In case you haven't noticed, the late-night talk shows are getting clobbered. Ratings for "top-rated" The Late Show with Stephen Colbert are down 32 percent from five years ago, pulling in a 9 percent share of TV audiences in its time slot. (Maybe it's the lousy skits? Or politics?) Contrast this with The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, which in its heyday drew in a whopping 40 percent of viewers in the same slot.
Speaking of which, there's a new biography of Johnny Carson by Bill Zehme with Mike Thomas. Andrew Ferguson returns to the Weekend Beacon with a review of Carson the Magnificent.
"In good middle-American fashion, he considered privacy a virtue. He refused to discuss his political opinions publicly. And he ignored the temptation, then becoming irresistible for celebrities, to make a display of his emotions. (A Carson joke about a Midwestern husband: 'He loved his wife so much he almost told her.') At the same time he made a running gag of his own marriage difficulties—the gossip columns made them unavoidable—just as the informal ban in family entertainment on the subject of divorce was coming to an end."
"The fame was comprehensive: It's hard to imagine that any American living through the Carson era didn't know who he was. (He even inspired—and this is saying something—the most insane song ever composed by the Beach Boys' Brian Wilson.) For most of his run, The Tonight Show pulled a 40 share—meaning that 40 percent of the television sets in use at airtime were tuned to Carson. Other networks spent decades trying to dethrone him, throwing up one would-be competitor after another, from the unlikely Pat Sajak to Joan Rivers to Geraldo Rivera. Their failure appeared preordained.
"Carson was compensated in sums and perks that would make Croesus blink. By his peak his annual salary ran to $25 million, roughly $85 million today. In return he worked 3 nights a week, 37 weeks out of the year. ... He owned his show outright, along with its mint-like capacity to generate advertising dollars, not to mention the fees NBC paid him to air it. A few weeks of stand-up in Las Vegas could bring in millions more. Even the show's brassy theme song, written by Paul Anka before Carson, exercising droit du seigneur, added his name as co-composer, earned royalties of nearly $2 million a year.
"And, this being a Tinsel Town tale, you will not be surprised to learn that none of it made him a happy man. His home life was a mess, even beyond the four wives and the constant philandering. He had three sons he more or less ignored, then felt guilty about ignoring. After the normal bitterness and anger the sons fell to viewing him with an icy detachment. 'Work was easy for him, family was not,' one of them told Zehme. He took little pleasure in spending his money; his ex-wives and their lawyers took much more pleasure making sure he had less to spend. Abiding friendship eluded him. ... The only relationship he managed to maintain was with his vast audience."
The rest of us can barely maintain a relationship with artificial intelligence! (Okay that's a stretch.) Michael M. Rosen reviews Taming Silicon Valley: How We Can Ensure That AI Works For Us by Gary Marcus.
"'Unless we stand up as a society,' Marcus proclaims in his introduction, advanced chatbots will cause 'the loss of the last shreds of privacy" and "the greater polarization of society,' all while sparking 'a host of new problems that could easily eclipse all that has come before.' This parade of horribles includes power imbalances, unfair elections, supercharged disinformation campaigns, embedded biases, despoliation of our natural environment, even the destruction of democracy.
"Yet most if not all of these apocalyptic-sounding results are not only overstated but find their roots in the humans programming AI, not in the software itself. We are flawed, and therefore, so too is the technology we develop. The solution isn’t to scrap or curb the tools we develop but simply to do a better job of developing them.
"Take as an example the case of Google’s Gemini, a generative AI model designed to create images and text in response to user prompts that, during its emergence early last year, produced a series of nonsensical results. 'It absurdly drew ahistorical pictures with black US founding fathers and women on the Apollo 11 mission,' Marcus observes, because 'nobody actually knows how to make reliable guardrails.'
"But the problem with Gemini wasn’t that nobody knew how to make guardrails, it was that the guardrails themselves were unsound. Google’s programmers hewed to a set of progressive assumptions about racial, ethnic, and gender diversity that proved risible when taken to their digital extremes. 'We got it wrong,' Google’s CEO acknowledged; Gemini’s results 'have offended our users and shown bias.' The company adjusted its human parameters and fixed its technological problem."
Human parameters have always been crucial when it comes to online dating. Haley Strack explains in her pre-Valentine's Day review of Operation Match: Jeff Tarr and the Invention of Computer Dating by Patsy Tarr.
"Tarr was a social and entrepreneurial junior at Harvard University in the early 1960s when he thought up online dating. 'It was a Saturday night and no one would have us but each other, and we were drinking,' Tarr said. 'So [classmate Vaughan Morrill and I] got the idea jointly that we’ll start a computer dating business to find dates.' Ivy League schools were men-only at the time, author and Tarr’s wife, Patsy explains, and the only way male students socialized with students at the women’s colleges was through 'sanctioned mixers or random blind dates.'
"'Meeting people in bars wasn’t even a thing back then—it wasn’t even really considered acceptable. The guys knew there had to be a better way,' Patsy writes.
"A math and statistics whiz, Tarr knew that if he bought computer services from IBM, all he would need was 'a way to collect data and enter it onto punch cards.' Operation Match was so born with a simple goal: 'meet women and make money.' Tarr and his associates, one of whom was Douglas Ginsburg, later appointed to the D.C. Circuit by Ronald Reagan and floated as a Supreme Court pick, sent out personality questionnaires to interested participants. They input the results of the questionnaire into a computer, received for each participant five 'ideal' matches, and mailed the contact information of those five individuals back to the original participant—all for the price of $3. It was up to the participant after that to decide whether to ring his matches."
"With the relative lack of intention found in today’s online dating profiles, apps have beset singles with something called 'swiping malaise'—the state of emotional exhaustion brought on by mindlessly swiping through matches, often accepting or rejecting people based on looks alone. The malaise is one of the reasons people are so exhausted by online dating. In the 2010s the apps were hot places to pick up dates or hookups. Matches hardly make it off the apps now. In addition, the dating app market is over-saturated with a slew of options, all of which essentially lead to the same result: a virtual match and little more."
Happy Sunday.