Just in Case...

More -

If anyone's reading this and hasn't watched "More" by director Mark Osborne, do yourself a favor and give it a whirl- it's only 6 minutes. (When this link is no longer good, you can probably find it on youtube.)

It's one of those films that becomes more and more relevant every day. Especially amazing is the fact that in 1998, he basically spelled out all the happiness and woe that's still about 15 years out when AR glasses really take off. Of course scientist and writers had been speculating about similar concepts since the 40's but for me Osborne really captures it in all its corporate, florescent light- "packaged BLISS" - eventually highlighting the fact that people can even tell something's wrong in the way their view of the world has changed, but alas...

Project google goggles is called google GOGGLES for a reason.

Fountain of Youth

NewScientist has a nice article talking about the possibility of immortal life through an avatar by digitally capturing your personality. Like we've talked about before, this would be viewed by your descendants or loved ones after your death in order to give them a momentary sense of comfort/respect.

"Ultimately, however, they aim to create a personalised, conscious avatar embodied in a robot - effectively enabling you, or some semblance of you, to achieve immortality. "If you can upload yourself into this digital form, it could live forever," says Nick Mayer of Lifenaut, a US company that is exploring ways to build lifelike avatars. "It really is a way of avoiding death."

...Like many people, I have often dreamed of having a clone: an alternative self that could share my workload, give me more leisure time and perhaps provide me with a way to live longer.

How my avatar looks may in the end matter less than its behaviour, according to researchers at the University of Central Florida in Orlando and the University of Illinois in Chicago. Since 2007, they have been collaborating on Project Lifelike, which aims to create a realistic avatar of Alexander Schwarzkopf, former director of the US National Science Foundation.

They showed around 1000 students videos and photos of Schwarzkopf, along with prototype avatars, and used the feedback to try to work out what features of a person people pay most attention to. They conclude that focusing on the idiosyncratic movements that make a person unique is more important than creating a lifelike image. "It might be how they cock their head when they speak or how they arch an eyebrow," says Steve Jones of the University of Illinois.

Equally important is ensuring that these movements appear in the correct context. To do this, Jones's team has been trying to link contextual markers like specific words or phrases with movements of the head, to indicate that the avatar is listening, for example. "If an avatar is listening to you tell a sad story, what you want to see is some empathy," says Jones, though he admits they haven't cracked this yet.

The next challenge is to make an avatar converse like a human. At the moment the most lifelike behaviour comes from chatbots, software that can analyse the context of a conversation and produce intelligent-sounding responses as if it is thinking. Lifenaut goes one step further by tailoring the chatbot software to an individual. According to Rollo Carpenter of artificial intelligence (AI) company Icogno in Exeter, UK, this is about the limit of what's possible at the moment, a software replica that is "not going to be self-aware or equivalent to you, but is one which other people could hold a conversation with and for a few moments at least believe that there was a part of you in there".

...Lifenaut's avatar might appear to respond like a human, but how do you get it to resemble you? The only way is to teach it about yourself. This personality upload is a laborious process. The first stage involves rating some 480 statements such as "I like to please others" and "I sympathise with the homeless", according to how accurately they reflect my feelings.

...One alternative would be to automatically capture information about your daily life and feed it directly into an avatar. "Lifeloggers" such as Microsoft researcher Gordon Bell are already doing this to some extent, by wearing a portable camera that records large portions of their lives on film.

A team led by Nigel Shadbolt at the University of Southampton, UK, is trying to improve on this by developing software that can combine digital images taken throughout the day with information from your diary, social networking sites you have visited, and GPS recordings of your location. Other researchers are considering integrating physiological data like heart rate to provide basic emotional context. To date, however, there has been little effort to combine all this into anything resembling an avatar. We're still some way off creating an accurate replica of an individual, says Shadbolt. "I'm sure we could create a software agent with attitude, but whether it's my attitude seems to be very doubtful," he says."

iDollators

While surfing the wrong parts of the internet again, I've stumbled into some research being done for lifesize sex dolls. In case anyone is still in the clear, please make yourself feel at home here in the gutter: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-7277801797935788405#

So these things are slowly gaining the ability to walk/talk in very rudimentary, creepy style, still very much stuck within the uncanny valley. Safely assuming that technology for voice recognition, speech synthesis, emotion detection, facial replication, etc. progress at a realistic rate, at some point we'll have something convincing enough that it will start to create quite a few social problems.

On a somewhat related note, here's this video from a while back showing research being done in human-humanoid interaction. Since things will progress, imagine the humanoid as a sexy fembot and the human with sleek, unobtrusive HUD glasses.

Innovation Blues

So I attended this "TechCrunch: Disrupt" event last week by agreeing to work for free in exchange for a ticket (usually $3k or something ridiculous).

Disappointment.

Out of 100 start ups, I'd say 70% were something completely mundane: "so with youtube and other current video hosting sites, you're required to convert to certain formats and limit your videos to a certain length- us? No limits."

27%, including the company I was working for, were relatively interesting but at least a year late and in no way revolutionary- basically just slightly more efficient combinations of pre-existing Ideas: "alright, this is like youtube but it's mobile, geotagged and social." etc.

The remaining three companies were actually interesting. One was called uJam, which is some sort of app where you can sing a song and then hear it orchestrated with background music. When I stumbled upon their exhibit I was actually a little pissed because I felt like they had stolen my idea from a while ago: "In another situation we're in a group hanging out on the street. Our devices know we're together talking. Suddenly one of the more inebriated amongst us breaks out into song- a drunken rendition of the latest top 40 hit. His device quickly runs a song recognition on what he's singing to identify a possible match, based on what it knows he's listened to lately and in the past [remember, it's hearing what he hears on a daily basis, keeping track the whole time]. Before he's hit the second chorus, it's figured out that he's quoting the latest T-Pain song, although a bit too slow, out of tune and in a different key. Nonetheless, like any good accompanist, the machine tries to follow his singing- it tries to make him sound as good as possible. To accomplish this, it transposes into the tempo and key he's set.
As this happens, everyone in the group hears an accompanying melody fade into what he's singing in real time. Like a live musical or a constant karaoke machine, this device adds acoustic background to whatever it hears. Life becomes a movie as simply hanging out with friends takes on cinematic effects. "

But apparently Bill Gates had said it over a decade ago:"And make no mistake, there will be great applications of all kinds on the Internet - much better and far more plentiful than the ones available today. Many of tomorrow's net applications will be purely for fun, as they are today. ... You might hum a little tune of your own into a microphone and then play it back to hear what it could sound like if it were orchestrated or performed by a rock group."

Bill Gates - The Road Ahead, 1996

and of course people have been dreaming about some sort of "magic harmonizer machine" for ages now, so...

"What has been done will be done again. There is nothing new under the sun"

Ecclesiastes 1:9

Emotion Detection Through Voice Making Progress

Computer Software Decodes Emotions Over the Phone

from Discovery News by Eric Bland
"THE GIST

• A company called eXaudios has developed software that detects emotions during a phone call.
• The program is currently used by companies to assist customer service agents.
• The versatile software could even soon diagnose Parkinson's disease, schizophrenia and even cancer."

As the computer becomes better at recognizing our moods, it becomes better at positively or negatively changing them. From my post about the digital secretary which I think really benefits from being placed in the context of this software:

"But let's go further and a little bit darker. If we improve CGI and voice simulation, there will be no reason not to have this secretary actually appear as a simulated friend- one who knows what will make you happy depending on your mood, one who won't mind giving you perpetually undivided attention. If it's linked to your cellphone, this friend could also fill you in on things and give you advice:

"you know you seem a little down today- why not try calling Robert or Jessica- you haven't seen them in a while, and last time you hung out you all had a great time." (it was listening to the quality of your voices and watching everyone's facial expressions)

you: "I dunno, what about Eryka, she seems pretty cool... what are the chances that she's into me?"

computer: "approximately 3,720 to 1"

you: "damn"

Even further and much darker, what if we allowed our secretaries to communicate with one another, say even temporarily like at a party. They would watch everyone's interactions, occasionally chiming in to suggest mingling (think a futuristic version of facebook suggesting that we help people become more social). Toward the end of the night we could begin some sort of Game Theory algorithm where each of the secretary agents would trade data until coming up with a "greatest possible universal happiness" formula which would pair those of us wanting to go home or to the next party with someone with each other in the most efficient way. And even if we don't agree to trade data, people will each use their own gathered information to see who they might have a shot with as things are winding down. Of course young people will also learn how to fool the system (like learning to pass a lie detector test) which would have certain advantages. As computer-aided social interaction becomes the norm, how will everything change?"

Twitter as Ghetto Prediction Engine

Twitter predicts future box office

from kottke.org by Jason Kottke

11 people liked this

A study by researchers from HP's Social Computing Lab shows that Twitter does very well in predicting the box office revenue for movies.

[Researchers] found that using only the rate at which movies are mentioned could successfully predict future revenues. But when the sentiment of the tweet was factored in (how favorable it was toward the new movie), the prediction was even more exact.

But as someone noted in the comments:

Works fine until people realize it works, then they start gaming it, and it stops working.

On Micro Donations

What if there were a way to donate small amounts of money almost effortlessly and practically without overhead charges? Then if you saw something inspirational that someone was doing, you might send your thanks/support in the way of, say, 30 cents. And if 10,000 people did the same, suddenly this person would be $3,000 richer and would have gained something for their effort. Thus as a society we would reward things instantly, directly and without any foreseeable detriment. (This fits into the idea that we'll try to rebuild the god that we've essentially destroyed, through an actual mediated social controller.) Think about it: just in the united states alone we've got at least 100 million people for whom a single dollar a month doesn't really matter. If that money became malleable, no one would really be put out and we would have created another outlet for artistic and creative reward- especially important today while these practices are being phased out of the economy by piracy. There could be something like a "five cent club", meaning people would commit to a donation of 5 cents every month to a certain cause, project, or person. The donor wouldn't even notice, but if you somehow managed to get 100,000 five cent members, you would make $60,000 a year. That's pretty cool to think about. There would have to be some sort of regulation mediated through social networking mixed with Paypal, wherein you could only get this "five cent member" icon put on your profile if you were really donating the money. It would be another way of showing your support and would be encouraged through peer pressure. There wouldn't even really be an excuse to stop because it's such a small amount of money. That's a strange thought because this would also make donation into a powerful political tool. For instance, if an artist or organization did something that many of its monthly micro-donors disapproved of, they would feel the effects as people withdrew their membership, which is the beauty of a regularly spaced interval contributions: they have instant influence through strength in numbers. Cash democracy on every level of society.
Also, there's the whole exchange rate issue. We already see this when people end up sympathizing with the 419 scammers that are cheating them (my mother's friend now regularly sends money and gifts to a guy in India who straight up told her the truth after she called him out on being a scammer) One hundred dollars in India is a big sum of money. $250 can pay for a surgery to fix a child's cleft lip. Perhaps if people could literally see their money heading to a specific kid who they could watch via Facebook for their entire life (and talk to with new translation software) they would be less inclined to selfishly spend $3,000 to pay for a surgery to help their objectively worthless dog live for another two years. You would start to have real worldwide social priorities take precedent over daily and local bullshit. Of course this might make as many problems as it would solve. Capitalism always finds a way of fucking even the best laid systems. You would have people donating to terrorist organizations disguised as relief spending and all sorts of hoax and counter hoaxes. Either way though, you can see the seeds of this all over the place right now. Insect theory: Practically nothing times a million is suddenly quite a lot.

Evidence:

http://www.charitywater.org/twestival/

This is the closest to what I'm talking about: different cities and organizations teamed up over twitter to raise money for sustainable clean drinking water projects in developing nations like India and Ethiopia. The result was 250K which is being used to build systems to provide sanitary water to ~17,000 people who previously had none.

Thus we have X number of people (lets call it 60,000 at $4 on average) donating an extremely small portion of their expendable income in exchange for roughly 17,000 people gaining access to the most basic necessity for life. Thus there is a large net gain in the total amount of happiness in the universe:

[60k * (amount of happiness lost over losing $4) * (-1)] + [60k * (amount of happiness gained over sense of having done good in the world)] + [17k * (amount of happiness gained from not dying)] = GUSH (Global Unified Shift in Happiness)

http://nonprofit.about.com/od/socialmedia/a/mobilegiving.htm

http://www.qwasi.com/news/blog/micro-donations-generating-millions-in-haiti-relief-efforts-for-red-cross.htm

PayPal 2.0 "Bumps" Money Between iPhones

iPhone/iPod touch: You're settling up a restaurant tab for three. One eater has no cash, the other only twenty-dollar bills, and you're left wondering. If at least two of you have iPhones, PayPal 2.0 lets you "bump" the balance between phones.