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Kryzys pasywności

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Z powyższych powodów postrzegam Youtube’a za jedno z największych zagrożeń internetowych, przed którymi może stanąć dziecko. Pal sześć, że będzie chodzić po stronach, po których nie powinno, nie przeszkadza mi nawet, że trafi niechcący na jakieś nieprzyjemne bannery – ale Youtube to dla dziecięcych umysłów narzędzie spłaszczające i zobojętniające bardziej, niż cokolwiek innego w internecie. Sposób na uniknięcie jakiegokolwiek wysiłku, metoda na ominięcie przeszkód, ale niestety równocześnie obsadzenie naszego dziecka w roli pasywnego, apatycznego widza, który trawi kolejne filmiki z Minecrafta, w którymś momencie przestając je od siebie odróżniać. Nie mam nic przeciwko telewizji jako takiej, ale tam program lub odcinek serialu zamknięty jest w jakichś ramach fabularnych, o coś w nim chodzi. W filmiku z Minecrafta chodzi tylko o to, żeby na niego patrzeć. To apatia i bezmyślne siedzenie przed monitorem. Tym samym monitorem, na którym można uruchomić własnoręcznie Minecrafta i wybudować coś pięknego.

za pomocą Kryzys pasywności | parenting.pl.

Czy roboty mają osobowość i uczucia?

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In a recent posting I raised the possibility that a system that simulates a brain at a deep level may, to all appearances, have consciousness and feeling. For instance, a robot of the future could appear to be a human being, both physically and behaviorally, but have no protoplasm. Its brain, say, simulates a human brain at a deep level but, once again, can be distinguished in some physical way from natural wetware. Under these conditions I, once again, offer that there would be no compelling reason (as usual barring some fundamental new discovery about reality) not to regard the robot as possessing true consciousness and feeling.

za pomocą The Personhood of the Technologically/Differently Sentient.

Klęska urodzaju – gdzie pchnąć słitfocię kotka?

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Given the proliferation of options, how should I document this cat?

For some, though certainly not everyone, this question is becoming increasingly difficult to answer. The most obvious answer is “don’t document that cat. Enough already.” I’m with you. I’m concerned about how social media documentation changes experience [see here, here, here, here]. I think there is good reason for why these types of documentation proliferate: most importantly, to be on social media in all its various forms is, for many, to exist. PJ Rey does an excellent job at explaining why it’s not so easy to just opt-out of all of this. In any case, this is not a post about whether this expansion in the ways of documentation is a good thing, but asking if there is a cognitive limit to all of this. So, again: How should I document this cat lying next to me?

Is she documented textually, in a tweet, or a Facebook status? Is it a photograph, and if so, with a nicer camera or with my smartphone? Instagram? Facebook? Or perhaps this is better a Snapchat, self-deleting and shared with one person? Or maybe a Lytro photograph that allows the viewer to change the focus after the fact, shifting the emphasis at will from her face to her tail? Or perhaps her tail-wagging is best captured in a soundless moving GIF using the popular GifBoom app? Or maybe make a Vine, the current “hot” app we may or may not be talking about a month from now that allows for short, quick-cut, looping videos. Many of these apps will come and go, but what is important is that photographs, video, text, and audio are being recombined in different ways for different audiences, putting a heavy load on our documentary consciousness.*

za pomocą Documentary Oversaturation » Cyborgology.

Techno-dystopie

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Ciekawa sprawa – twórcy i techno-utipiści wierzący w pozytywny wpływ rozwoju technologicznego na nasze życie zaczynają zmieniać zdanie. To już kolejny zaobserwowany przeze mnie przypadek.

Czyżby po zachłyśnięciu się osobliwością, pozytywnym zaćpaniem się technologią przyszedł czas na zjazdy, walkę z uzależnieniem i smutnymi brakami środków na koncie bankowym?

…the way Google translator works, for instance, is a graphic example of how a giant just takes (or “appropriates without compensation”) and monetizes the work of the crowd. “One of the magic services that’s available in our age is that you can upload a passage in English to your computer from Google and you get back the Spanish translation. And there’s two ways to think about that. The most common way is that there’s some magic artificial intelligence in the sky or in the cloud or something that knows how to translate, and what a wonderful thing that this is available for free.

“But there’s another way to look at it, which is the technically true way: You gather a ton of information from real live translators who have translated phrases, just an enormous body, and then when your example comes in, you search through that to find similar passages and you create a collage of previous translations.”

“So it’s a huge, brute-force operation?” “It’s huge but very much like Facebook, it’s selling people [their advertiser-targetable personal identities, buying habits, etc.] back to themselves. [With translation] you’re producing this result that looks magical but in the meantime, the original translators aren’t paid for their work—their work was just appropriated. So by taking value off the books, you’re actually shrinking the economy.”

za pomocą What Turned Jaron Lanier Against the Web? | Arts & Culture | Smithsonian Magazine.

Dlaczego ludzie nie są mądrzejsi?

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The evolutionary pressure selecting for general intelligence (to the extent that general intelligence exists) breaks once a species develops language.

And a logical corollary of this hypothesis is that we are only just smart enough, on average, to be capable of horizontal transfer of memes. Once language and culture arrived (note specialized usage of term ‚culture’), we didn’t need to get any smarter: we could „borrow” from one another. Therefore we’re only just smart enough to do this.

za pomocą The Anthropic Stupidity Hypothesis – Charlie’s Diary.

Jaki komunikat wysyła Warszawa?

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„Great cities attract ambitious people. You can sense it when you walk around one. In a hundred subtle ways, the city sends you a message: you could do more; you should try harder. […] How much does it matter what message a city sends? Empirically, the answer seems to be: a lot. You might think that if you had enough strength of mind to do great things, you’d be able to transcend your environment. Where you live should make at most a couple percent difference. But if you look at the historical evidence, it seems to matter more than that. Most people who did great things were clumped together in a few places where that sort of thing was done at the time.”

Jaki jest komunikat Warszawy? Dla mnie to chyba „bądź sprytniejszy„. To hasło ma w sobie dużo wartości pozytywnych – bo pokazuje zaradność, ambicje i wszystkie dobre cechy charakteru moich znajomych, jak i też cwaniactwo, kombinowanie i chamstwo, z którymi się niestety można tu spotkać.

za pomocą Cities and Ambition.

Steampunk to tylko moda

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…steampunk is an aesthetic, not a genre. It’s a color palette, not a subject. It’s context, not content. It’s the facade, not the foundation. Something is steampunk regardless of what’s under the hat.

Which, again, is not to disparage steampunk or make it any less whatever. Let’s be clear: steampunk is cool. I will happily eat it up with a spoon. I will read it, play it, watch it — one of the easiest ways to attract my attention is to wave the steampunk flag, and I will promptly arrive to sample whatever it is that you are serving up.

za pomocą Steampunk is not a Genre | joshroby.com.

Agorę widzę

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Na GamesIndustry.biz wywiad z Danem Hsu – byłym naczelnym EGM – swego czasu jednym z najważniejszych pism o grach wideo w USA.

„Even Ziff-Davis media, they didn’t do well because they were so focused on print, even when their online was becoming prevalent. They weren’t as aggressive as a new company that was online-only would be in that space. Print was still making them money, these are brands they’ve invested heavily in, these are properties they’ve had for a long time. It’s hard for these old-school companies to give that up really quickly, be very mobile about these decisions and move right into online. At Ziff-Davis, for example, we knew we had to get into online, we put money into 1Up, we built 1up.com. You could still tell we didn’t want to give up on print, we just never gave online the same kind of chance as say a company like IGN did, which was 100 percent online. The IGNs and GameSpots of the world have no print properties to bog them down.”

Games media’s big challenge: „It’s hard to monetize all the content” | GamesIndustry International.

Starego EGM już nie ma. Ziff-Davies zamknął, potem odsprzedał prawa komuś innemu, kto ponownie pismo wydaje. Nie wiem czy z jakimiś sukcesami. 1UP też zostało sprzedane i straciło dużo na znaczeniu.

I tak to czytam i widzę Agorę.

Korporacje rządzą światem

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We are now living in a global state that has been structured for the benefit of non-human entities with non-human goals. They have enormous media reach, which they use to distract attention from threats to their own survival. They also have an enormous ability to support litigation against public participation, except in the very limited circumstances where such action is forbidden. Individual atomized humans are thus either co-opted by these entities (you can live very nicely as a CEO or a politician, as long as you don’t bite the feeding hand) or steamrollered if they try to resist.

In short, we are living in the aftermath of an alien invasion.

za pomocą Invaders from Mars – Charlie’s Diary.

Seks w kosmosie – da się?

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Why is space a terrible place for sex? Sexual desire is likely to be curbed by the physiological effects of space flight, such as space adaptation syndrome (onset within 2 hours, and persisting up to a week, experienced by 2/3 trained crew and 85% of those less well trained; includes headache, nasal congestion, dizziness, nausea, vomiting without warning); anxiety about the dangers of space, busy work schedule, lack of privacy. Male  rats experience a decrease in testosterone levels (to less than 20% normal) and this is likely true also for human; anemia, fluid loss, reduced autonomic nervous system function, especially sympathetic tone (needed for climax in both men and women); reduction bone and muscle mass; sex in space may require significantly more energy and higher risk of fractures.

Sex in Space: How Do We Manage To Do It? | Book View Cafe Blog.

Electronic Arts idzie w kierunku mikrotransakcji

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„Od lat mówi się przecież, że gra to nie jest produkt, tylko usługa i jako taka powinna rządzić się nieco innymi prawami niż “kupiłeś pudełko, więc dalej nic nas nie interesuje”. Obecny model jest moim zdaniem najgorszym, jaki może być. Muszę kupić kota w worku i nawet do końca nie wiem, czy zainteresuje mnie całość zaoferowanego pakietu. […] Tak naprawdę chciałbym kupić tylko kawałek gry. W myjni samochodowej spodziewam się paru pakietów w rozmaitych cenach i tego samego oczekuję od gry. […] Czego się zatem spodziewać? Nikt nie zaryzykuje drastycznego obniżenia cen gier do zera (Moore tak mówi w wywiadzie, ale musi tak mówić właśnie), za to uważam, że rozsądne byłoby ścięcie cen o 30-40% i zaproponowanie “mikro”transakcji gdzieś w środku.”

Świetny tekst na Zagraconych, polecam lekturę całości.

Electronic Arts idzie w kierunku mikrotransakcji | Zagraceni.pl – Blog graczy 30+.