Cool site that has searchable lists of science fiction inventions. The funniest bits have to be the corny sounding names of some of them. It must be a regrettable and completely unavoidable fact that any thing you invent as a scifi author will sound tacky in 20 years time. Perhaps people will be laughing at laptop or iPod in 20 years time too.
Technovelgy.com: Inventions from Science Fiction Books and Movies
I went to a talk last night at the ICA on the new blood of British Science Fiction (do all of those need capitals?) which had a panel of people on both sides of the critic front line. Everyone was very keen and very excitable about everything they talked about. Highlighted by what Paul McAuley said at one point, that the difference between SciFi authors and “mainstream” authors was that everyone was all so supportive of each other. Genre authors in general took every opportunity to promote each other and raved about other books, something that he had found lacking in non-genre authors.
There were a couple of themes that kept recurring. One was What is the difference between SciFi and fantasy? The other was around what characterises this so called new blood?
I found these kicking around. More experiments in my HaikuPrime concept. Each line must be a prime number of sylables, and a prime number of lines. Ideally the total number of syllables ought to also be a prime but that is also considerably harder.
/Flesh will slow me
/Digital wont let me down
/Come revolution
/Slow Old Organic
/Lost Upgrade Path
/Non-Extensible
/Proprietary
/Evolution of the Body
/Come to me as code
/I want to upgrade
/Your soul
/Built with me
/Made as new
/Engineered for
/Recursive Generations Together
Here’s a watery yarn I wrote in my writing workshop a couple of weeks back. The tutor said “Can’t comment on comedy, it either works or it doesn’t”.
I’ve just finished reading these two Philip K Dick novels in fairly quick succession. About 20 years separates him publishing each of them. Very interesting to compare them.
I don’t want to give any spoilers, but they are both about people being transported to other ‘universes’ and in a sort of psychological way rather than physical transport. They focus on the weirdness of being in somewhere subtly different and play mind games with that.
I enjoyed both, but still have an underlying…
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I went to see Avalon last week. It’s taken 4 days before I’ve had the time in front of a PC to actually get some thoughts down.
Filmed by a Japanese director (the guy behind Patlabor) in Poland with the dialogue entirely in Polish. The setting is some sort of dystopian future where the only exit is the Game. A virtual reality super MMORPG set in some WW3 style middle European conflict (The polish army lent them equipment, from AKs to T-78s & Hind gun-ships). Death sends you back brain-fried. Loot can be exchanged for real world cash. The main character is one of the best in the Game. A solo warrior called Ash. She is of course very cute in a dangerous, rip your balls off, sort of a way.
It’s not your usual action movie. Certainly not a live-action manga either. The whole thing is filmed in brownish sepia tones (with a few exceptions), which on top of the slow, ponderous filming creates an oppressive air. You can feel the 1984 overtones. There seems like there are few actual action scenes, and they are used to truly forward the story, not just up the body count. The ones that are there are incredible. From a game like battle with a CG gunship in the intro to the finale they become more personal and meaningful to Ash.
Amusing to also see dumb game AI too.
There were elements of the movie I didn’t like, but the B&W treatment and the post-communist-decay settings had my eyeballs glued to the screen for the full 2 hours. There are also lots of very Japanese bits that may not gel with everyone - like cheesy theme songs and enigmatic endings - but it does tell a great story, which is certainly not black and white.
Fuckin flash sites crashing my computer… I might come back to it.
I was thinking about mimic AIs. Trained via chat rooms and IM to mimic humans. A kind of human shell, no life really, but must have learned to mimic having a life and all that goes with it. Also got me thinking about that movie where giant praying mantis’ live in the underground and pretend to be humans (mimic). Thinking about AI’s hanging around in chat rooms until they can kill someone and take over their personality and life. Needs some more thought. Prob not a good story by itself.
I got to this via Cory Doctorow’s post on boingboing about evolving AIs.
post on boingboing about evolving AIs
The turing test isnt any good any more. I dont think AI in any useful (for us or them) will look or feel like human intelligence (maybe it will if we force it to be).
The evolutionary approach is good, but cant use a human interaction criteria as a good one to further generations. the ecology/environment/universe that AIs evolve in needs to be thought about. This universe would need to be more complex than the AIs that are evolving. So we need to evolve them outside the “jar”. Cant do it in vitro.
I need to do some more thinking around this. I seem to be leading down the path that we have to evolve AI outside the lab. Provide them with a complex set of input. I do think we will be evolving/breeding/training this sort of “intelligence” for specific applications first. So any sort of human level intelligence will be emergent from complex pattern matching/predicitve engines that specialist fields.
