seated behind them. At least those are doing it on their own time.

Hey! I Went to CES!

I guess I'd better think about some reportage. As soon as I recruit a crowd to stand behind me and watch me type, I'll get right on it.

Bonus! Tesla Full Self Driving(Supervised) Report

That's how I got to Las Vegas. My weary driving finger is recovering even as I write. Encouraging progress!

* My recollection was that he was really good and very expressive! Well done, sign-language guy.