Kurzweil, You Big Douche.

I’m tired of Ray Kurzweil being touted as the King of Transhumanism.  Yeah, I guess he defined and popularized the Singularity concept.  But he spews predictions like a pez dispenser, rarely sparing a moment to back up anything he says with reasoning.  And if he’s not going to show the thinking behind his predictions, then all that’s left to judge are the predictions’ accuracy.  Now that the calendar is advancing far enough, we can actually do that.  And it turns out his predictions suck.

See this article from IEEE Spectrum: http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/software/ray-kurzweils-slippery-futurism/0

Minions Functional.

I got to a nice milestone last weekend. The Minions player software can now do all the same stuff that the old MP3 players could, but with centralized control via the Scene Manager software. So from Scene Manager, I can:

* Load MP3 audio onto the players.
* Set audio volume
* Set voice gender
* Start and stop audio playback

I could run the old Machine Control Experiment program on the Minions software now, and the setting up of players would be less of a hassle. My goal is to add interactive features next so that the program can be made more interesting.

Simplifying Travel

Points of travel for Machine Control Experiment

I’m on vacation in Kauai with Brittany.  Although its fun to lay around in front of a beach all day, I like to keep my head busy.  So I popped out a notebook and started scribbling up thoughts on the Minions software I’m working on.

One of the parts I want to simplify with the new system is moving subjects around to different points in the scene.  The current Machine Control Experiment takes some care not to put two people in the same place at the same time even though we can run up to four people simultaneously.  Still, it is easy to make mistakes and end up with a couple people competing for physical space.

What I want to do is model the physical world inside Minions and let the software route people around in trouble-free fashion.  Minions doesn’t need to know that much about the space.  I think I can abstract the scene area into interconnected nodes.  So if I take the graph shown in the figure above, which matches the scene area we’ve used for Machine Control Experiment at the CSPC, then one location can be modelled like:

• Name: Viewing Area
• Capacity: 4 people
• Connection to Excursion Point (Capacity: 1 person)
• Connection to Supply Station (Capacity: 1 person)

Locations need a maximum capacity of how many people can be there.  In our viewing area at CSPC, we’ve set up four chairs for people to sit in and watch a hypnotizing movie of a red robot.  If somebody gets up from the viewing area to walk to the Excursion Point, its only easy for that person to walk out if he’s the only one leaving the Viewing Area.  So I say that the connection from Viewing Area to Excursion Point just has a one-person capacity.

With these capacities in mind, I can have a little piece of code in the program that says:

• travelTo(“The Witness”)

…and the trip all the way from the Viewing Area to The Witness will be booked, checking for capacity problems on the way, in much the same way you book an airplane flight.  If the booking fails, then the program will get that information and send the subject to some other audio that keeps them waiting in place for maybe 20 seconds before attempting another trip.  During that idle time, the subject might be fed background information about Machine Society, read robot poems, or something.

Once the trip is booked, Minions can patch together pieces of audio in telephone menu fashion to instruct the subject on the route to take from the current location to the final destination.

-Captain Erik

Minions Software

Minions Scene Manager - Early Shot

I’ve been using a lot of spare time to put together new software for running machine control scenes.  Basically, people involved in the scene, a.k.a. “subjects”, will wear a mobile device that plays audio.  I’m about 75% done with the control software that coordinates the actions of multiple people in a scene area.  So instead of the linear, inflexible progression of instructions that I have with the MP3 players, I’ll be able to have the program instructions respond interactively to subjects.  In the screenshot above you can see what I’ve got going so far.

The Compound Functioned Properly.

Myself and friends went to Burning Man, built the Machine Control Compound, and entertained something like 50 people.  Pretty much everything we set out to do got d0ne.  Towards the end of the week, Brittany and I were figuring out new stuff to do for next year.  The script seemed to confuse or trouble about a third of the people.  I guess it could be tailored to the BM crowd.

For now, I’ve stopped running events at the CSPC.  I’ll go into R&D mode for a bit, I think.  I’d prefer to come back to the club with something different and  improved instead of running the same show again.  I also want to stop investing time in MP3-player-based and move on to mobile-device-based.  Once the framework is built, there are incredible things that can be done with it.  I.e. track where subjects are in the scene space, and route them to avoid collisions.  A lot of tricky timing issues have to be handled with the scripts that run on the MP3 players.   I’d rather it be handled on the fly with flexibility by a computer program.

Burning Man theme camp confirmed.

Some BRC person e-mailed today with approval for our Burning Man theme camp, Machine Control Compound.  Brittany and I had worked on the application like it was for getting into Harvard.  We even got advice on filling out the form from these guys that run the Suspended Animation camp.  And then we didn’t hear anything from Burning Man people, yet everyone else but us was posting announcements about getting their theme camps placed.  So it made me a little anxious, but now we have 50 x 100 foot parcel of land to build a temporary compound on with help from friends.  It will be like the Branch Davidian compound in Waco–but sexier, with robots, and hypnosis.  Okay, it will be nothing like the Branch Davidian compound.

Giving up on Human Nature

Have you ever seriously considered giving up on human nature?

In a way, it’s something more terrible than suicide.  It’s the idea that your entire species is not worth having around.  Imagine George Bailey was shown a glimpse of Bedford Falls without any humans in it.  Maybe the whole town was run by a bunch of otters or robots or snails.  No Uncle Billys or Mr. Potters.  And then picture our man George, in one of his tired and angry moments, saying, “Well, phooey on you all!  I say phooey on the whole screwed-up mess.  Why… we’d all be better off if the human race never showed up in the first place!”

I won’t trot out all the reasons why people lose faith in human nature, but at the root of most of them is the idea that we are self-doomed.  Maybe we create societies where a large number of people are unhappy and uncared for.  Maybe we will blow ourselves up with a nuclear bomb.  Maybe the world will heat up from all the particles we’ve spewed in the air and slowcook us.  It seems to a lot of people, me included, that we’re not the best stewards of our own futures.

Self-doomed.  It can make you weep.  ”Why do you keep hitting yourself?”  There is no other army to claim victory over.  No opposing team to beat in a glorious stadium.  No external threat to rally heroically against.  You can split up the humans into different groups so you’re on the good side and others on the bad.  But if you pay attention, you’ll notice people in your group, maybe even you, doing the same stupid shit you hate.   A thoughtful person is going to smack hard against this idea sooner or later: “them” and “us” divisions are artificial.  It’s really just “us”, the humans, and the humans aren’t doing so great.

What I’m noticing lately is a lot of people that are particularly distrustful of their fellow humans.  And interestingly, the more radical that conviction is, the more likely they are to be in one of two camps:

* Luddite – Do things simply, slowly, without the aid of technology.  Farm your own veggies, hang your clothes out to dry, turn off the TV, fuck Facebook.  Tech solutions waste more resources and put power in the hands of corporations and institutions already to blame for our problems.  Reliance on those neatly-packaged products has lost us an important connection to nature and how the world works.

* Technologist – The big, threatening problems will be solved by resourceful people wearing coveralls and lab coats.  And the root problem of humans making messes in the first place will be fixed by transcending human nature.  For some, this salvation comes from equipping humans with powerful tools that change how they interact with the world.   For others,  a literal transformation is wanted: pump us full of nanites, hack our genes, plug our brains directly into the internet.

The first camp says we’ve gone too far.  The second camp says we haven’t gone far enough.  Neither one is happy with the current definition of what it means to be a human.

I met a lady on the internet recently that prefers the world be run by artificially intelligent machines, with humankind losing its place as the dominant species.  In fact, she claims to be working on early steps of this solution now.  She’s a successful entrepreneur, owns data centers, and plans to throw a lot of time and money at this work.  Maybe she will.

Personally, I feel like some confused combination of luddite and technologist–ready to be amazed and delighted by wonders of man, yet watching that my soul isn’t stolen and replaced with something cheap–polyvinyl chloride, maybe.  I love humans, but I don’t trust the things they do.

-Erik

2010.05.07 Machine-Controlled Mating 1.0

We will be at the next Asylum party at the CSPC on 5/7/2010 using technology to create new human mating rituals.  For the mating, we will have self-selected threesomes undergo a half hour program where audio instructions are given to direct an erotic massage between the three.  One of the three subjects gives and receives attention with the other two.  The other two do not exchange attention between themselves.  Subjects can choose to hear the audio in a male or female voice.

We will be scheduling 8 sessions between 9pm and 1am.  If you’d like to participate, please find two other people to do it with you, and send an e-mail to info@machinecontrolnow.com to schedule a session.  We will also run sessions for people that walk up without prior scheduling, as long as there are open times available.  If you want to certain you get to do it, then definitely e-mail me to pre-schedule.

This is at the Center for Sex Positive Culture, a private club in Seattle.  You will need to be a member or be the guest of a member to join the party.  And this means arriving earlier on one of the days that they have new member orientation.  More info about attending the Asylum party can be found here.

The Choreographer

My friend, Touch, has started working on the choreography for the next Machine Control event. And “choreography” is the right word. So far, the programs have moved subjects along independent paths, but for our next event, the subjects will be touching each other sensually as part of their instructions. To write this kind of script, you have to model in advance the positions of subjects at each moment in the program. I.e. where each subject is, which direction he is facing, if he is sitting/standing, etc. I imagine it will be a fairly challenging task, even for Touch.

Somewhere down the line, maybe this year, I’d like to have software making decisions and issuing instructions like this in real-time. So far, we have been simulating a machine intelligence controlling people. But I’ve got plans to do it for real.

I Don’t Want to be a Douchey Hypnotist

I often use hypnosis in the Machine Control projects. It’s a useful tool to put people in a state where they follow instructions without worry or self-analysis. Hypnosis is also good hook to get people to participate. Everybody has some kind of idea about what hypnosis is. So if I say that the weird thing I do has got hypnosis in it, then I can spend less time convincing and explaining.

Still, there is an uncomfortable amount of baggage that comes with it. I’m a skeptic with a scientific mindset. I spent a lot of my youth around religious authorities that were fakes and liars. I’ve seen these swindlers work crowds and perform “miracles”. It took the first 20 years of my life to get my head clean of that crap, and I now have a quick-rising hatred of anyone that sets out to fool others.

Which means I would hate myself if I fooled people too.

Hypnosis works best when the subject believes it will work. If the subject perceives the hypnotist as being masterful, then the subject is much more likely to go under and get the full effect. There is a dirty secret here too: Sometimes, the subject will even cover for the hypnotist, thinking things like “I want to be part of a successful hypnosis with this guy, and bringing up my doubts about what just happened will undermine that.” It generally helps the hypnotist to assert his prowess and always be optimistic about what he is undertaking.

But it isn’t hard to cross over to dishonesty, I.e. “I can hypnotize anyone,” or “There is no possible way you can resist.” And the false idea of the hypnotist having this kind of power can in itself be appealing and sexy to both subject and hypnotist.

So I’m trying not to be one of those douchey hypnotists that makes claims beyond actual capabilities. You may not go into a proper trance during one of the machine control experiments. But that’s okay–the programs are designed to be enjoyable even if you aren’t fully under. And Google this common statement to understand what is really going on: “all hypnosis is self-hypnosis”.