It's pretty easy to see that romantic love is unfortunately bundled with the baggage of jealousy, suspicion, exclusiveness, and undeviating fidelity. You can’t have one without the other. The proportions may vary, but the less pleasant sides of the coin are part and parcel of the thing itself. You can’t have one without the others. So, I wonder if other human qualities have similar flip sides? I wonder if creativity, by it's nature a form of imagining that which does not yet exist, is necessarily bundled with deception (including self-deception) and subterfuge? Maybe a healthy proportion of self-worth is also needed in order to have the hubris to create. Couldn't that same valuable self-worth easily and equally become and engender maniacal control, freakish behavior, and bullying?
This is possibly what imperils the prospects of artificial intelligence. In order for a machine to make the leap into impetuous and truly creative thinking, it must also be capable of deception. Just like in all the science fiction scenarios in which the machines take over and do all sort sorts of nasty things, a truly smart machine will be capable of being a truly evil machine. Machines don't have the socially imposed moralities or even Darwinian genetic imperatives to reign in these tendencies. Uh oh.
EVL:
I visit some scientist/artists at the University to view virtual and developing display technologies they've been working on. One is a multi-panel flat screen display that can show massive image files and zoom in for details. You can see all of Chicago from the air and zoom into one block. Another is a 3D display with a robot arm that allows one to "feel" objects in a kind of box. This is already being used in some medical applications. One of the folks jokes that the porn world would love it.
Many of these displays require wearing goggles and/or a head device, but one of the projects under development eliminated the need for either of these. The display has infrared (I think) beams that lock on to the viewers face - an extension of biometric technology - and the screens can simulate 3D and offer an immersive experience by tracking the viewers head movements.
By far the most immersive experience was in the Cave, which is like stepping into a video game. I wear goggles and hold a game controller. There are projected images 8 feet high in front and to my left and right. There is even an image on the floor. So when I look to the right I see what's over there and if I "move" forward using the joystick, all the projections move as well. If I fly, as I did on the back of a giant bumblebee, I can look down and see what is below me. It's disorienting and unnerving and loads of fun. I even got a little nauseous at times if I wiggled the joystick and the landscape swiveled around me suddenly. It's the sort of thing that happens in IMAX movies, but in this case you are controlling it.
I spend most of the time exploring a woman's graduate thesis piece, a combination narrative video game and autobiography.
I ask why game companies haven't produced R&D funding. It seems a natural. The reason seems to be that the gaming companies want proprietary rights. Any company wants to be the only one with the right to exploit some new development, and these scientist/artists are holding firm to the scientific credo that information must be available to all.
I agree, but how to break this impasse? Government funding would do it, of course. It would be a way for the government to impartially support advances that would benefit both medicine and the gaming business, for starters. And given the scientist adherence to a kind of Creative Commons ethos, their developments could be picked up and expanded upon by anyone in those fields, but no one could actually own the development itself.
Paul Frazier travels with a Lava lamp.
Bush appointed a guy named Reich to be head of Assistant Secretary of State for the Western Hemisphere - the top state department post for Latin America - even though Congress twice voted him down. (Bush assigned him "temporarily," bypassing the law.) When he was sworn in, he said of his critics, "They say I can’t make rational decisions because of my ideology, well, they're not saying that anymore, because I had them all arrested this morning."
