It's not an XOR. Tech and social ideas and humanity in general advances because people dabble with it in the low risk entertainment space.
We need technology that is less immersive, not more
91–100 of 202 posts
Re: We need technology that is less immersive, not more
#92I 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…
I agree with you. One part of the article that I cut for brevity but maybe I should have included talks about the kind of immersion that is created by bright colorful moving pictures on a mobile screen. A lot of talent and resources is thrown at the goal of keeping people glued to their phones (TikTok, Candy Crush, etc.). "Engagement" is a form of immersion.
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Re: We need technology that is less immersive, not more
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
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, build…
I don’t buy this for even a minute. If my starter solenoid goes out on my old time Jeep I get the same feeling. (It’s happened a few times now). Does this mean the Jeep is now part of my body? Of course not. It’s called being annoyed or caught off guard by external stimuli. I think there is a large portion of people on this website who have not spent a day in years without their devices. That doesn’t mean their devic…
Ever go rock-crawling for several hours off-road with that jeep? If the stakes are high because you're far from a paved road, 4x4 is also a very immersive experience. After a while the tires become like toes, and finding a good line with the vehicle starts to feel like stepping carefully around broken glass. You cringe almost in anticipation of personal pain when you take a bad line. There's surely some neurological basis for this, some kind of reverse of phantom-limb syndrome. Similarly that sense of "stumbling" when you're fighting with a glitching IDE or whatever is also very real, at least for me. If you haven't ever felt something along these lines, then you might not have found something yet that you're accustomed to fully focusing on.
Re: We need technology that is less immersive, not more
#94Really? Windows Phone Ad (2010): "It's time for a phone to save us from our phones."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-X0p-79SjY
Re: We need technology that is less immersive, not more
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
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, build…
I don’t buy this for even a minute. If my starter solenoid goes out on my old time Jeep I get the same feeling. (It’s happened a few times now). Does this mean the Jeep is now part of my body? Of course not. It’s called being annoyed or caught off guard by external stimuli. I think there is a large portion of people on this website who have not spent a day in years without their devices. That doesn’t mean their devic…
Wait but driving cars is pretty much the classic example of how learning to use tools can become an "extension" of our visual, motor, spacial perception.
It's why a new driver feels so uneasy while a seasoned driver can almost "feel" the amount of space their car takes up.
Re: We need technology that is less immersive, not more
#96I wonder if the author realizes that there are eight billion humans. They can't all work on the same thing. And the majority of people who are not engineers and who just work regular mindless jobs need entertainment. Also we've had entertainment since the dawn of time. People don't just go home and stare at the wall for sixteen hours before going back to work. Almost none are going home from work to solve humanity's…
Of course they realize that, because that's not what the article is about. The problem being described is that the distribution of talent/intelligence across the problems civilization is facing is uneven. The author's perspective is that individual interests and pay/profit incentives bias the distribution towards fun boom/bust industries (e.g. video games/VR/entertainment), and more critical industries may be losing out on this talent as a result. These are problems that capitalism can't naturally solve, because not every problem needing to be solved can be crafted into profit driven market. More than a "critique of capitalism", the author has noticed his industry is filling up with engineers/competition.
Re: We need technology that is less immersive, not more
#97"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 wat…
Nobody disputes that entertainment has value. The article is about the fact that so much talent and resources is funneled into immersion. Using your neurosurgeon example, I posit that having fewer VR headsets will not prevent the doctor from unwinding. Nor will having mobile phones with less vibrant colors or application with lower engagement metrics.
>Using your neurosurgeon example, I posit that having fewer VR headsets will not prevent the doctor from unwinding.
Sure, they can always fall back on the classic method for doctors to unwind: whisky.
Re: We need technology that is less immersive, not more
#98Many 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.
> Ads have existed long before clicks
Not really. Advertising is pretty new, modern advertising with targeting market segments didn't exist until around the start of the 20th century[1]. The first ad supported media was in 1838[2].
Behavioral ads targeting individual user's are super new, though I'd argue TikTok and gacha games are orders of magnitude better at using behavioral manipulation than advertisers are.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_J._Barratt [2]https://qprintgroup.com.au/history-of-print-advertising/
Re: We need technology that is less immersive, not more
#99"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 wat…
Entertainment has gotten really weird now that we have (multiple forms of) recording, plus quick on-demand transmission to practically anywhere.
Basically all "need" I have of new recorded (to include video games—on-demand and not requiring the attention or effort of anyone but myself) entertainment is social. Any "need" for new entertainment exists because new entertainment is being created. If new entertainment stopped being created entirely, my quality of life wouldn't actually drop at all, because there's an astounding quantity & variety of it already, far more than I can engage with in a lifetime even restricting myself to the likely-to-be-very-good stuff. My friend-group, and entertainment media, could do exactly what we do with new entertainment, but instead by digging into older material we've so-far overlooked, instead of new.
Re: We need technology that is less immersive, not more
#100Many 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
I wonder if the original author knew they were also paraphrasing, riffing on Ginsberg's "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness". Glad to see quoteinvestigator mention that context