Technical mishaps

Technology is a beautiful thing. I was working at the 930 club last night and got to see some pretty awesome technology in action. From wireless communication via walkie talkie, to lighting fixtures and blasters and wazoos, when added up, all of the tools and gadgets made the show from a musical experience into a visual one as well. Perception struck me strongly though. Normally I would be one of the crazed fans in the crowd who can't wait for their favorite band to come on stage, but this time I was one of the guys who had built that stage and hung those lights. I looked at the performance and was glad that everything I assembled worked properly and that the show was going according to plan. The band's performance was an afterthought. I did notice though that one of the guitarists was using a ridiculous new technology. He had a bluetooth ring on. This ring, when waved around, sent data to his guitar to simulate a whammy bar(to get the notes to wobble). So instead of having to stop his playing to grab a bar that might ruin his flow, he was able to make awesome hand gestures and have his guitar virtually follow his expression. This is a step towards a new era of virtual music, where people are going to be able to play not just the instrument, but add new intricacies with their bodies that will bring live music to new heights.

the internet highway has a few potholes

Ever stop to think about what exactly makes up the internet? Data lines connecting millions of computers and servers. As hard as ISP's might try, some of these servers break down or get overloaded and parts of the internet stop working. This is a problem I face sometimes when i watch episodes of scrubs on tweekerville.com. The website is hosted on mid-bandwith servers so during high traffic hours, the server caps and locks out new users.
Now imagine this problem being applied to the third world. Not only are they at a technological disadvantage due to funding and location, but there aren't any tech guys waiting around to get their gear back up and running. When there is one computer to a town for email, if that computer goes down, the entire town is suddenly in the dark, and most likely, when that computer is in use the majority of the towns phone line capacity is being held up too. Infrastructure was brought up as a serious issue in these developing nations. Now they don't have a complete lack of infrastructure, but people are so worried about getting them online, they skip past more important matters, like how is that computer going to connect? will it stay running? these are all factors that a engineer would have to take into account and more when trying to set up information streams to new parts of the world. To "build out" the internet, it takes time and money that not many people are currently putting forth. Sucks for them. While we deal with crashed servers and computer viruses, they just deal with...well...a complete lack of internet. If they've never had it, they cant miss it, so no worries.

cyber punks

Cyberpunks. Thats a name that carries multiple meanings. In this case i refer to our class. I use the johnny mnemonic style cyberpunk. A person living in a world that runs rampant with technology. This monday we had a class online. Despite technological limitations, our free flowing conversation was self-moderated rather effectively.
We were able to tell what was going on by using our prior experience with debate and conversation to insert emotion and innuendo to each others "speech". We were able to tell who was talking to who and even gander a guess at what the response would be. If this were not the case, we would have had a significantly less meaningful conversation. So what happens when these chat rooms start to be used more commonly? What if the class started there, would we be able to even learn those mannerisms, or would our conversations be doomed to stale flatlining question and answer session?

AIM, conversation or hyped up emailing.

One of my friends pointed out to me yesterday that she absolutely hates talking online. I asked why and got the response of the lack of emotion. You cannot tell the little innuendos and sarcasms in human speech. All you see is a flat response. This can lead to a lot of miscommunication. After talking to her and failing to crack some of my favorite "thats what she said" style jokes, I realized that it was indeed true. The only reason people do get some of these intricacies online is their intimate knowledge of the other converser. They know what the person means, or what the person could understand when they speak. This is a similar situation to emails, but going back and forth in real time.

What ever happened to talking on the phone? we discussed the ease that this emotionless environment provides to certain types of speech, but now that cellphones run rampant, what does AIM hold other than multitasking?

console wars?

Has business really won us all over that well? Last year, a "console war" was the headline of many news bulletins in the tech industry. Between products by major manufacturers such as Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo this war was simply a ploy for market share and publicity. We have fallen right in step with their plans. By hyping up the competition between game platforms, an artificial increase in demand allows for guaranteed sales for these companies. All but sony turned a profit in major proportions for the year as well.
Where is the difference between competition over a target market and using hype to dupe people into rushing out to buy overpriced goods. In sellers terms its a beautiful economic trick. For the rest of us, it is a dirty dirty evil thing. On the buyer-to-buyer market, scarcity of resources drove demand and therefore prices sky-high making the xbox 360, ps3, and wii nearly three times their list price during the month after their respective launches. This hyperinflation did not discourage sales. Rather, it hyped up everyone else to keep the demand high above supply levels. The more machines the companies made, the more money they could walk away with. We've all been duped into the newest toy, the shiniest gadget, and the coolest marketing scam.

Many of us are tech junkies in a digital age.

Giving up so soon?

Despite all attempts, the media industry has failed to provide itself with secure methods of making sales. Piracy is at an all time high and the spread of ultra-high-speed internet means that more and more people are able to get anything they want, anytime they want, be it movies, songs, or shows. Media is even available in live streams on many websites such as dailymotion and youtube. A few days ago, the CEO and co-founder of Apple, Steve Jobs, came out and denounced DRM.
DRM is digital rights management code. What it attempts to do is prevent you or me from copying songs without paying money for their permission. The only problem here is that every DRM code released so far be it napster, apple, or windows has been cracked. If you factor this in with the big 5 record companies still selling 90% of their merchandise through CDs which are not DRM encoded, the incentives to pay for research and implementation of a broken system online are not apparent to many, and apparently are no longer apparent to Mr. Jobs. Here you can find his original speech and rationale. It makes little sense for these companies to try and hassle us from stealing online music when we can steal music from CDs anyway. Music is inelastic in its demand, people will buy it whether it is protected or not and people will steal it whether it is protected or not. Abandoning DRM will save money for these companies in impressive quantity and will allow loyal customers the ease of being able to take their music with them and not have to switch between services and devices in order to find a working match.
Is DRM worth it to these companies? What do you think would happen if it was finally thrown out?

shake it like you mean it demonboy

Creepy. Just creepy. What kind of world do we live in that every immature pre-pubescent boy feels the need to run around toting gang slogans, racial slurs, and sexual innuendos on the internet? Oh I know, its the digital world. These kids would normally be reprimanded or not taken seriously in real life, but on the internet, its like a playground. They roam free. The issue I see though is that this attitude is spilling over into the real world. The younger generations are slowly losing respect for one another and following the "baddass rebel" attitude more and more. A generation of white suburbia wishes it were from the ghetto, and those who don't wish they weren't so sad (see: emo kids). When people start realizing that these artificial persona are actually who they are and begin acting that way all the time, chaos will ensue. Hopefully I'll be living on some small island somewhere by then.

Can you tell?

Remember when SmarterChild was first released? As a middle-schooler i thought it was amazing. An program that controlled text conversation through an AIM screen name. The creators had thousands of possible responses to any number of questions. They even programmed humorous insults for when the program could not comprehend the human user in order to make up for the lack of complexity. This is similar to the matter discussed in the 3rd article of our reading. As realistic as Smarterchild may seem, it was very quickly apparent that it was a program and not a person. SmarterChild used perfect grammar on AIM, which is nearly unheard of and had a limited set of responses. If you were to talk to SmarterChild today though, it is a much "smarter" program than back at its debut.

It is obvious that a program doesn't have the capabilities of holding conversation with a human past a certain point as of now, but what do you think would occur if programmers set two of these automated talkers against one another?

Project: Science Fiction: the love/fear of technology in the future

Science Fiction- The love and fear of the future of technology.

Science fiction is a genre of stories that often create a picture of the future. In many of these stories the authors weave tales of technology at a point far beyond our current capabilities with artificial intelligence being a very popular subject. Authors like Isaac Asimov and the Wachowski Brothers dream of futures where technology has moved man in a new direction, but whether this is a good direction is left to the viewer.

In recent years science fiction has spread from books to film. As the potential audience spreads through the silver screen, more and more minds are faced with the questions raised by these stories. These movies are popularly packaged as high-paced action-adventures. Beyond a typical battle for good and evil though, one can look at each movie’s view of how technology has changed the future. There is fear of the unknown, often shown through the possibility of evil robots turning on their creators, but there is also the love of the potential of technology shown through improved living conditions and outlandish tools.

Regardless of the specifics of the future, two viewpoints remain prevalent regarding what is to come. On one hand, there are fantastic stories like Star Trek. In futures like Star Trek, technology has led mankind to the stars. Computers there run technology enabling such feats as faster than light travel and the creation of any foodstuffs imaginable through atomic reconstruction. These futures show the vast potential for technology to improve our daily lives. Another similar future is the one presented in Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot. This future, though not as distant or advanced as Star Trek, shows people with automated hover cars, and robots. These robots have debatably achieved consciousness, but are governed by specific laws that prevent them from being a threat to humans. The movie raises the question of whether or not these robots are to be feared. Wasn’t the cause of the evil robots an evil person? Think about the fact that humans designed and created these robots, so these people must also be responsible for imprinting them with the potential for evil acts.

A great fear with technological advancement is that if we create artificial intelligence, how will it react to its creators? Common scenarios show these mechanical beings improving themselves beyond human capabilities and then lashing out in an attempt to destroy their former masters. Such stories can be found in the Matrix, The Terminator, and Battlestar Galactica. In the Matrix, robots start as complex computers, very much like those in I, Robot, but eventually A.I. is created. Eventually, possibly due to human inability to view machines as equals, the A.I. decides it is not only equal, but superior to humans and lashes out. This story is told in the Animatrix (part 1 , part 2). In the terminator, a similar uprising leads to the fall of man as well ( terminator future scene). These stories lead to a very grim portrayal of a future with artificial intelligence which can be called post-apocalyptic. These futures show robots committing what we would call acts of evil. Therefore it can be assumed that these robots are evil, but what caused them to become evil?

The potential evil inherent in artificial intelligence can be assumed to be present because humans created the A.I. and humans have a natural evil to them. The next step is then that if we gave the A.I. the potential for both good and evil, do they act evil because of action taken against them (as claimed by the robots in the animatrix), or do they act evil because they lack human morality to give them cause for good? In the T.V. series Battlestar Galactica, the cylons are a race of robots who after being created by man, revolt and try to exterminate mankind in a war. After losing the initial war the cylons evolve into cyborgs that are indistinguishable from humans and develop a belief in god. The only difference between humans and machines in this case is their method of creation, they are like similar species. Nobody knows whether or not intelligent machines will be soulless killers or living, breathing entities. Luckily, the realm of science fiction presents us with many of the different possibilities so we can consider our choices before reaching an unfavorable situation such as the apocalypse.

Although the possibility for a dark future destroyed by sentient machines is popular, one cannot forsake the utopian ideas present as well. Our current lack of ability to create sentient machines might never be solved, which means that computers in the future will continue to advance as they do now, but any evil caused by them will be due to use by man rather than the machines themselves. Looking at stories such as Star Wars and Star Trek, the future is highly advanced and people live a much easier life out in the stars. The key here is that all of the evils perpetrated in these universes originated from people (or aliens which for this purpose we will treat like people) rather than from machines.

All of these potential futures are rather dark. It is daunting that a bright future in a popular story is rare, but the lessons learned from these dark times can be made very useful as the future approaches. Whether or not mankind ever actually develops Artificial Intelligence, the advances in technology we see today will only become more commonplace. Eventually some of these stories may become reality, but for now the best thing anyone can do is to speculate about what tomorrow might bring.

Emulation leads to actualization?

Monday's class brought up an interesting point about the current level of computer technology. Due to our lack of knowledge of how to create true A.I., computers today simply emulate functions capable of the human brain. Take for example Deep Blue. It was created with the intent of emulating chess players like Kasparov. By using long series of code, a computer can be designed to act in a near limitless number of computational functions. If code-writers have a good enough understanding of how a certain activity works, they are likely able to write code to make a computer do the calculations necessary for activities. Although computers are limited by the code that runs them, like us they are limited by their tools. In my audio technology class I learned about the ranges of human hearing. Although it is possible for the human ear to detect sound from 2hz to 20,000 hz, we can only technically hear from around 3,000 to 5,000 hz. Once outside of that range, hearing steadily declines from its maximum point. The advantage of computers in this arena is that they use microphones, which can be designed to pick up any range of sound desired. Again, emulation has outdone what we do naturally. My question is, if we can design computers to do everything better than we can, if we eventually come up with how to make A.I., would we have made ourselves obsolete?