Backpool, 1959
S2 E4: Who says time travel isn't political?
Who says time travel isn’t political? Next week’s episode sees writer and comedian Tom GK return to the PastMaster hot seat for his first game as a player and he has political revolution on his mind.
Journeying to Blackpool 1959, Tom heads to the Labour Party conference and attempts to influence Labour’s policies. He tries to shift Hugh Gaitskell’s thinking toward to political centre ground and pull the rug out from under Margaret Thatcher before she rises to prominence.
Will Tom succeed? And with all his political manoeuvring, will he have time meet the Beatles before they become the Beatles?
Find out: Episode 4 is out on Monday 20 November.
Future episodes
We’re delighted to be welcoming Marc Zakian from the brilliant Extraordinary Stories of Britain podcast to PastMaster head office for a recording session. Marc is a history guide and we are super excited to pit his knowledge of Jacobean London against ChatGPT and see who emerges victorious. It’s human guide vs robo-guide.
Does AI exist?
What does artificial intelligence really mean? And does it even properly exist?
The more we play with ChatGPT the more I wonder how intelligent it really is. It creates the illusion of a thinking, sentient being responding to us as we interact with it. But I know that in actual fact it is a programme that simply predicts the most likely sequence of words that follows whatever words you put in, based on analysis of the vast amount of data it has gobbled up and digested.
AI in the news
DeepMind, now owned by Google, has come up with an AI tool called GraphCast which can predict the weather more accurately than traditional methods and does so in minutes rather than hours.
The system normally used for weather forecasting is called numerical weather prediction, which uses complex equations based on physics. These gobble up data from buoys, satellites and weather stations worldwide using supercomputers and crunch the sums to predict the weather. It’s highly energy intensive.
If machine learning can make predicting the weather cheaper and better for the environment, it makes you wonder what might be possible in other areas such as transport efficiency and resource management.
Until next time, Tan and the PastMaster Crew
PS if you’re enjoying the show please, please subscribe on your pod platform of choice and also do mention PastMaster to a friend you think might enjoy it.
PPS You can check out the whole PastMaster back catalogue here. (Tan’s favourite episode is S1 E15 - Aria of Death.)
PPPS if you’ve got any suggestions for what you’d like to see the PastMaster team try next, get in touch:
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