This week we continue our conversation with technology critic Sara M. Watson about the “uncanny valley of personalization.”
Download and Notes: Mindful Cyborgs:
Page 16 of 682
New from me at Wired:
Automation is also framed as a way to make law enforcement more efficient. A red light camera can catch a lot more violations than a human can.
The rub is that extreme efficiency isn’t necessarily good thing. That’s what a group of researchers argue in a paper presented earlier this year at a conference on robot law in Miami. They go so far as to argue that inefficiency should be preserved, even increased, as we move to automated law enforcement.
That may sound counter-intuitive, but in the end, it makes good sense. Woodrow Hartzog, an assistant professor at Samford University’s Cumberland School of law and co-author of the paper, tells WIRED that, in some cases, making law enforcement less efficient just means putting humans back in the loop, allowing room for “inefficient” human judgments like mercy and compassion. “A robot can’t forgive certain infractions that are generally accepted,” he says.
Full Story: Wired: Why Robocops Need to be Less Efficient Than Human Coaps
Vox reports:
The last night Salam Sheikh could sleep was Sunday. That was before Islamic State fighters marched into his home city of Sinjar, in northern Iraq, defeated 5,000 Kurdish fighters within an hour, and made Cheikh’s family prisoners in their own home.
Now when the 28-year-old calls his three sisters and his disabled mother, more than 6,400 miles away in Iraq, they speak only in whispers. Speak any louder, they fear, and ISIS fighters might overhear and realize they are still in the city.
Sheikh and his family are Yazidi, part of an ancient religion with about 600,000 adherents around the world, mostly in Iraq. About 200 Yazidi families live in the United States, half of them here in Lincoln, Nebraska, where they began settling after the first Gulf War.
[…]
The Yazidi, who have been persecuted for centuries, say their cultural memory includes 73 attempted genocides. The Nebraska-based Yazidi fear they are watching the 74th from thousands of miles away.
“It’s worse than the war,” Sheikh says.
Full Story: Vox: The genocide 6,000 miles away: America’s Yazidis watch and wait, fearing the worst
See also: Wikipedia entry on the Yazidi
This week we talk with Sara M. Watson, a technology critic and fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, about her piece in The Atlantic “Data Doppelgängers and the Uncanny Valley of Personalization.”
Download and Full Transcript: Mindful Cyborgs: Visualizing Data Destinies with Experts Pt 1
Above is a look at my interactive noise art installation at the Weird Shift gallery in Portland, Oregon. I call it “Experiments in Psychetecture.” I don’t want to give too much away, and I’m feeling lazy about trying to describe it. But here’s the basic idea behind it:
Typically, a Psychetect performance would consist of me playing with this ensemble in front of a group of people. But I’ve never been entirely comfortable with this arrangement, since to me the main work that goes into the piece isn’t the final improvisation that goes with a setup, but the construction of a setup. This installation gives me the opportunity to simply let the people formally known as the listeners perform for themselves, while cutting me out of this finally step entirely.
But if you want to hear a performance using it, Weird Shift co-organizer Adam Rothstein made a recording with it that’s available as part of the first episode of Weird Shift Radio, which you can download here.
To play with it yourself, visit the Weird Shift gallery:
201 N. Alberta St
North Portland, Cascadia
97217Weekdays: 3pm – 9pm
Saturday & Sunday: 1pm – 4pm
It’s closed today to setup new works, but will be open again tomorrow and my piece should be there until the end of the month, or until it breaks, whichever comes first.
(Special thanks to Justin Landers for the use of the drum cymbal and Nolan Ashley for the use of the Korg NanoKontrol)
As I’ve mentioned before, when things get quiet on Technoccult it’s usually because I’m struggling to keep up with my day-to-day work. And I have been lately, but I do feel like I’m back on top of things, at least for a moment.
Still, I don’t have a lot of media to share. Part of that is because I’ve been busy, and part of it is that I’ve been recoiling in disgust from both general news and tech news lately. I’ve been spending what little spare time I’ve had lately reading about ancient mythology and revisiting my interest in the history of that thing we call “magic.” Of course that’s escapism, but is there really anything wrong with that? (Neil Gaiman says no).
It seems like I’m not alone. Joshua Ellis writes: “everyone I know is brokenhearted.” This may have something to do with our particular social circles, but I’ve noticed this too.
Though it’s hard to say exactly how new a problem this is. After all, about 2,500 years ago, Prince Siddhartha got similarly fed up with the pain and suffering in the world and dropped out of life, became a Sramana monk and eventually founded Buddhism. He may never have existed, but there are a huge number of scriptures attributed to his teaching. Enough different ones, apparently, to justify genocide.
I refer of course to Jack Kornfield’s recent article on Burmese Buddhists attacks on the Muslim minority in their country. Kornfield doesn’t have much to say about the situation other than that it’s bad and that the Burmese don’t really understand the teachings of the Buddha, which sounds overly simplistic to me, but it’s still worth a read. (See also: Buddhism is not a democracy movement).
Other stuff I’ve read lately:
- Thai Buddhism: Magic, Money and Murder
- The Role of the Magic in Buddhism, with special reference to Ch’an (Zen)
- Was the Buddha a Shaman?
- Aztec Philosophy (also)
Currently reading: Mockeries and Metamorphoses of an Aztec God: Tezcatlipoca, “Lord of the Smoking Mirror”
The Awl reports:
Whatever power of Spinks’ entrance had immediately evaporated when a deafening drone of noise started swirling in the air. As it crescendoed into a maddening roar, the crowd at the Atlantic City Convention Center arched to follow the procession of men, all cops and security guards, emerging out of Tyson’s locker. Tyson, bare-chested and already soaked in sweat, slowly materialized from the back and meandered to the ring, barely blinking. The broadcast announcer Bob Sheridan, struggling to define the scene, played it straight: “It’s interesting Mike Tyson selected as his pre-fight music just noise; every once in a while you hear the clanging of chains. I think that’s what he’s got in mind to do to Mike Spinks’ head, but we’ll wait and see. Everything that Tyson does is intimidating.”
The “noise” was in fact a song by the British band Coil.
Full Story: The Awl: A Man Walks into a Boxing Ring
Via Metafilter, which casts doubt that the song was in fact by Coil. I can’t really hear it very well in the video, so I’m not sure, but I don’t think it’s the Sergio Cervetti song that one of the Awl commenters suggested either.
My latest for Wired:
Instead of using pure mathematics to prevent things like the same person spending the same money twice, Document Coin will rely on personal reputation to keep all transactions in order. And each unit of currency created using Document Coin could have different values in different situations. If you use a coin in one place, it might be worth more then if you use it in another. The goal, Anderson says, is to get people to completely rethink the entire idea of money. […]
Unlike with bitcoin—which keeps its currency scarce by rewarding it only to those who participate in what amounts to a race to solve complex cryptographic puzzles—anyone will be able to create a new Document Coin anytime they want. The value of each coin will be completely subjective, depending on who creates the coin and why. “For example, the coin my disco singer friend created and gave me at my barbeque might be what gets me past the rope at the club,” Anderson says. A coin minted by tech pundit Tim O’Reilly might be highly prized in Silicon Valley circles, but of little interest to musicians. “It’s a bit like a combination of a social network with baseball trading.”
Ultimately, he hopes to get developers thinking about the social implications of crypto-currencies, and to get people to question the idea that everything needs to have a set, numeric value. “If bitcoin is the toy version of what we’ll all be using the future, then I want to build the crazy art project version of the future,” he says. Document Coin’s usefulness as a real currency is limited, but Anderson does hope people will eventually want to use it. “If you build something, you don’t want to be disappointed if it succeeds,” he says. “You need to build things that you would be happy to see take off.”
Full Story: Wired: A New Digital Currency Whose Value Is Based on Your Reputation
Previously: My interview with Anderson about CouchDB
Above: Fuller’s diagrams. Below, a diagram of graphen molecules.
My friend Trevor, who maintains the largest known archive of R. Buckminster Fuller’s work has uncovered an unpublished manuscript in which Fuller seems to predict graphene computers:
Fuller’s computer is a layered cuboctahedrons, each layer made of spheres. Fuller describes the spheres as glass coated with gold, silver, copper or
aluminum depending on their location in the array. But Fuller also speaks of individual atoms of these materials, predicting by decades the nanocomputers under development today.These layers of cuboctahedrons would have arrays of hexagons on their equators, and the nanocomputers of today are made of layers of hexagons. The fifth layer of a layered cuboctahedron of spheres would have the potential for a new nucleus sphere.
Full Story: Syncrhonofile: R. Buckminster Fuller’s Ultra-Micro Computer
I can’t say that I fully understand the material at hand. Fuller’s work seems to be focused on memory and storage, while today’s graphene computation research is focusing on the creation of more efficient transistors for processing. But there does seem to be at least some overlap. The fact that he was even thinking about computing at all in 1968 puts him well ahead of the curve.
See also:
CRXTO is an Argintine artist. Above is a piece inspired by Hakim Bey’s Temporary Autonomous Zone. Below is Technoccult’s long lost patron Tezcatlipoca. Below that is the Yagán spirit Curspi.
You can find more on his site and even more on his (sometimes NSFW) Flickr account.
(via Sorry Zorrito)
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