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We need technology that is less immersive, not more

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Re: We need technology that is less immersive, not more

#41

Post by mellosouls »

johnchristopher wrote: post #37
kamaradclimber wrote: post #2

Many of the most talented artists of our time don’t do any art — they work in advertising. I think the original quote is: The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads (source: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/06/12/click/ ) which is very close to article’s paraphrase

> Many of the most talented artists of our time don’t do any art — they work in advertising. > I think the original quote is: > The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads No, it's a paraphrase of a quote attributed to Banksy and it's specifically about graphic arts, not CS or psychology. > The thing I hate the most about advertising is that it attracts all the bright, creative and…

No, it's a paraphrase of a quote attributed to Banksy and it's specifically about graphic arts, not CS or psychology.

Nope, the most famous form is Ginsberg; I don't know if he lifted it from somewhere too.

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked

- Howl

(EDIT: the grandparent link actually points that out)

Re: We need technology that is less immersive, not more

#42

Post by ElevenLathe »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #18

I have a different take than the author. I don't have an issue at all with directed activities being deeply immersive - games most specifically. That is, I like the idea of putting on a headset for a half hour and playing a game, then doing something else. What I think is much more destructive is when "immersion" just looks like "constant distraction", i.e. the idea that we'll wear these immersive devices all the tim…

There are a few (TNG and Voyager for sure, maybe DS9 too) Star Trek stories that deal a bit with holodeck addiction ("holo-addiction"), and I think something at that level of immersion would absolutely cause lots of people to completely withdraw from society, especially if (real world) society is bleak (Ready Player One deals with this aspect of it). I already know 30-something childless adults who spend effectively every non-working moment in some virtual world -- these people are effectively already holo-addicted. It will only get worse if these environments are more able to block out reality.

To me the sad thing about my friends in this situation is that they usually aren't in some swashbuckling fantasy epic starring them, but grinding Runescape/WoW/Eve/etc., performing the same repetitive actions over and over, with the occasional burst of actually interesting interaction or story. They've replaced the real-world grind with a synthetic grind, but they are still grinding! At least its cheaper than a sports gambling addiction, and probably marginally less health-destroying than a drinking habit.

Re: We need technology that is less immersive, not more

#43

Post by rpigab »

"Less immersive so you don't get hooked and you can choose when to play and when to not play", that's exactly how I market my terminal UI Klondike Solitaire to my friends. You can't even play it on mobile, needs a keyboard! No fireworks when you win, nothing, well it's a work in progress.

Shameless plug:

https://rpigab.gitlab.io/solitaire-cli/

Re: We need technology that is less immersive, not more

#44

Post by eddd-ddde »

haswell wrote: post #15

While sitting with my iPad typing the other morning, something about the experience struck me in a way that it never had before. I've been typing since the early 90s, and can type around 120WPM without looking or thinking about it, and it hit me that in a very real sense, the iPad (and other computing devices) are already an extension of me. I've invested the time to integrate this hardware into my brain via the keyb…

That we have arms and legs that we can control is nothing but an accident, a very complex accident but still.

Our eyes and ears are no different in that sense, only they're mostly input rather than output.

Input is just as dangerous in our bodies as it is in some backend that connects to a database, marketing makes use of these vulnerabilities to control us in some way or another.

I don't think people argue we should cover over ears while walking outside out of fear we get hijacked from things we could hear. In the same way, I don't think there's an issue with immersive technology, one just has to learn to treat it as more external input that needs to be validated and sanitized.

Re: We need technology that is less immersive, not more

#45

Post by [deleted] »

amadeuspagel wrote: post #7
kamaradclimber wrote: post #2

Many of the most talented artists of our time don’t do any art — they work in advertising. I think the original quote is: The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads (source: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/06/12/click/ ) which is very close to article’s paraphrase

Ads have existed long before clicks on and the most talented artists have worked on them long before the most talented programmers thought about making people click on them.

[deleted]

Re: We need technology that is less immersive, not more

#46

Post by huijzer »

haswell wrote: post #15

While sitting with my iPad typing the other morning, something about the experience struck me in a way that it never had before. I've been typing since the early 90s, and can type around 120WPM without looking or thinking about it, and it hit me that in a very real sense, the iPad (and other computing devices) are already an extension of me. I've invested the time to integrate this hardware into my brain via the keyb…

I think Buffett has a very great counter to this which he learned from his father: inner scorecard. By judging yourself on your inner checklist, you’re less likely to be pulled into the latest fads. Your goal is follow your own path instead of the path that happens to be fashionable that day.

Re: We need technology that is less immersive, not more

#47

Post by massysett »

"I hope you’ll agree that humanity has a variety of important engineering problems to solve, and nicer-looking graphics is quite low on that list."

I used to sneer at the social value of entertainment. Then covid lockdowns hit. I spent a lot of time playing Factorio. When professional sports resumed playing (in empty stadiums, with fake crowd noise on the broadcasts) I was happy to sit on the couch after work and watch baseball.

Without that entertainment, there is no way I would have been able to trudge to my computer and work from home day after day, when the only thing I could leave my house for was an occasional walk and a frightful trip to the grocery store.

So even if the brain surgeon is not using those "nicer-looking graphics" to improve brain surgery (which could very well happen), the brain surgeon might just be looking at "nicer-looking graphics" to unwind after a day of brain surgery, which gets her ready for another day of brain surgery. Entertainment has value.

Re: We need technology that is less immersive, not more

#48

Post by johnchristopher »

mellosouls wrote: post #41
johnchristopher wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Many of the most talented artists of our time don’t do any art — they work in advertising. > I think the original quote is: > The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads No, it's a paraphrase of a quote attributed to Banksy and it's specifically about graphic arts, not CS or psychology. > The thing I hate the most about advertising is that it attracts all the bright, creative and…

No, it's a paraphrase of a quote attributed to Banksy and it's specifically about graphic arts, not CS or psychology. Nope, the most famous form is Ginsberg; I don't know if he lifted it from somewhere too. I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked - Howl (EDIT: the grandparent link actually points that out)

> Nope, the most famous form is Ginsberg; I don't know if he lifted it from somewhere too.

No, they appeared in very different contexts and Ginsberg goes in a different direction (1955, drugs, jazz, etc.):

> I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night, [..]

while Banksy deals with the then current state of arts and marketing (~2000/2010?).

Also, it's not explained in the article how Ginsberg and Hammerbacher ideas relate except for an "en-pasasnt" quote from the person originally inquiring the quote investigator opinion, so the grandparent link doesn't actually point anything out.

edit: to summarize: that quote is taken out of context even if it seems to fit

Re: We need technology that is less immersive, not more

#49

Post by foobarbecue »

haswell wrote: post #15

While sitting with my iPad typing the other morning, something about the experience struck me in a way that it never had before. I've been typing since the early 90s, and can type around 120WPM without looking or thinking about it, and it hit me that in a very real sense, the iPad (and other computing devices) are already an extension of me. I've invested the time to integrate this hardware into my brain via the keyb…

When my computer glitches, e.g. if a key stops working on my keyboard or the mouse doesn't respond as expected, I sometimes experience a physical sense of of discomfort or disorientation that's not unlike dizzyness or the feeling of missing a step on stairs. I think it's because, as you describe in terms of immersion, my brain has extended its concept of my body through my typing fingers to the computer screen, building a proprioceptive loop which includes the computer.

We are already cyborgs.

Re: We need technology that is less immersive, not more

#50

Post by EGreg »

This!

And the more immersive the technology is, the more the back-end should be open-sourced and put under the control of a free market of hosting companies and maintainers, that end-users and communities can pay.

Right now we have:

  People 
     Big Tech Server Farms
What we should have is:

  People
   Communities
     Hosting and Service Providers 
       Developers 
          Conferences, Certifications
The second kind of ecosystem can liberate people.

Would you rather spend your years hooked up to Neuralink owned by Elon, or have a say in what you experience and mitigate the power dynamics?

Would you rather spend 9 hours a day in a metaverse owned by Zuck+Facebook (oh sorry, Meta), Elon+Twitter (oh sorry, X), Bezos+Amazon, Page+Google (oh sorry, Alphabet) or would you rather at least have your own Minecraft server? Or better yet, have an open platform that anyone can fork and build on, like Linux, Wordpress or Ethereum?

Technical overview: https://qbix.com/ecosystem

Layperson overview: https://www.laweekly.com/restoring-healthy-communities/

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