“What you’re looking at is a salt circle, a traditional form of protection—from within or without—in magical practice. In this case it’s being used to arrest an autonomous vehicle—a self-driving car, which relies on machine vision and processing to guide it. By quickly deploying the expected form of road markings—in this case, a No Entry glyph—we can confuse the car’s vision system into believing it’s surrounded by no entry points, and entrap it.”
Specific dates provided in movies–especially those that pass within our lifetimes–are always interesting to me. Today is one such date. While watching Blade Runner on Saturday, I overheard the replicant Leon mention his inception (activation) date, April 10, 2017. That’s today. (Notably, the more advanced replicants such as Roy have earlier activation dates, in 2016.) It makes Blade Runner another one of those movies that hilariously overestimated the advancement of technology. Like with many others of the time, it’s hard to fault the conclusion; in 1982 we were exploring space, had personal computers in peoples’ homes, and the (somewhat affluent) common man was capable of recording their own video broadcasts. Looking 35 years ahead, it was ambitious, but not completely unreasonable to assume that we would have the kind of quantum advancement we had seen since 35 years earlier, in 1947.
Blade Runner is one of my favorite movies, mostly for the visual artistry. In an era long before CGI as we know it today, Los Angeles is somehow depicted with breathtaking beauty. The lighting and shot compositions blends film noir of the old with a futuristic view of humanity. It’s easy to see how much my favorite anime, Bubblegum Crisis, borrows from the setting. I’m not as completely sold on the film’s story, which bears its fair share of oddities (and I’m really not fond of the interactions between Deckard and Rachael in his apartment.) But overall it’s something I think everyone should try.
I love when real life overtakes movie life like this.
What I find interesting is not so much the overestimation but how bad pop culture can be at guessing which AREAS of science and technology will advance. Blade Runner has ‘replicants’ and space colonies and flying cars; it doesn’t have smartphones. Countless stories and series and movies had routine interstellar travel and computers that still needed punch cards, or printed answers out on film, or generally just displayed text and primitive graphics. Isaac Asimov’s Elijah Bailey books had androids that looked perfectly human, intelligent robots, and interstellar starships, and still, in one novel, had the protagonist taking a flight in which essentially a scrolling newspaper was displayed on a piece of physical film on the seatback in front of him!
We don’t have spaceships or extrasolar colonies or flying cars, but we do have devices in that fit in the palms of our hands and have access to almost literally the entire sum of human knowledge, and more processing power than all but perhaps the most advanced supercomputers of the 80s. We may not have tricorders or long-range sensors that match what you’ll see on Star Trek, but we can display images and information in incredibly high definition. This is not the future we expected, but it would certainly have seemed just as fanciful 50, 40, even 30 years ago.
Mind you, I still want starships and extrasolar colonies, so get on that, everybody.
Called FIRE, this amazing hair color is the first in the world. It changes according to the temperature of its surroundings. In a cold setting, you’ll get stunning raven hair and in a warm environment, your hair will literally turn fire red.
There’s a creativity variable I can set when the network is generating new recipes, and when I set it low, it comes up with its best guess at the most quintessential recipe titles:
When I tell it to get creative, things get even weirder.
Beef Soup With Swamp Peef And Cheese Chocolate Chops & Chocolate Chips Crimm Grunk Garlic Cleas Beasy Mist Export Bean Spoons In Pie-Shell, Top If Spoon and Whip The Mustard Chocolate Pickle Sauce Whole Chicken Cookies Salmon Beef Style Chicken Bottom Star * Cover Meats Out Of Meat Completely Meat Circle Completely Meat Chocolate Pie Cabbage Pot Cookies Artichoke Gelatin Dogs Crockpot Cold Water
I hate it when people say technology is taking away kids’ childhoods
If anything, it’s actually giving kids more of an opportunity to let their imagination out
A lot of times when I let kids play on my phone, they go for the drawing app.
I watched a girl on the bus write a silly poem about her friends and then laugh as she made Siri read it
I hear children say to their friends “hey, FaceTime me later” because they still want to talk face to face even when they’re far away.
I see kids sitting, who would feel lonely and ignored if it weren’t for the fact that they’re texting their friends who are far away.
Children still climb trees. They might just take a selfie from the top to show off how high they’ve gotten.
They can immediately read the next book of their favorite series on their Kindles.
Most kids would still be up for a game of cops and robbers. Or maybe they’d google rules to another game they haven’t played yet.
When children wonder why the sky is blue, they don’t get an exasperated “I don’t know” from tired adults. They can go on Wikipedia and read about light waves and our atmosphere.
They show off the elaborate buildings they created on Minecraft.
Love this post so much to counteract much of the pessimism surrounding technology and kids. It’s not stealing kids’ innocence, just another means of expressing it. And so often do I hear that all kids do these days is “play on their phones” instead of doing other things, it’s starting to sound like a broken record. >.>
Heck, it reminds me of the first time our family got a computer; sure, I was on it all the time, but it afforded me a chance to talk more often with my best friend at the time. It filled in that boredom that would have otherwise been filled with TV and made me curious about the world.
Whenever an adult starts complaining about technology taking away kids’ childhoods they should stop and consider what they’re doing, as an adult, to keep those childhoods safe. Or if they’re maybe not actually obstructing their kids in the pursuit of their needs.
‘Get off the computer’ and ‘turn off your phone’ but no real understanding of what the kids are getting from technology that their adults fail to provide for them.
Like, privacy from monitoring by their parents. Like interaction with their peers. Like a limitless world where they can make their own space without being fenced in, chastised, restricted, criticised. Like finding new knowledge. Like fun. Like creativity.
It’s an adult guardian’s responsibility to try to understand that world instead of blaming it for being more welcoming to their kid than they are.
There are six people living in space right now. There are people printing prototypes of human organs, and people printing nanowire tissue that will bond with human flesh and the human electrical system.
We’ve photographed the shadow of a single atom. We’ve got robot legs controlled by brainwaves. Explorers have just stood in the deepest unsubmerged place in the world, a cave more than two kilometres under Abkhazia. NASA are getting ready to launch three satellites the size of coffee mugs, that will be controllable by mobile phone apps.
Here’s another angle on vintage space: Voyager 1 is more than 11 billion miles away, and it’s run off 64K of computing power and an eight-track tape deck.
In the last ten years, we’ve discovered two previously unknown species of human. We can film eruptions on the surface of the sun, landings on Mars and even landings on Titan. Is all of this very boring to you? Because all this is happening right now, in this moment. Check the time on your phone, because this is the present time and these things are happening. The most basic mobile phone is in fact a communications devices that shames all of science fiction, all the wrist radios and handheld communicators. Captain Kirk had to tune his fucking communicator and it couldn’t text or take a photo that he could stick a nice Polaroid filter on. Science fiction didn’t see the mobile phone coming. It certainly didn’t see the glowing glass windows many of us carry now, where we make amazing things happen by pointing at it with our fingers like goddamn wizards.
That, by the way, is what Steve Jobs meant when he said that iPads were magical. The central metaphor is magic. And perhaps magic seems an odd thing to bring up here, but magic and fiction are deeply entangled, and you are all now present at a séance for the future. We are summoning it into the present. It’s here right now. It’s in the room with us. We live in the future. We live in the Science Fiction Condition, where we can see under atoms and across the world and across the methane lakes of Titan.
Use the rear view mirror for its true purpose. If I were sitting next to you twenty-five years ago, and you heard a phone ring, and I took out a bar of glass and said, sorry, my phone just told me it’s got new video of a solar flare, you’d have me sectioned in a flash. Use the rear view mirror to imagine telling someone just twenty five years ago about GPS. This is the last generation in the Western world that will ever be lost. LifeStraws. Synthetic biology. Genetic sequencing. SARS was genetically sequenced within 48 hours of its identification. I’m not even touching the web, wifi, mobile broadband, cloud computing, electronic cigarettes…
Understand that our present time is the furthest thing from banality. Reality as we know it is exploding with novelty every day. Not all of it’s good. It’s a strange and not entirely comfortable time to be alive. But I want you to feel the future as present in the room. I want you to understand, before you start the day here, that the invisible thing in the room is the felt presence of living in future time, not in the years behind us.
To be a futurist, in pursuit of improving reality, is not to have your face continually turned upstream, waiting for the future to come. To improve reality is to clearly see where you are, and then wonder how to make that better.
Act like you live in the Science Fiction Condition. Act like you can do magic and hold séances for the future and build a brightness control for the sky.
Act like you live in a place where you could walk into space if you wanted. Think big. And then make it better.
Guys, this is really important. Until now, Google collected your data, but did not attach your name to it. Now, they can, and will. This new thing they’re doing will allow them to collect your data across searches, your email, Youtube, Maps, Google+, and all their affiliates, and build a complete profile of YOU.
If that doesn’t bother you, maybe this will: they own and can sell all that data, including anything you create and send (artists and writers, take note).
There is a way you can opt out of this ridiculousness. It’s described in the link, but if you’re still not sure about it, please ask me and I’ll guide you through how to turn all this off.
This is my wake-up call. I’ll be locking down my devices and scaling back what I put through the big Google machine, which means you may see less of me across social media. I’m going to keep researching this, but it may mean in order to keep the rights to my creative work, I’ll have to keep it out of Google’s hands. And that may take some doing.
Duckduckgo is a nontracking search engine….may be worth a try.
So according to the article there is an opt out for this. Instructions are I the last paragraph. I’m on mobile so I’ll edit this more later. EDITED TO INCLUDE OPT OUT INSTRUCTIONS
To opt-out of Google’s identified tracking, visit the Activity controls on Google’s My Account page, and uncheck the box next to “Include Chrome browsing history and activity from websites and apps that use Google services.“ You can also delete past activity from your account.
Interesting
Yeah ok, that’s the last wake up call I needed. Getting out of your prying, sweaty little hands now.
Steel Phoenix Studios 