Experience the New Experience

Wired has done a great job of presenting both a detailed view of the new "Magic Leap," "mixed reality" technology that's been pulling in huge sums of venture money of late, as well as a fairly comprehensive overview of what's out there now in both virtual and mixed approaches to what will undoubtedly be hot consumer items eventually. The article, "Hyper Vision" is a read that I recommend you take the time to go through. What's coming, along these lines could well be pivotal, assuming, of course a bunch of other bad things don't come along to show us exactly how good nature still is at special effects.

I am always of two minds when it comes to this sort of thing. On the one hand you simply can't have any geek credentials at all if it doesn't excite you to at least some extent. On the other hand, though, is a life worn old voice that reminds me that everything comes as a trade off; usually in ways we can't fully comprehend beforehand, when that first blush of excitement takes the blood away from where its need and makes us dash into the full embrace of whatever the new thing is.

Having read pretty much all of the VR, or MR, fiction ever written I have a keen sense of just how alluring this sort of thing can be. I also toyed with the idea of developing my own version of a VR system; in this case being more of an enhanced simulator than anything else. Think of a centrifuge like they use to train pilots and astronauts with. Then take and put the rotating arm on a vertical shaft, say, at least 30 meters tall so that the rotating arm can traverse up and down along the shaft as needed, while going round and round. Then make the rotating arm itself a traversable horizontal axis so that the modular vehicle cab (detachable so as to accommodate vehicles of any type) can move into, and out of, the center of rotation. And lastly, of course, make that cab be gimbaled 360 degrees in pitch, yaw and roll. Combine that with sufficiently hi res interior display systems inside, and suitably immersive controls and I guarantee you that you would then be left with is a motion simulator that would knock your socks off.

Whether that would be cost effective as a commercial piece of entertainment is another question altogether of course; possibly making it useful only for the military or commercial airlines, but I bring it up now because I never ended up actually wanting to develop it myself (I did try to give it to a certain large software company, when I was there, but they simply ignored the suggestion).

This occurred because of the ambivalence I have come to have for any form of augmented, or completely fabricated, experience systems (a topic I have covered before).

The problem here for me is not that such things would be inherently bad simply because they were engineered experiences. I do, in fact, believe that a great deal of good, and/or utility, may well come from such systems. What I do fear, however, is that they might be made to be so good that the temptation to use them exclusively would become irresistible, and in that will we come to understand just how problematic the tradeoffs already mentioned could become.

As I have said before, experience is experience. In the whole, neither nominally real, or engineered, will necessarily be better, or worse, than the other; either aesthetically or as a practical aspect of living. The main thing that we do need to keep in mind, however, is that both are quite likely to have intrinsic aspects to them that the other does not have. And in that, if we use one to the exclusion of the other, will we risk cutting ourselves off from something very important indeed.

What exactly you might ask? And to that I would have to admit that I don't know exactly what it would be. The thing is, however, it is exactly that kind of ignorance that can kill you, one way or another; especially when we rush to make the assumption that we already know all of what, let's call it natural, experience has to offer; quite an assumption even if we've been immersed in it for so long.

And to illustrate this point I would ask you to consider only one view of how our evolution has forged us into a sensory stance towards natural experience that was never intended, initially, to get all there is to get out of it. This is a a view that has been suggested by people like Robert Ornstein (as in "The Evolution of Consciousness") in talking about how our brains filter out a great deal of what we receive into the higher layers of consciousness. What happens here is that we have a host of what he calls "simpletons" of assessment that were set up to make quick, down and dirty, determinations of occurrence so that muscle memory actions could take place before any potential bad could happen; a circumstance that has certainly provided a good deal of adaptive advantage, but also left us with brains susceptible to all sorts of visual, and auditory, trickery.

The point here is that, even as we have moved quite a bit beyond the pre-social, and into the extensively cooperative social groupings we have now, we have put very little effort into understanding how that filtering may have limited us from fully understanding, or viscerally appreciating, all the energetic exchange that goes on around us; aspects of which may not only be of tremendous emotional, and cognitive enhancement, but also quite fundamentally imperative. Aspects of which, now that industrialization has abstracted, and segmented us out of formerly deep connections with each other, and the natural world, we have begun to feel as vague misgivings to both body and spirit.

So. Bottom line?

Its quite understandable to be excited by these new developments, and to look forward to enjoying them. Just take it all in with some caution. Try to remember that balance in what we do, and how we live, will still be of up most importance. Just as getting lost in the material world of work, money, and all that money can buy, hasn't been all that good for us, or where we live, getting even more lost in the imaginative made effectively real may well not do either any good as well.



HYPER VISION

The world’s hottest startup isn’t located in Silicon Valley—it’s in suburban Florida. KEVIN KELLY explores what Magic Leap’s mind-bending technology tells us about the future of virtual reality.


See Also:

The Evolutionary Argument Against Reality

The cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman uses evolutionary game theory to show that our perceptions of an independent reality must be illusions.

By Amanda Gefter

April 21, 2016

We Absolutely Need a Fundamentally Better Way to Reach Near Earth Orbit...

...And space elevators are still a pretty cool idea. As the Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell video linked here indicates, however, creating one presents some formidable engineering challenges, of which the material that the tether is made up of is only just one.

I have to admit that, even though I recognize the potential such an approach would have, I have never been all that enthused with their long term prospects for large scale, earth to orbit, throughput. It just isn't that efficient on a tonnage to time ratio (two days per traverse each way, with the lifter having definite limits on both size and overall weight each time up), which, given its initial costs, might be a negative when one thinks long term.

What has always amazed me, however, is the lack of consideration given to another possible approach: Using mass drivers to accelerate things into orbit.

I know, these face their own set of engineering challenges, as well as the primary consideration as to where you could possibly build one. To be able to launch large payloads into orbit it would have to be some combination of both a large diameter, as well as a lengthy acceleration barrel. And if humans were to be involved, not to mention any other cargo you don't want to compress into useless junk, or jelly, the longer it is the better as far as acceleration g loading is concerned.

How in the hell would you make such a long barrel, and still have it angled upward appropriately?

Well, as it happens, I have always had a pet idea for just such an approach. You do this by building the worlds first underwater, suspended tunnel, as the launch barrel. And you start by putting the launch base in the deepest ocean trench we can find at, or near, the earth's equator.

I know, recoil, suspension from what exactly, tremendous ocean pressures, just to name a few of the challenges, present formidable engineering problems of their own, but the thing is, going this route not only would be considerably safer long term (with no tether to worry about getting broken and falling back to earth, or whipping around it), it offers a better chance of more throughput over time. And best of all, if you were to pursue hydrogen production at sea with Tornado wind turbines you would already be producing the support platforms with which to suspend the barrel by. Not only that, but you would also be putting into place the production infrastructure to produce those platforms (the modular design of which lends them to mass production far beyond what the oil industry has managed so far) a great deal more cheaply, as well as great deal more rapidly than anything that has gone on before.

And let me just emphasize once more: Going this route also gives you the potential for throughput tonnages far beyond anything an elevator could ever achieve, popping multi hundred ton shots, say, every 10 to 2.4 hours.

I make the point of throughput repeatedly for a reason. This is so because we need to be very clear on the fact that we need launch infrastructure as big and robust as we can possibly make it. And we needed that some time ago. This, in turn, is so because the lead times involved here are tremendous no matter what approach you take and, with not only the list of things that we need to not be doing on planet, that we could do out there, growing, but the number of possible bad things that could happen down here also growing as well, not having options involving very large scales of ability is a prescription to our ultimate demise. And we would be fools indeed if we did not address this lack ASAP.

As always, just a thought.

A DREAM KEEPING OUR HEADS IN THE CLOUDS

Will Space Elevators Really Be Possible In The Future?

24 diggs Space Explainer

Space elevators could drastically reduce long-term costs to space travel, and just sound really cool, but what are the obstacles to their construction?

Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell

The Whole Point of Seeing Things in Perspective

There is no doubt about the fact that what ISIS does is not only brutally tragic, and destructive, but frightening as well. The fact that we get such mega doses of what they do as a part of nightly news all the time doesn't help in regards to the last part, especially as it pertains to the other pressing issues we, and the rest of the world face.

The Digg linked video linked here provides some much needed perspective on this. Perspective we need to keep in mind as we prioritize what we address as a part of national security issues. Obviously, an effectively strong military to protect us has to be one of those priorities, but it cannot, by any means, be the only one. Global climate change, for example, must be one as well.

The interesting aspect to this, however, is that taking coordinated actions to address global climate change could also serve to address some significant aspects of why we create enemies in that part of the world in the first place; as in our dependence on oil as a fuel. If we had a hydrogen fuel economy would we need to concern ourselves with that region nearly as much as we do now? And if we weren't as concerned in that manner, wouldn't it be a great deal easier to demand that other affected nations there do a good deal more in confronting what should be more their problem in the first place? I, for one, certainly think so.

ISIS, OR MARYLAND?

ISIS Is Scary, But Its Size Is Very Exaggerated

7 diggs Explainer Warfare World

Media reports and constant violence around the world make ISIS sound enormous and all-powerful. But how big is it really?

The Atlantic

Tax Returns as Transparent as Mud

And then you have to wonder at the Trump resistance to exposing himself financially. Is he only afraid of being seen as the multi millionaire that he is, or is it a bit more complicated than that? As this news spot makes clear his returns have been so "complicated" that he's been under virtually continuous IRS audit. And in this I have to wonder whether it's only trying to get away with more than a little rule bending. I have to wonder if these records would show, to one degree or another, just how bad, or at least how lackluster, his business dealings have been; a record not so much of IRS law breaking, but of a business man who still has money only because he started out with so much, and because he's played his losses well with the marginal gains he makes every so often (if you fire with the shotgun approach to business ideas that he has shown a tendency towards in the past you're bound to hit something every so often).

Donald Trump Releases Curious Letter on Tied-Up Tax Returns
by ALI VITALI 

He Wants to Build a Wall Around Your Womb?

One has to really wonder here. Is this just an idiot spouting more of what he thinks is tough talk towards an issue he doesn't really care about in the first place, or is this another example of an equal opportunity bully finally having the chance to be the biggest dick on the block that he's always thought himself to be. I'm tending to lean towards the latter now that the Republican fringe, and a far too docile media, have empowered an ego that, until now, was kept in partial check because he's been such a shitty business man; and that despite having inherited a pile of money to start with.

The really scary part of this interpretation, however, is that he wants to extend his sense of righteous bullying to America as a whole; hence his other "take no prisoners" view of immigrants, terrorists, and any other foreign leaders who don't play the fearfully humbled in either his presence, or the presence of what he thinks is our manifest supremacy. This is why his continued support of his campaign manager isn't so much a direct insult to women particularly as it is a pat on the back to an underling putting the bully bat to an upstart reporter who wasn't respecting her place in the order of things. Just as he implicitly supported his chump brigade bullying any protesters in his campaign rallies.

In this context you have to stop and consider what such a bully in power, going far beyond what Nixon ever contemplated with his "Plumber" and "Dirty Tricks" campaign ever conceived of, would be capable of. After all, all he has now are campaign staffers and a cadre of "chump" supporters to do his dirty work for him. Imagine the kind of secret cadre of empowered "Bully Boys" he could put together from the White House. And as you are imagining that remember one further thing: This is what our money corrupted, entertainment as distraction, system of governing, as well as doing business as usual, has come to. Isn't it time to start thinking about a great deal more than just "reform?" Don't you think that it's long past time for fundamental change across the board?

Republicans Increasingly Fret That Trump Escalates 'War on Women'

Ian M. Banks Culture, and the Avoidance of Uselessness

I had forgotten just how sad the first book in the Culture series was. What seems to start as an adventure of a nominal enemy of the Culture; a changer come to be assigned to recover a General Service Vessel ship mind for the Idirans (a huge, three legged warrior race), turns into a heart rendering waste of lives. The Culture agent involved to foil the theft prevails but only barely on the tragic stupidity of the changer, the pirate crew he latches on to by chance, and the extreme zealotry of the Idirans. A prelude, in fact, to the inevitability of warriors losing to what seem like hedonistic dilettantes as far as war fighting goes.

The result was inevitable because, even though the Culture was not directly threatened by the Idiran march of religious conquest, it could not stand by and do nothing. And the reason for that was because "doing good works" was all the society had left to give it purpose, with everything else being provided in abundance by super automation. As the Culture half of the ending  "appendices" in the book explains:

"...For all the Culture’s profoundly materialist and utilitarian outlook, the fact that Idir had no designs on any physical part of the Culture itself was irrelevant. Indirectly, but definitely and mortally, the Culture was threatened… not with conquest, or loss of life, craft, resource or territory, but with something more important: the loss of its purpose and that clarity of conscience; the destruction of its spirit; the surrender of its soul.                            

Despite all appearances to the contrary, the Culture, not the Idirans, had to fight, and in that necessity of desperation eventually gathered a strength which—even if any real doubt had been entertained
as to the eventual result—could brook no compromise..."

So a part of what we may have here is s cautionary tale about what the limits of automation ought to be. It is, I think, part and parcel of an axiom of mine: "Woe be to those who become too separated from that which sustains them." Which is both to say that A: lose connection to truly understanding, and participating, in what keeps you going places you at risk of either catastrophic failure, or equally bad manipulation by agencies that have no concern at all about what is in your best interest; and B: If you are not fully connected any longer in any aspect of what has always been our main challenge to growth, what are you really for at all; aside, of course, from merely taking up space and consuming various things and distractions"

There is something else, however, in this book that needs observation and consideration. You see the first outlines of it when Mr. Banks gives us a description of the processing power of a ship mind:

"...The Mind had an image to illustrate its information capacity. It liked to imagine the contents of its memory store written out on cards; little slips of paper with tiny writing on them, big enough for a human to read. If the characters were a couple of millimeters tall and the paper about ten centimeters square and written on both sides, then ten thousand characters could be squeezed onto each card. In a meter long drawer of such cards maybe one thousand of them—ten million pieces of information—could be stored. In a small room a few meters square, with a corridor in the middle just wide enough to pull a tray out into, you could keep perhaps a thousand trays arranged in close-packed cabinets: ten billion characters in all.  
 A square kilometer of these cramped cells might contain as many as one hundred thousand rooms; a thousand such floors would produce a building two thousand meters tall with a hundred million rooms. If you kept building those squat towers, squeezed hard up against each other until they entirely covered the surface of a largish standard-G world—maybe a billion square kilometers—you would have a planet with one trillion square kilometers of floor space, one hundred quadrillion paper-stuffed rooms, thirty light-years of corridors and a number of potential stored characters sufficiently large to boggle just about anybody’s mind.   
In base 10 that number would be a 1 followed by twenty-seven zeros, and even that vast figure was only a fraction of the capacity of the Mind. To match it you would need a thousand such worlds; systems of them, a clusterful of information-packed globes… and that vast capacity was physically contained within a space smaller than a single one of those tiny rooms, inside the Mind…"
.
This is interesting to me because it illustrates a particular bias towards what is involved with intelligence. In this bias it is always the greater capacity of not only items that can be stored, but the sheer speed with which the items can be compared, collated and given relational significance; all aspects of intelligence just as logic, and the reasoning of cause and effect are, but are they all that's involved? In this one also needs to consider the contemplation of meaning. Vast amounts of reasoning power, with equally vast arrays of facts, are not necessarily superior to the creative use of meaning, and the ideas that stem from it; especially when starts adding layer upon layer of abstraction to come up with great systems of interactive process. When you then add the aspect of choice, understanding metaphor and meaning become very important indeed.

I make this observation because it never ceases to amaze me how otherwise very smart people get so obsessed with the idea that machines will inevitably transcend human intelligence. How can this be when humans have yet to transcend the fearful, territorial, hording mentality of the savage? What will we create if but nothing more than faster, and more capable of coldly calculated survival, and the ever expanding material requirements to sustain that.

Perhaps, if we make the first transcendence of our own baser instincts, we can grow our own thinking capabilities far beyond what they our now; and do it in a way that still keeps us connected to life in general, as well as all of the positive aspects of what it is to be human. Remember, Phlebas was the Phoenician who drowned in T.S. Eliot's "The Wasteland," section IV: "Death by Water." If we give ourselves up to whatever all encompassing environment, is there really nothing more to say about it? Are we nothing more than the mere facts of our physical being? If you believe that then life must really be a cold, meaningless slog through pointless fear and deprivation. Even then, however, I still don't see how the machines would make it any better.

Just a thought.

The Racial Bias of Roads, Transit Lines, and Red Lined Loan Districts

Harold Innis published "The Bias of Communication" back in 1951. In it he outlined how the various forms of communicating, as well as the channels such communication, or interaction if you want to see it a bit more broadly, flowed through, affected the very nature and composition of societies. A very influential work that had great impact on how Marshall McLuhan would come to formulate his own advancement of a media centric approach to history and social/psychological development,

McLuhan's introduction to "The Bias of Communication" is very informative here:

"Most writers are occupied in providing accounts of the content of philosophy, science, libraries, empires, and religions. Innis invites us instead to consider the formalities of power exerted by these structures in their mutual interaction. He approaches each of these forms of organized power as exercising a particular kind of force upon each of the other components in the complex."

I mention this now because I have been reading an article by Alec MacGillis that puts the effect of this kind of power into stark human terms. The article, "The Third Rail" relates the history of white flight from Baltimore as cautionary tale of how racism, and real estate greed, came to influence the demise of the very first, truly extensive, streetcar system; precisely because it allowed for unrestricted migration of upward scale blacks to where ever they had the will, and new economic means, to go; something the people of a borderline, North/South state would not tolerate.  And rather than run them out on rails, they would take the rails away, and build expressways for the burgeoning auto that would encircle the city and, along with restrictive county rent voucher rules, as well as red lined loan districts, make black isolation be both physical and economic. as well as nearly absolute.

As I have said before, everything is connected, even when you try to thwart the connections. The bottom line here is a simple equivalency: failed states, or failed cities, the difference is one of only size and geographic location. The resentments, and hatreds that build up from such disorder bring trouble your way no matter how much you try to barricade yourself in suburbs of denial. And perhaps much worse, the very act of this denial, the forgetting of the historical injustice perpetrated, turns you ever colder, and less human; ripe ground for even further excesses of greed and the trampling of the rights everyone deserves.

Please read this article. Remember the history recounted here. Consider it the next time you here or see the cliche response, either in movies, or news reports, that the ghettos of whatever city are simply the fault of those stuck in them, for whatever assumed failures of character. Environments of despair, so carefully engineered by those in power, present obstacles to overcome to challenge any character set. Just consider, if the racial roles had been reversed, how many of us whites would have fared any better.

The Third Rail

In Baltimore, public investment — and disinvestment — in transportation have figured greatly in the persistence of racial and economic inequality.

See Also:

HAROLD ADAMS INNIS:THE BIAS OF COMMUNICATIONS & MONOPOLIES OF POWER