Earlier quoted context omitted.
The video was removed from net. What do you want me to do about it ?
Continuously changing story = BS.
??
William Gibson says today’s internet is nothing like what he envisioned
161–170 of 174 posts
Re: William Gibson says today’s internet is nothing like what he envisioned
#162Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes! What's interesting about Gibson's vision is that he assumed connectivity would be hard, but VR would be easy. It's a world of payphones, fax machines, and "simstim" where you can receive someone else's sensory input and ride along inside their head as they move through the world. That's not where we are now, but we'll be a lot closer to it if and when we nail VR.
Simstim is - at least in part - being worked on by a company called Openwater[0]. Mary Lou Jepsen did a talk at the Long Now Foundation a while back that speaks to the ambition of thought/memory recording via an MRI-like device and the "insertion"/playback of the same in other people [1]. [0]www.openwater.cc [1]www.longnow.org/seminars/02018/oct/29/toward-practical-telepathy/
Yeah, I was at that talk. A little out there, but pretty awesome.
Re: William Gibson says today’s internet is nothing like what he envisioned
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
Simstim is - at least in part - being worked on by a company called Openwater[0]. Mary Lou Jepsen did a talk at the Long Now Foundation a while back that speaks to the ambition of thought/memory recording via an MRI-like device and the "insertion"/playback of the same in other people [1]. [0]www.openwater.cc [1]www.longnow.org/seminars/02018/oct/29/toward-practical-telepathy/
Yeah, I was at that talk. A little out there, but pretty awesome.
Have you seen Brainstorm from 1983?
Re: William Gibson says today’s internet is nothing like what he envisioned
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think one of the things it was easy to miss in 1984 when Neuromancer was published was how accessible the internet and computers is. I've watched two year olds interact with the modern internet. If you have a system with a high barrier to entry -- like computers where in 1984 and as they are described in Neuromancer -- it's safe to assume that a lot of "boring" and "average" people wouldn't use it. At the time Micr…
Interestingly, a decade later, both Tad William's Otherland (1996), and Neal Stephenson's Snowcrash (1992) described networked virtual realities which everyday normal people had access to, but they were referred to as "Ken and Barbies" or similar. Their use of off-the-shelf avatars and no custom software gave them away. And the Techno-elites still had their own spaces within these worlds that were either off-limits o…
Something happened between 1984 and 1992 where imagining a virtual world had to include large numbers of everyday people.
Re: William Gibson says today’s internet is nothing like what he envisioned
#165I'm still holding out hope that we'll get that "mysterious and sexy place" at some point. The current generation of VR seems like the first halting steps into that world. Progress towards realtime raytracing and massively online social worlds look like the next steps. The lofty goals of brain machine interface companies whisper faint possibilities of "jacking in" at some distant date.
The human brain processes ~40gigabits/second of information. Current direct brain interfaces are probably closer to 400bits/second Computer to Brain. I think it's very possible that we will hit wetware limitations for direct brain interfaces an order of magnitude or two less than ~40gigabits/seconds. With less information to process the digital worlds created by brain machine interfaces will be significantly less sti…
I would argue that that number is a bit high for sense input. Figures I've seen are about 20x lower on the high end. The only time I've seen estimates as high as the one you gave are when they are considering the full field of vision for each eye and translating that directly to pixels assuming there is 100% fidelity. Human vision doesn't work that way, we dedicate far fewer neurons to our peripheral vision outside the fovea. You also have to remember that neurons transmit data at a much slower rate than electrical connections (100m/s vs 300,000km/s) so the path to building a better brain machine interfce is to have a large number of electrodes which seems to me a fairly straightforward problem to solve e.g. make them smaller and adding more of them. The other side of the coin is that we aren't aware of all of our sensory input all of the time so you can get away with only transmitting the important stuff which greatly reduces the bandwidth needed. Further out, there's likely some form of abstraction going on inside our brains and if we can communicate data on that level we'll likely need even less input to create a realistic experience.
As an aside, I don't think I'd opt for the type of uploading outlined in that novel considering it involves a posthumous destructive scan of the connectome. There wouldn't be any continuity so you'd probably just end up with a copy. The only type of uploading I could see working would be a Ship of Theseus approach where you gradually replace your biological neurons with artificial neurons and even that causes some hesitation.
Re: William Gibson says today’s internet is nothing like what he envisioned
#166> "the internet when he first conceived it, he thought it was a place that we would all leave the world and go to. Whereas in fact, it came here." Somehow this reminds me of the difference between various editions of Shadowrun , a cyberpunk-fantasy rolepalying game in a dystopian near future where magic and dragons returned (though the magic is irrelevant to my point here). In the earlier editions, from 1989 through…
There were also gameplay reasons behind that for flow. One of the criticisms of the newer model is that the needless connectivity without so much as a logistical benefit doesn't make the decker/hacker feel smart so much as make it feel like the world is set up by colossal idiots who would think giving the army hand grenades which are always remote detonatable without a manual safety fuse would be an excellent idea an…
One would think that way, right ? Stuff like this in SF always felt unbelievable to me in the past, especially coming from the technical/IT background. No one would be THAT stupid to have their stuff so wide open for anyone to hack into.
Well, then future came and with all the insanely insecure IoT devices all around I'm no longer so sure. :P
Re: William Gibson says today’s internet is nothing like what he envisioned
#167Re: William Gibson says today’s internet is nothing like what he envisioned
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
Have you seen Brainstorm from 1983? https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0085271/
No, just the clip that Lou showed at the talk.
I asked because the world of Brainstorm consisted of payphones too, and they did that 'telepathy' with headsets which could replay recorded experiences over that modem line.
Hard to classify that movie, at its time it was pure science-fiction, now it is a technothriller from the past. But very watchable, i think.
Re: William Gibson says today’s internet is nothing like what he envisioned
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
Those seem unrelated to the parent's point. Weinstein is co-opting the death of Aaron Schwartz to push his own far-right ideology. The target of his form of `rise up and take back` is neither "corporate shenanigans" nor "capitalist greed", but those who challenge it from the center and the left. He's clearly very popular with the Breitbart crowd, and about as anti-establishment as any billionaire politician with the…
Weinstein isn't far right. You have no idea what far right is if you think he is. He is centre-right maybe centre. His brother and his sister-in-law are both lefties. There is nothing far right about Weinstein or his family. > He's clearly very popular with the Breitbart crowd, and about as anti-establishment as any billionaire politician with the backing of a media arm and an attitude of suing everyone who challenge…
Weinstein acts right but talks left. He hoards his hundred millions and goads students to take back MIT. He gives lip service to Aaron Schwartz without doing anything to reduce the digital divide. He is an establishment hypocrite. He is a whiner. (weiner?)
Re: William Gibson says today’s internet is nothing like what he envisioned
#170Earlier quoted context omitted.
Facts you say? The world is all ears!
Ok, let's find out. > Things like the "5G causes coronavirus" To what degree is that a comprehensively accurate representation of the ideas floating around in the conspiracy world? And if you feel the urge to click on the downward pointing diamond to the left of my comment rather than replying, please pause for a moment and consider that action in the context of your comment, as well as the grandparent comment "But w…
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