Posted by: lettrist on: November 17, 2009
The following four vignettes have stuck with me since I watched them first in 2006, following the worldwide curiosity pique with the virtual world phenomena. As a filmmaker, when I first explored virtual worlds I wanted to document their religions like an anthropologist. I planned to make an hour-long film about the religious centers and [...]
Posted by: lettrist on: October 12, 2009
As machines talk to other machines, they may uncover facts and relationships that are not apparent to people. That may enable factories to “learn” and find ways to become more efficient. They may enable the industrial work site to operate autonomously, without the service of human labor. Could these machines also [...]
Posted by: lettrist on: October 6, 2008
Second Life, one of the online virtual economies, has developed from earlier models such as Norrath, and what made SL unique is that its platform consists of one contiguous reality with streaming architecture that allows for “dynamic, collaborative creation” on a single world, as opposed to many copies operating independently on various servers.
Second Life has [...]
Posted by: lettrist on: September 15, 2008
A video that I (edited?) for work.
“Technology is not ancillary,” says Geoff Proehl of the UPS Theatre Arts Department, “I think its central [to teaching]“.
The snippet was a very good leftover clip from an earlier interview with this professor of dramaturgy. He begun a few years back using wikis and online collaboration devices to keep [...]
Posted by: lettrist on: May 8, 2008
“When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.”
- Samuel Johnson.
One of the disturbing things about death is that it is usually the cause of tremendous fear and anxiety. Or more generally people call this stress. One psychiatrist, George Vaillant, who has studied the stress and depression [...]
Posted by: lettrist on: April 10, 2008
It seems clear to me that the next stage in informatic integration is to break down the barriers that exist between the innumerable platforms and content online. The next stage should be a “mash up” of everything that exists so far, so that all the redundant content is no longer separable. For example, as an [...]
Posted by: lettrist on: January 14, 2008
A cuddly gremlin-looking humanoid unit known as “Leonardo the Lovable” was produced by the MIT media lab in conjunction with Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) a few years ago. Furry little Leonardo and other robots that use “socially-guided learning” systems were featured on a 2005 Scientific American Frontiers show. And Leonardo’s older brother, Kismet, [...]
Posted by: lettrist on: January 2, 2008
The BBC actually created this program in October of 2006. It’s a very accessible introduction to transhumanism and human enhancement futurism.
I was surprised that the BBC had a section on deeply embedded institutions like DARPA (the double-edged sword of technology) which seek to use enhancement technologies to develop a police state panopticon. The program also [...]
Posted by: lettrist on: January 2, 2008
Last night on New Year’s Eve I was hanging out at my older brother’s house in Magnolia, where I met a friend of his who is working towards a Ph.D. in neuroscience. His particular field involves creating neuro-computational models of the brain, which I found very fascinating.
Though I’ve written a lot on this blog about [...]
Posted by: lettrist on: December 23, 2007
Emerging technologies are expected to create a multiplicity of psychological modes of being. This is known as neurodiversity. In general the right to one’s own psychological state of mind is not recognized, while freedom of thought is. Thoughts are physiologically represented by brain states. If one does not have the right to alter one’s own [...]
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