Sunday, November 15, 2009

the singularity is coming

When this happens, you'll know the Singularity has arrived.


Here's the stuff I've been looking at on the net today:

This is a surprisingly accurate portrayal of a Marine's daily life.

This is a clever image resizing technology. By "clever" I mean "pure evil." I can't figure out exactly why, but it feels so wrong to me. No, I can figure out exactly why. You can't just let users change the content of an image any time they want to resize a window! Who's to say those bits of sky aren't important? We're going to create a whole generation with no concept of the relative positions of objects in the real world. And did you see what happened to that baby's face? That's just one of the bugs they know about. How else can this thing go wrong? Will the algorithm preserve everything it considers cute and mutilate everything else, or let it dissolve in the ether? Who could live in a world where a computer decides who deserves to be photographed, and drinks our blood? Or worse, a computer provides a handy interface to put that decision in the hands of the most wicked calculating machine of all: Man.

Here's the website of a guy who likes to chop up computers and hang their still-operating pieces up for display. It's sick and captivating. The machines would be crazy not to hate us.

So that's what the future has in store. I make sure I have an easy way out within reach at all times. Do you?

2 comments:

  1. That YouTube link is brilliant. I was in for ten and a half years, about a lifetime ago. Some shit never changes.

    --MrMojok

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  2. That's what I said when I read you had joined!!!

    --MrMojok

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