shop-class or genie back in the bottle

Though sometimes touted with great optimism as the desk-side Industrial Revolution, democratizing manufacture and taking the power away from big business (and one ought not to curb one’s aspirations on this account), invoking how inkjet printers did not put the publishing magnates into arrears Wired! magazine presents more of a tamed but nonetheless important speculation on the possibilities of 3D printing with modelling to help artists and artisans perfect their final product.
Sort of like confronting a first draft with red ink and the necessary detachment from one’s own words, 3D modelling and experi- mentation allows one to explore folds, contours and stresses nearly as on the native media and approach the potters’ wheel, as it were, with a bit more confidence. But what do you think? There’s probably much to be gained by the return of cottage-industry or the ability to assert some independence from the factories and sweat-shops or even one’s warranty and service-agreement by being able to produce one’s own quasi-unauthorised replacement parts. Perhaps the desktop revolution did not occur with printing and self-publishing (at least, not to order) in part because the presses were so cheap but the ink so dear. Designing our own printers, however, perhaps we won’t let that short-coming materialise, unless we are placated with instant delivery on demand and the tumult of obsolescence.

automatonophobia

The brilliant Kottke, maker of fine hypertext products, introduces us to a new type of uncanny valley in the form of composite three-dimensional masking.
While trying to capture the essence, the thing in itself, of personalities or politicians, one found that a sort of ventriloquist’s dummy is created and despite transferring personæ to different individuals, the original speaker still reverberates through gestures and facial expressions that come across as familiar and recognisable but look awkward and alien on the face of another. The eeriness and conflicted vocal cues is probably best illustrated in the video demonstration of the technique with talking-heads and statesmen found at the link above. The fear of anything that impersonates a living being is called automatonophobia (as in an automaton), which can include wax-figures and mannequins too.

rapture-ready or recursive self-improvement

In the labour market, the concerns about mass redundancy due to advances in robotics is undeniable and computing has gotten quite good at putting on at least a friendly persona, a clever mask for its subroutines that make it possible for the user (client) to engage with it.  Maybe humanity’s enduring and abiding mystery is a bit of a conceit itself, and surely the spark of conscious, self-awareness is dulled some if it only amounts to a convincing though banal chat with an automated customer service telephone tree, judged effective if the result is customer satisfaction.

The Singularity does not necessarily follow—and if it did, artificial intelligence won’t partake of the same negative and positive aspects of human character—on it’s own accord, at least, and needing human agency—like greed, ambition, kindness or curiosity that we would like to ascribe to it. Such an incubation period, even if at infinite speeds, does not given guarantee a survival instinct or evolutionary drive—gestating in an environment where it can only know, if know at all, those traits as abstractly material. There may only come a point when the robotics industry has taken all the jobs, writes sitcoms and the news, are our interstellar ambassadors, controls the economy and the defense apparatus—but by Jove, they’ll still be us curmudgeonly humans, managed but still with the advantage of being conscious, whatever benefit that affords. Maybe the Singularity is like the way that some fundamentalist Christian sects interpret the Rapture, the End of Days—for those not left behind (that is, made unemployable by the robot masters) they’ll be the chance for some sort of ersatz biological or uploaded immortality. What do you think? Are we just forever refashioning our hopes and fears?

5x5

rook to queen’s gherkin: the skyline of London in chess pieces

ossuary: sojourn around the world to reveal how the dead are kept among the living

blue harvest (dead link): Chinese theatres screen Star Wars saga for the first time nearly four decades after its release

consider yourself part of the furniture: aspirational lamp aims to earns its keep, like a character in Pee-Wee’s Playhouse

border-control: colourful gallery of world’s passports

warp and weave or venus in blue jeans

Via the splendiferous Kottke comes report of the latest technological collaboration of the wearable type in the form of Project Jacquard and the amazing, technicolour dreampants.

While it’s probably at best misleading to suggest that these new touch-sensitive textiles come in many colours or own any heritage to the that thermochronic experiment of the late 1980s that seemed to go underground (or even mood rings, which have seen a revival), having apparel that clothes one in a second, interactive skin, the Generra brand was the first thing I thought of. These new materials, however, are not to meant to interact with one’s body alone—though I imagine that true dreampants could be self-tailoring and will probably be laden with the soon to be standard compliment of vital-sign monitors and check one’s overall circulation and admonish the wearer if he or she becomes too big for his or her britches—but are moreover extensions of one’s distilled quiver of gadgets. One’s jeans and shirts would become control-panels and beacons for one’s electronic frontiers as intuitively (or not) as any other state-of-the-art implement.

bypass or great big convoy

Via the ever-excellent Kottke comes this rather profound study and projection of how self-driving vehicles will alter the economy and particularly the gas-food-lodging infrastructure built to support commercial trucking. While it does not take much boldness to imagine a phalanx of safer, more efficient robot guided convoys taking truckers out of the drivers’ seats as it has already come to pass, but the impact does not of course stop with this last lament of middle-class bread-winners.
The article is written from an American perspective and by analogy compares the seismic changes that could occur to those communities that the interstate freeway system passed by and withered for the sake of expedience, but I think the analysis is completely universal. With manufacturing increasingly retreating into yonder tightfistedness, goods are forever being shuttled back and forth. Consuming merchandise created and delivered by machine, vast swathes of the human workforce (and ultimately, all of it) become redundant and without access to meaningful employment. The untenable situation is accelerating to an important junction, wherein either there is no demand to satisfy the production-capacity because no one has the tender to pay for it or money becomes a rather meaningless trifle and in a utopian society, humans are at last allowed to enjoy the fruit of their labour. I suppose that’s precisely the point of progress but it is hard for me to imagine that the robber-barons might herald this event joyfully—especially if they knowing ushered in their own severance. What do you think? Will those automated cars drive us all off a cliff or make our existence better by abolishing capital?

rinse cycle

A group of clever engineering students in China have come up with a concept for a stationary bicycle with a workout routine that doubles as laundry duties. The design is still in its earliest phases and there are some obvious hurdles to its manufacture, like plumbing but hopefully in short order, rows of exercise bikes might start appearing in wash-salons and in laundry rooms. The drudgery of both chores is sure to be compounded by being tethered to dirty clothes for the entire duration but it might equally provoke thought on each task, making the environmental impact a little less through peddle-power.  Be sure to check out the link for more bright ideas whose time has come.

spermaceti

Reflecting on all the terror and ravages of petroleum and how we’d all like to make do with less providing that the industry take the commanding lead, I do suppose fossil-fuels are a better alternative than what sustained humans through the period of mechanisation and urbanisation, whale oil. Before advent of kerosene and the harnessing of vegetable oils, whale oil provided illumination in oil lamps and was a staple in cooking and the product of the waxworks organ in the heads of whales was used for candles and cosmetics. The animals were nearly hunted to extinction until substitute products became cheaper to obtain. And although the legacy of petroleum production and the rampant expansion it has enable probably will cast a longer shadow, at least the inhumanity with the slaughter has relented. We are still jerks but maybe a little more civilised about it.

moral-compass

We are already in possession of a psychological rather than psychic bridge of telepathy in the form of empathy, and Æon magazine questions whether computer-aided telepaths might engender more misunderstandings than the resolve, what with the forced intimacy that constantly makes tiny course-corrections to align one’s moral-thinking.
People are already wired to be both vicarious and viral but those influences are well-mediated by our own ideas of self and the limits of expression that lannguage limns. Despite whatever parlour-tricks (and some very helpful and promising applications besides) that science has induced—and not to say that the research in neurobiology is not an important one and that we ought not to be introspective especially for the sake of helping the disabled, but we know very little still about how the mind works and probably could not well cope with being fully integrated into some network to keep our feelings on tack and steady forward. What do you think? Would complete transparency encourage sympathy—or quite the opposite?

the devil and the deep blue sea or bright lights, big city

The always intriguing BLDGBlog reports on the experimental use of a chlorophyll-based compound that’s employed by some denizens of the ocean’s depths to see in the perpetual blackness, distilled into eye-drops that may allow humans enhanced night-vision without goggles or other special equipment. Research and efficacy is a pretty guarded topic and those oily, black eyes are pretty off-putting. In his signature manner of launching into all sort of exciting potential prospects—and not just the obvious military-industrial applications of surveillance—the author ponders how such super-powers, should these tests pan out, might give us heretofore dimmer urban environments, using less energy and resources to limn us nightly in a good light.

bell-hop or pole-position

It struck me as an odd coincidence that I would be addressing the same subject about driverless cars with a co-worker on the way into work this morning—first commiserating how the lanes and the concept of right-of-way kind of get tossed aside when people are in a rush, and then moving on to the feasibility of self-driving automobiles and the question of fault for misjudgment and malfunction.

I declared, with auto-pilots already being tested in trucking, once, just like with the horseless-carriage, the infrastructure is established, human drivers won’t be street-legal for very long, operating under impulsive and unpredictable protocols. Like with those swarming insects or birds of a feather that someone manage to avoid collisions amid the chaos and guided by an instinct or perception that we cannot penetrate—in fact, the only accidents that seem to transpire end up on our windshields, the traffic of the future won’t admit any margin of operator-error. How do you feel about that? Are we being robbed of a freedom, leisure or will the idea of allowing people to maneuver lethal machinery without controls in place seem barbarically irresponsible and a dare-devil stunt that no one would voluntarily attempt? I especially liked futurist Mister Musk’s analogy to an old-fashioned elevator (lift) operator and how those bedecked and courteous engineers were replaced by push-button automation. I think this machinery behind the scenes is a good comparison for what we may be leaving behind.

whetstone or rolling-stock

The incomparable BLDGBlog has a feature called “Intermediate Geologies,” where artists have reversed engineered an ore, a nugget out of discarded circuit boards and other electronic detritus. Of course, whether as accoutrements or artefacts, the metallurgical composition was always present, but it is an interesting demonstration of another, less invasive approach to mining and the importance of scrap and salvage. The author speculates that, like burning the midnight oil in an attempt to outwit a Rumpelstiltskin and to eke out a bit of pocket-change—real work versus rather than a proof-of-work incentive scheme, people might keep the equivalent of rock-tumblers churning for extended periods, panning for gold.

jam tomorrow and jam yesterday

Indeed, attention is probably the scarcest resource there is—at least by our own estimation, as we absolutely rush, harried through our daily routines, ushered by those gadgets designed to be more fleet of foot and to help us help ourselves—but surely it’s a cultural quirk, a weakness or vanity that can be appealed to like any insecurity.

As with any other matter of pride or conceit, there is a price to pay—perhaps not so obvious to the buyer and beholder, whereas it might be mockingly apparent to those outside looking in. The family of inmates—I think, is growing. This essay from Æon Magazine certainly gives pause and make one think about the idea of allotted time. Technology is both a flatterer and a heckler—our schedules, how we use time, has probably never been allowed to be so idiosyncratic, and yet there’s a dual passage of it, both incredibly slow and incredibly fast and with the same seconds, minutes and hours to savour as before, that synchronises very disparate agendas. Innovation, even when made to bear awful burdens of chauvinism, covetousness and myopia, is not imagination and generally re-enforces the society that creates it. Far from the great, relentless oppressor its easy to characterise it to be, those productivity tools that are sometimes thrust upon us (but usually willingly accepted and even sought out), and just insistent reminders of what’s left yet to be done (or what could be done) and closed-out. It is OK to leave something pending—and has been always, although ignorance or forgetfulness can no longer be substituted for avoidance and procrastination.

livery and latchkey

I wonder if there is a public shame-registry of unmarked white vans. Should we make such a thing? Suspiciously—though probably only in truth relegated to the wilds of my imagination, this one “delivery” vehicle has been parked opposite my apartment’s balcony for almost a week already and I can detect no sign of activity—other than the interior lights were on the other night and one could see the rear windows illuminated through the plastic tinting.
I tried to stare it down last night but nothing came of that standoff.  Rather than building a registry, I suppose, snapping a picture probably is more likely to tattle on the observed with hidden, backmasked Q-R codes, camouflaged in the white to off-white of the van’s paint (which is a pretty scary concept, that one’s scanning in invisible data with a digital sweep of one’s surroundings). I guess, however—thinking back to a funny, chance separate incident—there are other ways to have one’s cover blown.

dovecote or invasive-species

I wonder if we could enlist pigeons or some other urbanized wildlife to act as a take-down, shock troop to dispatch with swarms of drones, without harming the pigeons or turning them into roving access points, of course—or rather than dog-fighting it out, perhaps equipped with signal jamming devices. I bet house-mice—and the whole domiciled food-chain, would not appreciate others scrounging around in their crawl-space one bit, and I wonder if some evil genius would even need to train them—or would the pigeons and other vermin, seeing their air-space and territory invaded, do this spontaneously on their own accord.

positronic-reinforcement

The New Yorker has a nice, succinct piece on the recent demonstration of the artificial intelligence DeepMind, whose talents draw from two sources, a deductive network of filters and positive-reinforcement.
The program—instructed with only the protocol that winning was good and losing bad—dazzled the human audience with a stellar progression on a platform of classic arcade games with some very masterful and unexpected strokes. It is not that DeepMind is inside the game, like when one challenges the game, but separated like a human player, and quickly devised a sure strategy. The program, however, did not perform quite so well with certain games—like Ms. Pac-Man, and the handlers weren’t quite sure why. Some disparaging voices checked their enthusiasm, as milestones like Deep Blue beating a chess grand-master or Watson winning against Jeopardy! quiz-masters. These achievements, though not coddled and not insignificant, came about, however, through extensive coaching, whereas DeepMind is learning on its own. What do you think? Is growth going to be exponential and get very quickly out of human hands?

blast me barnacles

Possibly surpassing spiders’ silk for its tensile strength, biologists may have discovered a new candidate for a new class of more efficient and durable housings and casings in the humble but unmoveable but not immoblie limpet.

This sea-snail has evolved a rasping, conveyor-belt type of tongue called a radula in order to graze on the rough surfaces of inter-tidal rocks, plus to keep it in place whilst being bashed by waves or pried at by predators. Researchers found out that what’s preventing the snail’s drill-bit “teeth” from being ground away is that the creature’s chemistry incorporates nanoscopic fibres of a mineral called goethite, named after that Goethe, who was also an attested rock-hound, having assembled the largest collection in Europe. Such refinement was unexpected and is inspiring.

hindsight bias or temporal paradox

Back in late 2000, a man calling himself John Titor, claiming to be a time-traveler from the year 2036, began appearing in chat-rooms and on-line forums, presenting the world with a litany of the terrible things to come—which certainly seems to violate the popular understanding about causality but sometimes the timeline and canon is disdained for lesser things. Though we are living in a sort of post-skeptical world where most agree that perpetuating future-fraud would be quickly smacked down and the internet is not a hiding-place, I still feel a little cheated for not knowing about this fantastically fun and possibly didactic anecdote. Though Titor’s stop in the year 2000 was just a detour, an authorized-delay, after accomplishing his main mission of retrieving a piece of legacy hardware from a quarter of a century earlier, which was reportedly had the needed fix to inoculate computer systems of his time against a fatal programming bug that had ravaged the contemporary technological landscape, he did make a nostalgic appearance online to entertain questions and issue some dire warnings—one being that one ought to avoid eating beef since, owing to the decades’ long incubation period, mad-cow disease would not present in the human population until Titor’s day and age.
Another, more timely announcement—which most have seemed dismissibly distant back then but probably inversely interesting since the internet was new and fresh and we were innocent and curious about what it might mean to have the world shrink through the sharing of ideas and experiences rather than finding that that shrinkage can also lead to things like compartmentalization and ennui that there’s less unique about us than we’d like to admit (Titor, if there’s even an internet for humans in the future, could have been prescient about that too I suppose)—was that there would be an atomic exchange between the US and Russia in the year 2015 that would be known as World War III.  These pronouncements are quite different than the predictions of Nostradamus, not vague by design but maybe a little evasive, and not just because they claim the authority of experience but also in that if anything does not unfold as Titor said (like the civil wars that were to occur in 2006 and 2012 that was to split the United States up into five separate countries), it still cannot be refuted as wrong, since his time-travel affected the future, as planned. The engagement ended abruptly after four months, and though there has not, I think, been a continual following—bits and pieces of this strange story resurface now and again and spark a resurgence that’s not only in the dismantling and maybe the desire to find resolution, since those interrupted mysteries are the ones that haunt.

desk-job

Via the nonpareil Neat-o-Rama, comes the next phase of office furniture engineered to make one jump out of his or her chair, a surfboard like foot rest that requires one to constantly readjust one’s weight and make small shifts in one’s posture to remain upright.
It’s a clever idea and I bet it would be much more fun to rock and keep one’s balance rather than just standing still or going through a litany of sitting, standing and kneeling like one’s at Mass—but sometimes this idea of healthy ergonomics makes me want to jump out of my skin sometimes. I would imagine that the goal of all of these subtle and not so subtle changes to the work environment is to eventually allow us to redeem the virtues of being able to rest one’s feet and work in a setting not buffeted by distraction and walking the high-wire. The office is a venue for combating our general laziness and inactivity because we’re rather captives for what someone has deemed our own good, never mind that being seated—or even lying in bed is probably more conducive to creativity and productivity and fitness ought not to start or end at work. Besides, I think the layout of the office, even as a sandbox for collaboration, is changing too quickly for any of these sedentary iniquities to really take root.

geofencing and defenestration

The always splendid and visionary BLDGBLOG presents an excellent survey of the coming electromagnetic moats that are being created to thwart off the remote controlled cat burglars known as drones.
It ought not come as any surprise that constellation of technologies that enable the good guys to keep us safe also comes off the shelf for the potential deployment and home- invasions, casing the joint from a safe distance. The number of black sites for GPS navigation devices is growing as are signal-jamming equipment create permanent and impromptu force fields. I suspect, however, that whatever counter-measures are implemented, new methods for getting around those drawbridges and portcullises won’t be far behind, including navigation by more traditional methods, orientation without being tethered to a human operator and completely autonomous missions (replete with exhaustive demographics) with no need to report back. I wonder how the the physical façade of suburbia and gated communities, exposed and set apart from the concrete jungles that might provide some natural defenses and more barriers to overcome, might change to support this firewall fortress.