quote:

Originally posted by jbx:
I could just go on forever.

You should.

quote:

Originally posted by Sentinel400:

quote:

Originally posted by jbx:
I could just go on forever.

You should.

Ok, only because you asked. Gotta get that post count up somehow.

Where to start tho?

I'll start with now. I think we're "in" the Singularity now. The most "classical" def of The Singularity (double caps 'cause it's like The Rapture) is, I think Kurzweil's, which is: “technological change so rapid and profound it represents a rupture in the fabric of human history”.

Statements lead to questions lead to more questions, questions about the questions. Or as I've heard it put, "Everybody knows what something means...until there is a problem".

Fabric of human history? Rupture? Rapid? Profound?

The essential problem, for me, here, is that human engage in the manufacture of meaning. Pattern Recognition is a just a meat-routine that funds the creation of that meaning. Patterns without meaning\value are irrelevant.

So then if we are unaware of things we can't make meanings for them, technology doesn't really advance on it's own. We have to do that, and, as we've seen already, there are often unintended consequences to such advancements.

So how will technology advance to the point that we, it's creators, become unable to ascribe meaning\value to it? And if we are creating things, ways for things, options, that we are generally unaware of, isn't that the singularity?

The discontinuity of human history then is that we don't know what we are doing, or could do, have done. It seems clear to me that we are there now.

Teh Gib sez that the future is here now, but uneven in distribution, which is a statement which I suspect has always been true, and will continue to be so moving towards greater entropy. There's some island near India composed of people who are still a mystery, they throw spears at helicopters that get too close. They are left undisturbed for the most part, tho I read that pirates might be using their island, or could soon, a rough day for the natives I'm thinking. Point being they'll be left alone, by design, the future may never really arrive for them.

I also read once that gene splicers were available on the internet, and relatively cheap, compared to nukes and nuke tech at least. This is why I'm worried about Zombies. 'Cause I figure if I was Kim Jong Il that I'd be very interested in living a very long time and unrestrained by living in other peoples countries and with the US happily distracted by my nuke program, I could get a bunch of smart young guys down in a bomb shelter with some splicing gear, educate them in western universities, and have them start whipping up some gene-mods to make me last longer. Plenty of starving peasants and political prisoners to test it on. A "defective" strain that makes people in to something like zombies could be weaponized and it's not even radioactive. Be kinda neat to have around.

So there's some "future" that is unevenly distributed and that we'd like to stay that way. Once the Russians start nuking their own cities to stop the spread I'd assume the radiation would increase incidents of mutation. Mutant Zombies now.

Anyway, my point is, if the singularity is technological progress so rapid we mere humans cannot understand it, and we are the ones making it happen, then...it's not really happening, because, by definition, we can't understand it, and if we don't understand it, then we can't make it happen, or can't make it do anything.

Like wandering around with a tac-nuke on your head and using it to power your cellphone, until one day you wonder what that little red button does and vaporize your favorite coffee station.

Futureshock was the old term, and it's more applicable now. People just don't want to know. Want to regress. But, like Hutz says, "there were never any good old days, they are today, they are tomorrow", and I don't think there is much going backwards. Herds move slowly, but they move. Futureshock is the edge of the Singularity. So much "technology" that the mind recoils and can't function under effects of trying to make sense of it. Partly of course because sense cannot be made from money and money drives technology, so, inherent to that then is that technology makes no sense given the impetus of it's creation. Movies are very popular, but we've been able to watch them for years, why the 100" plasma screens and Blu-ray discs so we can up-sample and re-colorize "classics" and watch them again. Why the drive to replace books with movies. Harry Potter and Aragorn are pretty dead now are they not? Written over by Dan Radcliffe and Viggo. We'll see those again in a few years won't we? Another iteration? Once the technology gets there it should begin to do it on it's own. Rerecord movies to improve graphics, saturation, color separation. Provided there is money in it.

A rupture in the fabric of human history would mean what ? Really I can't imagine what it would mean that things like ice-ages and the destruction of the Library of Alexandria wouldn't also mean. Change rapid enough that history becomes erased.

Which is what it comes down to then, if the..sry, The Singularity, is something beyond our imaginations (which was the posit of the thread yes? that you cannot write beyond it because you cannot imagine it), but as we, collectively, are the ones who are the imagineers, then it doesn't occur if we do not imagine it to do so. Since things are already happening which are beyond our imaginations, individually, then, collectively, we are inside of The Singularity now.

What does that *mean* tho!?

Leads to another series of questions.

If we are the ones making meaning of what we do, you know:
Sometimes killing is bad, and it means bad things. Sometimes it's good and means good things.
Sometimes ringtones are irritating and dumb, sometimes novel, sometimes it's just because your peer group all bought the same phone and you need to know who's is actually ringing.
And we're the ones imagining what comes next, ascribing meaning to that, etc, then it becomes us that create "reality". Both collectively and individually.

Previously data was a big pain in the ass. Papyrus parchment? Squid ink? No printing press? No laser printer? No Alta Vista translations?
Energy intensive, time intensive, limited utility.

So you figure we'd only record things which are important and their value then would be unquestioned as they'd exist and that would make them valuable and true, because what other option would you have?
Over time of course we've gotten better at recording and exchanging data. To the point that we have public webboards full of digitalized pictures that are taken with weird shutter speeds. "bad" photos. But instead they become art work of a kind, very pretty, evocative, suggestive, abstracted. Point being: Data is cheap.

Because data is cheap we make more of it, it's easy to store too. I've got 15,000-20,000 pics on my machines. I've got 300+K word blogs on drives. That's a lot of paper! More than I'd want to store and lug around with me at least.

I don't see that trend stopping, quite the opposite in fact, as the creation and cataloging of data becomes automated. Reality becomes devoted to the creation of that data.

Ya'll read the one about the girls in Florida that violently beat another girl for purposes of recording it and putting on The Google on the Internment Machine? Or maybe it was the GooTube they put it on. Or MyTube? Something like that.

People start doing things to create data. The experience itself is devalued.

Eventually we'll all want to carry around a lil blob that leaves us plugged in to internet all the time right? And then effects emerge from that. Provided you're always on you can interact with that data always also. Check your bank balance from the mall. Comparison shop while you're shopping. And this leads to more data, more connections between data sets, meta data, until, eventually, but seemingly inevitably, all things which exist have data about them. Or, upon seeing them, data is created about them.

Microsoft made something, a few years ago now, it was like a necklace, with a camera, took pictures randomly, queued by light changes, movement, time, that sort of thing. The camera looked roughly in front of you as you wore it, creating a data model of what you looked at all day. Same here.

The "display" or "monitor" for the data world can be inject in to the mind via the optic nerve. That good old "VR" stuff, augmented reality, I can't imagine I'd have to explain it very deeply here.

The keyboard, ridiculous little glass gesture pad, nonsense, it can go away as well. Like a Wii-mote, you wear it on your hand, imposed in your vision, and a camera and microphone right next to it as well, so your machine can tell what you are looking at, hearing.

Anybody else got one of those phones that can listen to a song you play for it and have it tell you want song it is? Yah. Like that. But....everything.

And then we exist in data parity between reality and data world (is cyberspace too passe now? or do we still use that one?) and this leads to a pile of emergent effects right?

Even before we arrive at nano-faxery and universal assemblers and computar-machines that think they think as we think, we get weird shit going down.

No more labels. No prices. Your machine reads the data and tells you how much it is. All mapped out nicely. No forgetting to get something at the grocery store. It's either all waiting in a nice little box when you get there, prepaid and you just wait while the robot loads it in your car. Or it's all nicely mapped out and you just follow machine prompts around the store while IMing, (via voice translation), and not really paying attention to what it is your getting, since you told the machine to remember that for you. Imagine arriving home and realizing tonight is the night you make stew...evidently, as that's what your machine had you buy at the store.

The point here is that essentially all of that stuff is things we can do right now. If Intel and GE and Sandia and all the rest of them just stopped today, no more R&D, no more university research, we could roll-out those sorts of things described above.

That's the future shock right? When we've advanced technology so much so fast that we haven't even been able to catch up conceptually with all the things we can do with it?

Which leads back to The Singularity in that if we are not imagining it happening, how it's happening, then it won't happen.

Provided we don't make machines that make things happen for us.

Machines that make things happen for us. Like movies. These would be tricky machines and indeed how would we know if they were working. Because they are still being imagined and built by us, even if we just imagine and build a machine to build them, so we don't have to, then they do what we ask. I read about a machine that makes sushi?

But we still want the sushi, asked it to make it, made it to make it.

We didn't make a machine that watched us and decided, "These silly humans can't make sushi for shit, I'm gonna build me a machine to make sushi FOR them!", and if we did then it's still a machine working at our direction. We imagine and build a thing that imagines and builds things FOR us.

How do you eventually get to a machine that imagines and builds things for no reason?

The old Alien Mind thing. If a thing is really alien how can you describe it? Which is another form of The Singularity right? If a thing is really beyond you how can you really do much but observe it? And then is it really beyond you anymore? Once you watch it work you, as a human, must begin to give it meaning and from the meaning value and from that it's now known and no more alien or The Singularity anymore right?

So I'm still left with thinking that The Singularity will be quite understandable, because it will only happen as we want it to, as we make it.

Why should we really want to be on teh int0rnetz all day all night all the time?

Because it's all about the post-post-modern, the neo-structuralism. Previously there was only a truth or it's opposition. God was real, or he wasn't. Things outside of the known don't exist right? The world is flat until it's round until it orbits the sun not the other way around. Then we moved in to subjective perception, it could be truth depending on how you looked at it, or it could be a lie, but we were pretty sure it at least existed, whereas before that might not be true. And now, or soon, with the GooTubes and Internet Chat logging and the perma-web and the omni-web, and the little camera in your glasses looking at what you look at, we'll know all these things about it, at will, maybe even unwillingly. And then there is no more truth or falsehood, just existence.

You don't debate global warming, if it's happening, why it's happening (if it's happening that is), what it will do, what we should do about it, etc, instead you just know what the weather is going to be like....forever.

You don't get in to arguments of the she said\he said variety, you just watch the replay, and since you've got a replay, you might watch it before you even ask, leading to you not asking.

Leading, eventually, to magic.

And then we're back to magic again.

Magic, like the Singularity (oops! The), is either hard to define, or easy and nearly meaningless (either "You cannot possibly imagine" or "you know , like..faster smaller computers and stuff")and so I'll go ahead with this one:

Magic is the alteration of reality.

Money then is a form of raw magic. That's why it's so popular.

Want sugar and mind-altering chems? Abra-cadavera-presto-chango! And your 5 dollar bill becomes a triple shot cafe mocha. Just. Like. That.

Can you tell a green field from a cold steel rail? Probably, and with the right kind of money you can turn a green field in to a cold steel rail, or back again. You could turn paradise in to a parking lot. A grocery store in to a laser tag arena. Whatever right? You get the point.

So humans make meaning, make value, and create reality from those things. If a tree falls in a forest and there isn't a human being around, sure it makes noise, but....who gives a fuck? And as soon as a human wanders along to see it the fallen tree will instantly describe some meaning, hold some value. It might just be "pretty!" or it might be all kinds of other things. Depends on why the tree fell over. Maybe it's a nasty tree killing fungus infecting 100s of acres of old growth endangered wildlife supporting woods and it's like a big fuckin' deal man! We gotta get some people out there to do something about it. Like those dead bats in New York or the dying bees.


What does all that mean for The Singularity? Well, the point would be, it means whatever we want it to mean, just like The Singularity means whatever we want it to mean. Collectively of course. It could mean microchips in our spines and black terror squads in vans in the middle of the night and urine-analysis in every toilet. That Jello Biafra line about, "Take only the drugs prescribed by your boss or supervisor!", and some Orwellian boot mashing a face fo'eva'.
Or it might mean we all live in the Bohemian Grove all the time, and it feels like it's 70 degrees in your head all the time, and music fills the air, and little chubby bunnies bring us cool drinks and we all wear holograms for clothes and dance in the fountains and things like that.

But I don't think it will violate most of what we know of physics, The Singularity, it won't make microbes stop existing, or conjure electricity from the Zero-Point Energy Fields, won't create more gallium arsenide that we've already go, nor more indium. It won't really make humans any less human, not right away at least.

If we've been fundamentally the same for many thousands of years what would change so rapidly? The human mind adapts, the meat routines still recognize patterns, but they can be totally different patterns of recognition (plants and flowers and the movement of clouds OR avatars and icons and ringtones) totally different values ascribed then to those patterns. Unless we directly engage in wholesale modification of our meat substrates we'll be basically the same, just differently socialized.

Even if we make machines to figure that stuff out for us then what? We'd make ourselves aliens to ourselves?

"Computer! Extricate my higher emotional centers but leave my personality intact!"

or we could take out our adrenals to make us less aggressive? but then why not just take pills to make us less aggressive if that's what we want? or make little machines to sit in the brain and rub those chems directly in to the hurty-spot in our meat?

Magic can either work well or work poorly, usually it works poorly because, when changing reality, you gotsta know what you's trying to do right? If your intentions are not clear you'll get unclear results.

If we're unclear about what we want from The Singularity it will produce things which are unclear to us, because...that's what we asked it to do.

Reality becomes more adjustable to our whims. Particularly with the wearable computing and the enhancement of our vision\sensorium via the data world. Generate overlays. Make people look different. Big cartoon heads. Little tiny feet. Read their clothing labels at 100 meters.

Post-The Singularity (ie, right now) we begin to create the world as we want the world to be, more or less as it's always been, but the greater quantities of data make it more obvious, more granular.

We've got no reason for wars now. Except that we like them. Because even after the move to a post scarcity economy (what, in this world, is scarce, except that we desire it be so? couldn't we (the world, collectively) get HD hockey on HD TeeVee to all of Africa if we really wanted to?)we're still human. Still obsessed with sex and death, drugs and food, control, power, all that kind of thing.

The Singularity changes nothing. We change IT!

The trouble (a trouble) with writing these things is that they get very unruly. I tend to think the principle issue of post-modern"ism" is that language is serial in nature. You only express as a stream, only picked up as a stream, but of course the whole-idea is bigger than that. You know, a pile of crap starts out as discrete turds but ends up as a less differentiated mass (provided you're not moving while shitting, which would, at least, make "laying pipe" more accurately descriptive I think) and talking and writing are the same way.

I still suspect that for purposes of the topic at hand that writing about Teh Gibz version of said event is best. Gives it some basis in reality. ;-)

Another thing, re: lack of cells in Neuro, is the lack of computorz in VL tril. The ubiquitous computification of all things.

Which I think returns to my thesis, in contrast to UbersDs thesis, that The Singularity is only what we imagine it to be, I've heard, since the Dot Con Rubble, of the internets enabled refrigerator. That was like, the 90s, man, and still I find a lack of flying cars, and a lack of internet enabled refrigeration. Which means I'm unable to answer the question of it that light *really* goes off when I close the door.

But now that somebody came up with the idea of the internet attached home appliance we've got articles on the NYT aboot gizmos to synchronize dance movements in real time to artificial piano players.

Thus then if I don't write all this out how else will it come to pass? Somebody elses ideas! Fuck them.

So then what changes and what doesn't?

People don't change I don't think. The evolutionary food people are very excited to declaim that 10,000 years a blink of the evolutionary eye in terms of biological adaptation to dietary changes. So clearly inventing nano-faxes won't give us gills, new limbs, or that Walter J W one about oxygen injectors for the oversized brains.

Transportation. The idea I like here is the soccer ball.

Rather than build bigger cars, you build smaller ones. And they explode on impact. The car is the airbag and then you recycle the car for your deposit to get another car.

And we work backwards from there right? Why should a car crash? Cars that drive themselves are so obvious it hurts. And it's a funny pain isn't it?
Because people fear cars that drive themselves, the loss of control, but they don't mind buses or planes. The real truth of the matter of course is that human beings are extremely unsuited to driving vehicles. Biologically, sociologically, psychologically, we are collectively really quite shitty at it. Not well suited at all. And what is? Machines. Computers are practically custom designed for our fucking needs in this department.

I read that a car with 30 seconds of traffic look ahead becomes as efficient as a hybrid. Why not go further out tho?

It would be a cake in 3 layers. Direct physical proximity. Short wave radar, lasers, heck, maybe even cameras and other non-buzzwordy tech. Machine reactions are much better than human reactions, the real limiting factor would be the contents of the car, people, and the sudden stopping, more so than the ability to make a machine that can rapidly avoid a thing in it's path or brake when required.

We'll be putting those little chips in our children then, just like we do with our pets now, I figure they are in the greatest danger of getting hit by cars. So the cars would know where they are (we'd all know really, it would make tracking the sex perverts more effective to just track their targets right?) and thus could avoid the inevitable fleshcrush effect.

The second layer would be for passenger comfort. Nearest neighbor, next-nearest-neighbor, and maybe one beyond that as well. Like the old AppleTalk networks. First you access the local traffic pattern, then you say "I'm doing this", then you go ahead and do it.

Finally the local\regional\national\global grid. So that everybody going to the hockey game can get shunted in to a unified traffic packet and stream line the merging of other traffic flows.

Would we own cars? On the one hand I can see them being so cheap we'd all have them. On the other hand I can see them being much cheaper to rent. They have that sort of service in Seattle at least. But what about a next gen of that?

Because we all have the omni-device we can all always talk to internets and this allows that creepy shit to start creeping in. Order a car, put a request in a queue, and it shows up when you need it. In real time right? You are walking and get tired of walking and request a car (by listing a destination, because your location would be obvious) and one of them stops. Just stops, right there in the middle of the street, because all the other cars already knew that (layer 2 above) and they move around it. They move around you too as you walk to the car. Imagine that! No more looking both ways before moseying across the highway, just start walking with all these cars bearing down on you and...they all ballet out of the way. That car you get in has a bunch of other assholes in it, they are all going somewhere along the route you are going. There might even be a bin in the back containing packages for people along the route. Folks could hop out, hand a package (tamper resistant, tamper evident) to a guy on the street, and he gives the pizza to the guy who ordered it, because that guy lives in his building, so it's on his way.

A constantly updated network of people wanting a location and machines to get them there.

I take the bus and currently you go to a place, wait there until it arrives and get on it, it stops at other designated points where people gather for pick up. Sometimes it's late. Instead you have a color coded chart overlaying your vision giving locations of vehicles that can help you, costs associated (you pay more for riding alone, non-stop flights, that kind of things) and time estimates (the color coded part) as to their location to your location.

Further more what is all the driving about? The traffic becomes free form. You can go there, or you can come here, or even neither. Physical skills will be in demand I suspect. Even a robo-surgeon has to be present to robo-surgerize you. I can't fix a computer that is broken in a way that prevents me from having remote access to it. Nor can I get my ear pierced (data enabled internet jewelry? Vibrating tongue studs powered by body heat? Sure why not, I'll take two.) when I'm home alone, gotta go find a dude with a piercing box.

Normally, well, currently, we'd expect him to be in a fixed location, sterility and all that, but there'd be no need for that then eh? The box sterilizes itself and he sells access to it. Depending, he might not even need to be there. You could order a bit of surgical steel off internets and begin wandering towards where a automobile modules (automods) is going to appear to pick you up, whilst some other jackass grabs a shiny metal thing off a display stand (no paying right? that was taken care of already) and gets a coffee (also not for him)and he passes both of those off to somebody else who's riding the same car as him, that guy is also getting a piercing, and drinking the coffee when you both meet up at the middle of a 10 lane blacktop where some other jerk left his piercing box the night before, or maybe somebody else left it there for him. He hasn't even ever seen his box he owns, it's just that piercing boxes are a good investment you see, he owns most of them in the city, but then...why cities right? Continuous contiguous contagious civilization. Randomly accreting where ever it happens to cruft up. Perhaps more accurate to say he has a program that keeps his set of boxes in a certain geographic zone of control, so he can monopolize the local piercing market and thus set prices (varied as his financial needs change. Going to the Rush concert tonight? Getting your ears done is a buck extra today.).

Like that. Or something like that. Rental boxes.
Ideas of space change. Bars? Fuck it, drink in the car!
The cars change too. No driver seat. More like a camping tent (as opposed to circus variety) you all sit facing each other. Got a table in the middle, play cards while you drive (but not with each other, with other people in other locales via internets), have a place to set your coffee.

Walls for display surfaces, watch movies in big screen. Rental fees for same.

Custom cars. Decorated to certain ideologies, or functions. Christian cars. Drug cars. Cars for orgies. Another weird future business. Owning interior decoration rights to certain fleets. Charge a premium for rental.

Functional strip malls. Series of cars all stop at once, each car contains a specialist, all related. Massage therapist. Martial arts instructor. Psycho therapist (being in the room and a sealed private space as well, that costs money. Talking to somebody about your problems on internets? That's the new Youtube. Competing to help the most people the most, fastest. Speed therapy. Aphoristic dictionary software. Buying access to specialized databases of personal issues.

Live in your automod, long term rental. Work while in transit. Every day a new dawn, a new location. Tour Civil War battle fields. No driving required.

Transport should be fun like that once the cars drive themselves.

Food.

Another thing I suspect will remain unchanged is food.

While it could go The Matrix and we'll all eat goo. Perfectly formulated goo. I suspect not.
We're still human, still enjoy enjoying things.
Would you really want to eat goo all day every day?

Boutique food exists now. Grass fed beef. Beyond Organic produce. If goo is an alternative, the cyber RPGs liked to posit this one eh? Krill wafers. Mycoproteins. Then the cost of food goes up. Maybe we eat well irregularly.

Maybe we have our stomachs stapled and put a machine in there with a little spigot out the old belly button. Feeding direct to the gut. Eliminate the same way and what I once read described as the "backdoor portal" becomes an obsolete organ.

But I don't think implants will be popular. What a pain in the ass? Surgery? Healing? Surely we can do better. They've got those brain mice already, no datajack required.

So the idealist foodie version goes like:

Lil machines monitor your blood. Blood sugars, fats, vitamins. Cool stuff like that. These report to your omni-device (OD from here on out) and those pick what you need to eat.

It could work many ways, up to you, your OD could just decide what to eat for you. Each meal is an exciting surprise! OR you could get a list of options.

Where does the food come from? Little shacks. Everyday some folks bring food to the shack, this is in the city you dig? Need centralized spots for food distrib. And the shack generates and publishes a list to the internets (which we call the Omni Net (ON) in the future) and your OD talks to the local list serv and builds a menu for you based on nutrient needs. This can even read your day planner months in advance. Running a marathon soon? Quoth teh Gib, "Need to carbo-load.". Suddenly you find yourself eating a lot of donuts.

So you let it chose or you pick your prefs. Or you free eat. But that's bad for you. Same off hand distaste some have for smokers. The OD talks to the local shack, the order goes in, the machine preps the raw and the dude cooks it, and right when that is done you are standing the queue getting a box handed to you. Food to order for your up-to-date metabolic profile on-demand.

I like that version. Maybe you charge for access.

Any number of things can be done to increase food quality. Repetitive tasks, things machines are good at. Tending the beeves. Tending the garden. But artful plate arrangements (the best part of Iron Chef)? That's a human job.

Back to transportation for a minute you can have the return of the sweet as blimp! Hydrogen economy means we've got a bunch of hydrogen, good lifting gas. Low energy cost to having a nearly endless series of blimps wandering across the sky. Big hooks descend to grab cargo off the ground and drift it to wherever it's going to end up. Or maybe there is no plan. Maybe you just set things out, they pick them up, and then as demand for the objects filters in they drop them in disposable (recyclable I mean!) parachutes. Just anywhere. By the roadside. Somebody in an automod will be along to take what they need, what somebody else needs, soon enough.

How about that? On a road trip? Hungry? Your machine cuts speed to 50mph from 125 and goes right off the side of the road, tears across a couple fields, stops next to a battered 40 foot cargo container that opens as you get close, and you select some quality produce to eat, throw a box in the trunk, and off you go again, next time you stop it's next to the person who wanted the stuff in the trunk. Maybe you just get out of the car and it goes driving on. You're at your destination and the produce will end up where it needs to be.

But that's transport, this is food.

Ordered by your machine, and you just stop off and pick it up. No boxes even. Just carry around a single dish. Flexform plastics. Bowl = plate = skewer. Pump some electricity through it and it burns off the residues.

We see this already in fact. Nalgene bottles. Maybe the plastic is bad. Saw a guy recently, eating in an alley, why not? It was a nice view. He had one of those metal ones on his belt. Carrying canteens around now. Reminded me of old DnD games. 10sp for a wineskin? Biatch! How else you gonna get a drink when you're down in the dungeons? Gygax style, when you needed a 10ft wooden pole and 50+ feet of silk rope (keeps your encumbrance value down). Anyway, this dude has one of them metal ones AND a mesh thingie on his belt just for it.

All this custom water we drink, why put it in plastic bottles? Why not just carry your bottle? Steam clean the attachments, like an autoclave. Empty it out via steam pressure, put some beer in there, lemonade, whatever you want. No more waste. No more dirty plates at fine diners. No more questionable silver wear ( a guy know used to work (as a dishwasher) at a Perkins, said, "...shove it up your ass, it'd be just as clean", had a good story about a bird that flew in to the deep fat fryer, said the guy working the fryer, "Fuck no I ain't takin' it out, I just changed the fuckin' oil!".) it's all always yours. Just like the OD. It's always your computer. Always your desktop, always your favorite webbrowser and favorite link lists.

So there's food. Surely it will get more science-y as time goes by, but as we're still human we'll want the tasty cakes and pigs-in-blankets, not the goo, and krill cakes.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brillat-Savarin

That dude, and he's French, so you know he knows, says it's all about the pleasures of the table as much as the taste of the dish, and this is the extension of that. Why eat goo? Where's the ritual? Where's the tribal fun? Maybe if you're in a hurry, pressed for time, in the combat zone, but otherwise? I doubt it.

They can have my Eggos when they pry them from my cold dead hands!

Still no new page? I'm very disappointed in myself. Hopefully the length involved in these posts, the tedious subject matter, the irritating writing style, have now resulted in my being on the Ignore list for the 4/5 Digit Post Count Overlords, thus I can labor in a virtual invisibility. But that's probably overrating myself.

(Not that I don't want this read, nor that I wouldn't welcome comments\responses, just that the idea of a phantom postmachine laboring in self-created isolation is an entertaining thought)


Anyhizzle, a few more things before it turns out I was lying about being able to go on "forever".

What about housing and the environment? Or power? The electrical kind, not the socio-politico-economico-spiritual sort.

Yes, well, about them:

Personally, in terms of future visions I enjoy, once there's a one-world-government, unified Omni-Net, all that happy horse shite, is the "creche breeding" concept. It goes like this:

At the age of sexual maturity all the little boys and girls get a few rounds worth of future human potential extracted and frozed up and then we sterilize them. Leading to some sweet Children of Men style "Whoops!" scenarios when the baby-making machines error out. The genetic materials then get computer generated assigned mates and we grow them all up Brave New World style, but instead of selecting for future job roles we select for maximum genetic diversity. Maybe prune the more serious "defects" for quality of life purposes. Then we raise them in creches, cadres, whatever spacey future term you prefer. Why? Well, first off, it's fucking cool, secondarily, it eliminates inherited property and social position, it "forces" a kind of extended human family concept. While your creche would be your family and your teachers, who stay with you your whole life, are you parents, your family could include your future mates, no incest, so no incest taboo, and your race and such like are non-things. You also have a global peer set in the rest of your generational cohort. Sounds fucked up and awesome to me.

Population control. Presuming we take the immortality option of El Singulo-Technologique we'd eventually end up with a surplus of humans. Having creches of artificial generational cohorts allows a fine and granular sort of control over human totality in numerical terms.

Which means we could live where we want to. Slim down the profile and everybody fits around the waist of the planet. Handy for ice-ages. Or dial it up and pack us in to coffin hotels and madhouse public spaces. Give us a week a year in isolation in carefully domed over nature preserves. Not to stabilize our sanity, but to drive us mad and let us appreciate again the hustlebustle of 10BILLION weirdos breathing each others air.

But back to housing. Why not the return of the yurt? The techno-teepee. Some of you might have played StarCraft? With the distinctive human trait that all their buildings can move.

So using the ideas from the transport section you relocate yourself via rental car and then live awhile where ever you fancy finding yourself.

Reduce or eliminate the ecological footprints. Serious facilities can be built Cinderella City style, straight down in to the good earth.

With most of the society existing in a random access fashion all you really need is your ON connection, your portable shelter, and some electricity.

I figure the carbon economy, the little cute bastards (a friend of mine was saying last night, re: VL, that he has one of those "paper" bikes and rides it every day, carbon fiber, it's a weave), should facilitate a return to those sweetass Fullerian geodesic domes. When I was a kid I had a friend who's father lived in a pair of them. Surrounded by busted up diesel cars slowly being mulched for spare parts. I rather liked it.

So why not then make tents out of them? Disassemble, portable, light. The continuing waves of improved materials science should allow us to make them in to solar collectors, water purifiers, radio transmitters (so you can become your own node on the ON and extend the mesh of humanity, like them thar OLPC thingies hope to do) and then you just need a big fat battery (fattery!) which might not even be very big nor fat by then.

Far enough out and the battery is the tent is the engine and your fully automatic Lexus convertible is your house is your car is your cubicle at work. Double-wide RV culture of the near future. We're all our own "pirate" radio stations, bouncing the shortwaves around the globe.

Maybe you build yourself a solar array or other power source, get some mass-driver plans off the ON, order the parts by robo-zeppelin delivery-drop and start flinging your own custom comsats up the grav-well. Private global communications could be a growth industry by then.

Then you've got flash-mob cities. Like Slab City, but...you know, more futurey and thus more cooler.

You probably would be eating goo then tho, hard to extend your supply lines at random. Unless it's all kept flash frozen in the robo-zeps, just traversing the nothing until the request comes in.

If we cut the population down enough we could even get back on the hunter\gatherer tip. That presumes a fair amount of physical solitude tho perhaps. Enough that we each live in our own nature preserve and congregate like those chumps in that Azimov book. Virtually.

But what about history?

If you chose to live in a city, and old city, a historical zone, then you'd have to dress the part, have to live the part. A whole scene of SCA analogs. They might go back to lead-based paints just to have that next-level cachet with their peers. If they're not having kids it'd be more or less safe.

Certain parts of NYC are always like the late 70s. The Ramones (or at least a group that looks and sounds identical to them) performs at CBGBs every single night. Unless the Talking Heads or Iggy are on instead. Neo-tribal shamanistic cultural ossification. When The King dies somebody else puts on the white leather and starts eating the vintage recreation Fool's Gold Loaf. Which could be quite the process.

Going back to the idea that social influence is the new currency....how would that work?

If it's vintage then it's cheating to use simulated or machine grown constituent parts. You gotta talk some guy in to living in the middle of Kansas (or Africa, or France, or...) and growing real wheat from the real ground. No nano-enabled fertilizer either. He ships it around for processing, to the outskirts of the historical recreation zone of NYC. Like those western town facades, at the edge of the Bowery or the edge of Manhattan or the edge the city, all the painstakingly recreated bubble-gum clad sidewalk fronted vintage buildings have a hi-tek backside where shipments of vintage goods from the outside are taken in for retro-processing. The wheat is interred in real paper bags labeled "Flour" and sent out to recreation bakeries and onwards to the lair of Elvis for processing in to that Golden Loaf of Wonder.

All our landfills transformed in to the playgrounds (by which I mean post-doctoral research parks) of the hipest of the hip, those who research the past. Trying to maintain that exacting level of accuracy in the stitching, the logos, the way the vinyl records warp and skip and scratch. Hard work, getting it right, but, worth it for the social capital. Take a week off, head to the Big Apple, don some vintage garb and brush up on your decade corrected slang. Be a shame to spend all that time to get access and then fail to get laid because you used "Groovy" in a inappropriate context.

After a few years there'd be a huge political battle, perhaps literally, and that might mean muskets, since DC would be in the neo-colonial phase, to revamp NYC, the 80s this time. On one side the staticists. One late-70s forever, under God, amen. On the other side the progressivists. Always re-aging the simulations. And then the real weirdos, the fringe types, the ones that want to make TWO NYCs, one on the other coast, so that we can duplicate two historical epochs at the same darned time. Have to construct it down in Baja, so the "ocean" is on the right side.

Power. Who needs it?

It seems easiest to make everybody that isn't involved in a *serious* historical recreation zone wear the same uniform. Like Star Trek meets Iron Man. A shell.

Why spend all that time trying to catch terror-criminals when we can just enable ourselves terror-proof?

Bullet proof. Wear your RNBC gear ALL the time. Like high-fashion spacesuits. Like skateboards, all decals and custom modules, but the same basic chassis. The beige box of the 90s "IBM" computer world.

And then the power. You wear your AC, you wear your heater, you wear your lamps and refrigerator. You wear your "laptop".

So you then are also going to be wearing a battery. So you'd best be able to charge it up, even if you are all alone in the woods.

They make those things now, the solar panels you plug in to your laptop. You'd wear them on your front and back, like a t-shirt, but functional. They are going to make those knee braces that siphon off the energy of your lower leg dropping to the ground after you take a step.

As computorz get smaller they consume less energy, so those should be enough right? Maybe the whole thing is like a big heat pipe and nano sized turbines harvest the heat as it's exchanged too.

Wear a battery like a camel back, or in the lower back. A nice ergonomic location. Might even help dudes regain our centers of gravity. Leading to people having trouble walking right when they take off their shells.

Harvest your own heat for your own uses. Run your ON connections thru your OD, and fear no bullet nor radical biological molecules. Plus if we all had breath masks to wear we wouldn't have to listen to people talking on their cell phones. Provided the brain mice and vox readers haven't invalidated speaking entirely by then.

I think perhaps you'd be able to avoid the Post Modern traps that that time. No more irritating serialized words to get in the way of transmitting pure experience and mood-state.

That might be fun as well.

I went to a bar once, they had the Cuervo Girls there, free shots, free CDs, and those little glowy bands you see at concerts. Went around the wrist. Red meant you were not interested in being hit on, or talked to at all. Green was the opposite and predictably yellow was in the middle ("approach with caution", they phrased it to us). But when we all wear computers all the time and those displays are integrated in to our realities (tho display is perhaps a misnomer since it needn't be strictly visual) then there's no need for such crude external markings. You can "publish" your convo specs in real time. It'd make finding a dance partner easier. Put William Gibson at the top of your list of topics of conversation and see whom else in the local area is a WGBer. Like carrying your MySpace with you everywhere. Or turn it all off and people should leave you alone. You'd drop right off their grid what with the profusion of other social signal data bopping around their sensorium. Cold shoulder via steady irritating buzzing noise, until it drowns conversation and they have to leave to keep talking. Automated conversations where your OD spouts your position statements until\unless they distinguish themselves as worth talking to. Your machine reads your blog to their machine until your machines both agree you'd probably like each other enough to spend precious face time actually dialogging. With the datamasks in place it might be several hours before you find you can go home with them for some hot sweaty monkey love because...while it's their face you're seeing, subpixel accuracy, heat maps, simulated sweat from the fleshcrush of the club, the body is a robot they're sense casting in to. They live in another city, another country.

Maybe they live in the NYC historical zone and just wanted a break from the mid-50s pretension they're surrounded by.

It's ok tho, you can order a automod and start collecting bits of vintage clothing as you traverse the oceans towards them. By the time you arrive to meet them you're already married, and fully clothed for a stroll down Broadway, catch the newest play in town, Guys and Dolls. Talk about what your parents did during WW2, go for a soda. Then sensecast back to the bar you met in, both of you riding robots this time. Turns out it's a different theme now, but since your ODs remember it, having recorded everything you see and hear for your whole lives, you can virtualize a skin for it, or virtualize the whole place entirely, and recreate your first night together, but this time with sex at the end. Then in the post-coital afterglow you stroll through each others childhoods before going out for a smoke on the terrace, which involves putting on the decade corrected under garments.

I think that's most of it. Post Singularity. People, Food, Power, Computers, Shells, Transport, Economics. Opt in, opt out. Live unaware until some gene-punks script-bomb your orchards and they start growing Twinkies.

Yo, jbx. JUst discovered your scrolling series.

When I hit wigber's main page, I look for new names/titles. Since jbx hadn't changed per this thread for awhile, I assumed it was static, and I'd thought I'd addressed something here recently?

I'll prolly dive in sometime this weekend.

quote:

I find it incomprehensible that you don't realize this.

Daily life is constantly moved by motives we aren't consciously aware of.

I find it incomprehensible that you didn't, apparently, recognize that you answered your (unasked) question of the first sentence of the two above.

It's hard to comprehend why others may not comprehend what they aren't consciously aware of, ci?

I find that death begins to exert a significant influence sometime after turning forty, when most bodies begin their initial Shutdown Sequence and the body begins its first geriatric failing.

At fifty, which I'm just a little past, the shutdown increases noticeably and looming death acquires a recognizable face.

Around 60 (based on my observations of friends of mine), it begins to really bug folks. A lot. But it also can do wonderful things for their appreciation of life, loved ones, the recurrent miracles of life (anyone wanna join a singalong of [i]'Tammy'[/i/ with me?).

It's like Han in the Millennial Falcon, spending way too much time in parking orbit, but enjoying the view either from his window or his memory, recognizing that he no longer has the fuel even to correct the Falcon's decaying orbit.

quote:

Power. Who needs it?

Organic metabolic beings. Like us. Not the gross enormous amounts we westerners consume now. I think about 60 watt 24/7 will suffice for the young and hale, and also for old and frail if young and hale will be decent enough to look after the elderly.

quote:

Originally posted by Sentinel400:

quote:

Originally posted by jbx:
I could just go on forever.

You should.

He really did. Wow...

quote:

Time would still be precious, unless they've done away with the second law of thermodynamics.

Didn't you get the memo?

At last, that off-the-rack quip finds its zenith. Touche'.

quote:

"ok, but...what do we DO with all that time?",

Well, "all this time" just replaces 'what happens (if anything) when we die' with 'what happens next'?

(Suicide likely becomes a form of adventure not a desperate response to existential despair.)

Kenmeer's Conjecture: The Mystery, like ten billion imoortal Dudes, yet abides.

quote:

“technological change so rapid and profound it represents a rupture in the fabric of human history”

Slight quibble: history is an ongoing epistemological (or similar term) rupture.

A singularity, I assume, would be a Rupture (Rapturites, take note) in the knitting scheme.Old crochets would not link with new crochets.

Not a rupture but a massive tangle.