DawnOfNewEverything
Dawn of the New Everything (Jaron Lanier)
- Entertaining. Learned a lot about VR.
- Shared lucid dreaming. A way out of the dull persistence of physicality. This thing we seek, its a way of being that isn't tied just to our given circumstances in this world.
An argument for why VR will never become "better" than the human nervous system: The universe doesn't have fine grains, and the body is already tuned in as finely as anything can ever be, when it needs to be. (eg: individual photons for seeing)
Approach rather than arrival is what makes science realistic.
After understanding that a deterministic game like the Game of Life could produce unforeseeable results, a dark anxiety I had felt melted away. There was no longer tension between determinism and free will. If the only way to know the future was to actually run the universe, then it no longer mattered to my philosophy if there was a deterministic floor to the thing. There might or might not be. We could never know, from inside the universe. Moot point.
- Vision has dominated culture for a long time. Until recently vision connected generations. Whole academic departments are devoted to distinct visual disciplines like cinematography, typography, photography, painting in its many guises, graphic design, and so on. We love to talk about what we see. It might take generations before we fully internalize how obsolete visual dominance has become in the Information Age. Whoever has the best computer cloud will watch everyone else with superior intensity from now on. One's own eyes are increasingly beside the point.
- Experiencing VR with slow computers: Users would graciously slow their movements, usually without realizing it, to give the sluggish sensors and computer graphics processors time to catch up. Glove wearers experienced time distortion: Users thought they were in the VR would for less time than they actually were. This was a cute demonstration of how the brain uses the rhythms of the body to measure the passage of time.
- Bluntness is good in the design of information devices. Power relationships are unavoidable, but are always more ethical when they are stated clearly.
- The rise of the web as a source of optimism and inspiration: The first time in history that millions of people had cooperated to do something not because of coercion, profit motive, or any influence other than the sense that the project was worthy. If we could fill the Web out of thin air, maybe we could solve our big problems
An AI entity is a non-real-time avatar, and that is what allows for the illusion that it isn't an avatar at all. The people from whom the data was taken are no longer in the room when an AI program is run, so its easy to imagine that the AI program is a free-standing personage instead of a reflection of human data, capital, and agency.
- We understand math, but we dont understand what understanding is. There's no scientific description of an idea in a brain at this time. Maybe someday, but not yet. We're capable of forgetting that we dont understand. We confuse ourselves easily.
- Source code is somewhat readable as if it were a story about what the computer is supposed to do. Its more like a legal document detailing the precise course of action the computer must take in order to not fail. You have to become a robot to program a robot.
Its virtually impossible to flip a bit in an unforeseen way in a present-day program and create a small improvement. Doesn't that mean we're using bits wrong ? (Counterpoint what about ML training? )