Our Primordial Future II (in progress)

I just happened upon tthis article while eating huevos rancheros in sunny Burbank CA:

New Computer System Can Read Your Emotions

The system works by analyzing acoustic patterns, like speed of speech and number of pauses and it seems perfectly reasonable that a computer could 'outsmart' me in my lifetime. Thus leads to a clarification of what outsmart really means, because what the system does, if it works exceptionatly well, is exactly what the human system does, so quickly we don't even realize its happening. Its a worthwhile experiment to see how much tone of voice can influence the way people respond to you. We naturally turn away from stress cases and towards more energizing or relaxed sensibilities.

Though its a skill psychologists specialize in, I think reading people should be taught alongside the written word.

And it occured to me that indeed, this system could 'outsmart' us, first and foremost because the skill its being optimized for is not one that western culture has prided itself on excelling in.

As these new iterations of intelligence arise, its a priviledge to be able to look back at the human system and attempt to recognize what its naturally optimized for. To forget the skills we posses as a biological birthright would be a terrible waste of intelligence.

Original article with love from Candilejas (home of the best huevos rancheros I have ever had)

 http://m.engadget.com/default/article.do?artUrl=http://www.engadget.com/2011/11/22/new-computer-system-can-read-your-emotions-will-probably-be-ann/&category=classic&postPage=1 

Wed, Nov 23, 2011  Permanent link

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FIRST EXPERIENCE OBEYING AUTOMATED SYSTEMS

Wroclaw Poland / Puro Hotel

Tue, May 10, 2011  Permanent link

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A funny thing happened on my way to THE FUTURE

The other day I went to buy some EMT at Home Depot. It was just like every other day, until I noticed a small screen with a glowing green LED at the end of the Electrical aisle. I approached it, tapped it, stroked it, tried to discover it's purpose. No luck. It merely displayed an illuminated orange Home Depot logo. A complete waste of plasma. As I walked up to the self-checkout aisle I found myself standing in front of another one of these plasma dumps - only this time, I found myself.




Being surveilled has been common practice for as long as I can remember, but to be confronted with yourself as you try to legitimately make a purchase was quite unique. It was as if the corporate headquarters at home depot decided to emulate those really awkward one way video chat conversations.

Was someone going to pop up next to you on screen if they saw your eyes dart back to the Reeses's peanut butter cups, force you to look yourself in the eyes and try to talk you out of stealing it?

I couldn't really quiet understand how or why this new form of self-surveillance had been implemented. These screens seemed to serve no other purpose. There were was no inventory search functionality, no home depot trivia, no opportunity to spy on fellow shoppers in the shower door department. It wasn't your standard monitor hanging above the entrance and exit. It was some new form of Jiminny Cricket, your only hurting yourself here style surveillance.



The next day I went back to return the items I had bought the previous day, and as I handed over the goods to the woman behind the register I once again watched myself look back at myself as I performed the inverse transaction.

I wondered if this form of consumer reflection made anyone felt righteous about making a purchase. If nothing else it made me feel very identified, as my physical self were being migrated into a vast network of reflections looking out at me from various locations within the store. As if my image multiplied on countless sources scattered throughout any given location would soon take up more physical space than my singular human body.

I wonder if that's the head trip Home Depot was anticipating when they decided these monitors were a worthy expenditure....

Mon, Apr 4, 2011  Permanent link
Categories: social transformation

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The End of the Terminator Era?

In the span of 12 hours I met a young French man playing gypsy music on a saxophone in the park, filmed a rehearsal for an anti-play by 1960s Austrian playwright Peter Handke, being restaged for children by my friend Emily Mast, and attended an event about the current trends in science, specifically related to transhumanism, for an audience of Hollywood screenwriters. Needless to say, you can live in as many different centuries in a day as you can access multiple dimensions (which according to current estimates is up to 12, or infinitely many according to Gleb*). In the strangest way this clash of generations within generations seems be a defining characteristic of this day and age. (And it seems like an age when more effort is being put towards characterizing the passing days than ever before.)

Transhumanism itself is a hodge-podge of scenarios and strategies for enhancing humanity through technology; at least, this is how the hosts of the “Science of Cyborgs” framed the movement at the Directors Guild on Sunset Blvd. I listened as they reminisced about the days when “the heart of cyborgian transhumanism” was the forearm, (more often than not a male forearm), and presented the fairly well accepted refrain The Future Is Now, on the basis of Oscar Pistorius’ Artificial legs.


Wearable Terminator Salvation Toys, basically sums up this entire post.

Next, they introduced one screenwriter and three scientists, whose research was meant to inspire the next round of Hollywood blockbusters. Jonathan Mostow was the first to present, and set the tone by explaining that perhaps one of the reasons the prevailing depiction of evil machines in motion pictures results largely from a deep-seated anxiety about humans losing contact with one another. An interesting theory.

Then up walked a PHD! an accreditation that, given the context, inspired a certain amount of reverence. It may have been just me, but in this context, it seemed like the scientists were 21st century prophets come to deliver an eager audience of culture-makers news from the future.


Epic question from MacIver's PPT

The first presenter Malcolm MacIver, was developing robotic systems based on the movement and sensory systems of a weakly electric fish called the “black ghost weakly electric fish.” This same presenter was a consultant on the sci-fi series Caprika, and concluded with the a clip from his favorite show, Battlestar Galactica, where one character says to another “You said that humanity never asked itself why it deserved to survive...maybe you don’t.” Again, the human audience was asked to question its relevance, but more because of its arrogance than its anxieties. The next presenter, Michel Maharbiz worked on inserting microcontrollers into larvae in order to wii-mote control beetles (seriously), while the fourth and final PhD, Mark Humayun, discussed his work on recovering sight for the blind. Humayun proved to be the only one of three working directly with human systems, and it was his singularity that proved to be one of the most striking aspects of the evening.

While the discussion began by defining cyborgs as machine modified humans, it concluded with how photosynthesis could be inhibited in isolated spinach coroplasts. And it was the final statement from Maharbiz during the Q&A that really defined the evening for me:
“If there’s one thing you should all do when you get home tonight, it’s wikipedia opto-genetics… What you think now is technology is organic.”

This statement seamed to debunk the classical notion of our future as cyborgs altogether in favor of the increasingly seamless integration between artificial and organic systems on a whole. The kind of invisibility predicted by Kevin Kelly in his first book, and a seamlessness that ultimately poses the greatest challenge to Hollywood screenwriters: when biology becomes technological, how will the difference between “us and them” be visualized?

In any case, it’s this integrative perspective of the entire organic system that I find most exciting when considering our future forms. It’s the re-contextualization of our sapience in a larger pool of sentient life that explodes far beyond the singular human frame and, perhaps, marks a closure of the conventionally imagined cyborg era.

Here are a few resounding notes compliments of Glebden.

Wed, Mar 2, 2011  Permanent link

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Empathy >= Survival

While doing some research for a project I stumbled upon this book and thought I'd quickly share some excerpts:


The difficulty lies in the evolutionary process itself. Empathic consciousness has grown slowly over the 175,000 years of human history. It has sometimes flourished, only to recede for long periods of time. Its progress has been irregular, but its trajectory is clear. Empathic development and the development of selfhood go hand in hand and accompany the increasingly complex energy-consuming social structures that make up the human journey. (We will examine this relationship throughout the book.)

What an empathetic education might look like:

Because empathic skills emphasize a non-judgmental orientation and tolerance of other perspectives, they accustom young people to think in terms of layers of complexity and force them to live within the context of ambiguous realities where there are no simple formulas or answers, but only a constant search for shared meanings and common understandings.

What does this tell us about human nature? Is it possible that human beings are not inherently evil or intrinsically self-interested and materialistic, but are of a very different nature—an empathic one—and that all of the other drives that we have considered to be primary—aggression, violence, selfish behavior, acquisitiveness—are in fact secondary drives that flow from repression or denial of our most basic instinct?

[ From Jeremy Rifkin's The Empathic Civilization
The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis ]

Fri, Feb 25, 2011  Permanent link

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Our Primordial Future

M.C. Escher Peeled Faces

"We are flesh—-self-aware, questing, problem-solving flesh."

— Octavia Butler

I had a really exciting conversation with Adam Stieg scientific Director of the Nano and Pico Characterization Lab at the California Nanosystems Institute this evening about his current projects. There was always something about his research that really rung a bell with me, and as he continued to describe his work with artificial brains and stem cells, I had an epiphany. Whether he's attempting to create a "physical brain" using top secret chemical etching techniques, or experimenting with mechanically induced stem cell differentiation, Adam consistently relies on basic physical processes to "artificially" modify (or create) living systems.

Rather than a building an artificial intelligence system out of software or reverse engineering the brain one neuron at a time, he attempts to catalyze a "physical brain" using special etching techniques, basic chemistry and chaotic processes that may or may not yield functional brain-like structures (more info shall be revealed after publication). Similarly, rather than injecting DNA from another animal to induce stem cell differentiation, why not expose the pluripotent gems to the physical environments that they're destined to serve in through machine-driven stimulation? I suppose these very elegant solutions could only come from a forward-thinking chemist, who compared biology to art in its nebulousness. (It should be noted he is also the Scientific Director of the Art|Sci summer program at UCLA).

I suppose it's only natural then that I was immediately compelled to extrapolate this bottom up cell differentiation theory to the highly complex process of human development, recalling a wise Japanese inventor named Dr. Nakamatz who recently introduced me to the idea that our environment and actions allow us to access genetic potential, IE nature and nurture are not opposed, but complimentary. The more experience you subject your human apparatus to, the more access you have to potentialities as yet unknown to you.* And from Adam's perspective, this makes sense because a person is a system subject to the same natural laws as say, the pluripotent stem cell. Then he held up a book on Cybernetics — " the study of systems and processes that interact with themselves and produce themselves from themselves." (Wiki).

Which leads us back to, THE BODY.


Yang Zhichao, Planting Grass, 2002 via The Operating System

In spite of being a severed head wishing on occasion to disregard the body completely, I can't help but be seduced by the thrilling re-cognition that the material world is as manipulatable as it is concrete. Under the right conditions it can be elastic, re-programmed, and re-imagined. The work Adam is doing is definitely on par with some of the best conceptual art in how concisely it opens up the possibility that life, even Artificial Intelligence life, may actually be catalyzed by interactions in the physical world.

Clearly the integration of the internet/computational intelligence (a most harmonious coupling, from which the most user-friendly form AI will most likely be birthed — see Google* and NELL — ) to the total system is crucial. However, when it comes to the future form of everything, technology not only offers add-ons and implants, but also a means of further unraveling and transforming intelligence from the most primordial levels.

Now performing another leap in scale, I would compare this re-conception of the physical world to the discovery of 10 thousand galaxies inside a tiny black patch of sky. Seems to me like the 90% of the JUNK in our genome is another black patch that will hopefully reveal some equally massive new insights. We are continuously looping back on ourselves with fresh information gleaned, "producing ourselves from ourselves." Will runaway AI be catalyzed physically? Will it look more like us or will we look more like it?

The present seems like a breeding ground for the primordial and the high-tech to meet, mesh, and manipulate each other in mutually mind/body/environment altering ways.

As such, it may be apt to conclude by saying that the newest high tech airport security may, in fact, have fur.

Wed, Feb 16, 2011  Permanent link

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The Closest I've Gotten so Far in Making the Internet Tangible

The rest of the material that I attempted to capture through Screenium contained mysterious errors that left me with an unopenable 2.8 GB file containing a sequence of events between myself and a relative stranger that resulted in what we agreed was an unprecedented feeling of physical closeness on the Internet. The circumstance it seems, is not unlike the mysterious hour long tape of Jody Foster's encounter with an alien race in Contact.

10:54 PM
vin: theres so many possibilities for those moments
it feels good
its hard to describe since i had never experienced such moments

10:55 PM
me: i haven't either

10:59 PM
vin: at some point, when in close up, your face became this array of pixels. abstracted face by the slow connection.
me: yeah
the close up
felt close though

vin: it really weirdly did
me: hah

Fri, Jan 7, 2011  Permanent link

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Leaving the Garden of Earthly Delights

Tue, Aug 3, 2010  Permanent link
Categories: severed heads

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Revenge of the Elders

As the aging populations of Europe and Japan come to represent the local majority, it would seem the elderly are posed to reclaim some of the cultural territory they lost to the decades long bias towards youth. And as the search for immortality continues, the extremely old, reverently referred to as supercentenarians, are in the position to become icons as celebrated and admired as the most flawless of pop stars. Edna Parker (pictured below) is one out of 100 people in the Supercentenarian database, whose DNA is being used to study genetic links to long lives.

So, while the ambition of most longevity enthusiasts is to reverse or eliminate the aging process, what if instead, as lifespans increase, there is a renaissance of beauty at age 200+?



Ann Pouder 110 YO England

Maria Capovilla 116 Eucador

Edna Parker 115 YO US

Yone Minagawa 115 Japan

Jauna Bautista 125 YO Cuba

Interestingly, longevity is increasing in Cuba (home to Juana Bautista, the oldest woman in the world) in part due to the winning combination of social programs, cigars, and a healthy sex life.

Sat, May 29, 2010  Permanent link

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What comes after the Internet?

Last night I asked google, "is the internet over?" This was the response (be warned if you have little tolerance for internet gore do not click). The result was both ironic and nostalgic, like a last stand for the unkempt wilderness the internet has been.

As I mentioned on Olena's post, it occurred to me the other night that lawlessness can be extremely beneficial to intelligence and the rapid growth of culture, particularly when it comes to the vast databases of music and movies we've stolen for our edification and enjoyment. It also struck me that those who've directly benefited from this lawlessness are simultaneously the most marketed to generation in history and a generation that's probably stolen more merchandise on a whole than any other group of people living in a semi-functional society.

But I've had a distinct sense for the past few months that the internet is no longer the frontier, that it's well on the way to becoming as practical and depoliticized as the telephone. While cyberwarfare may be making appearances in the newspaper for months or even years to come, it'll more likely be evidence of governmental meddling than radical uprising.

While I don't get off on illuminati flavored conspiracy theories, the use of Facebook friend photos to generate advertisements, in combination with the Supreme court decision, and Google deleting music blogs without warning has made me extremely aware how easily we can sleep through what promises to be (or already is) a corporate chokehold.

While this all seems a little bleak, it's actually rather refreshing to realize. I've been feeling a little coddled by the neverending stream of utopian rhetoric surrounding the internet, which I myself am guilty of propagating, and with good reason! But it seems about time we set our sites on a new frontier.

So...what comes after the Internet?



[ note, this post was written and published as private for a while so the news is old now...but still relevant ]

Sun, Mar 7, 2010  Permanent link

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