Jake

Idle Thumbs 224: Ms. Petman

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I would think that the primary advantage of a humanoid robot would be that it would be more suited to using technology created by humans/navigate spaces designed for human use.

This is the case. I watched some documentary about the Fukushima disaster where they were talking about how they needed a human-like to navigate into the melt-down to turn valves and door-handles and other such instruments that were designed to be manipulated by humans.

I also read an article recently about how the Chernobyl disaster would have been far worse if not for three human individuals who basically served that same purpose, knowing that their bodies would literally fall apart if they failed or succeeded.

http://m.scotsman.com/news/stephen-mcginty-lead-coffins-and-a-nation-s-thanks-for-the-chernobyl-suicide-squad-1-1532289

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I don't think the robot uprising is the real threat, it's just the funny threat. The real threat is all this robotic military equipment making warfare and the eradication of "unwanted" people achievable, in a way that is absolutely terrifying to picture in ones mind, all without having to put a human face on any of it (joke: it is a robot that looks like a human but without a face). The scary thing is that people are building these devices, to then control them as they are deployed against other people.

 

I don't believe that my kids will have to fight Skynet, but machines taking over is a theoretically possible scenario. The "intelligence" of a self-driving car combined with weapons is sufficient to create a literal killing machine. As development speed increases in robotics, it is important to discuss possible scenarios.

 

The optimistic me thinks that a semi-automatised world will be better than the current, provided that we figure out political solutions for the increasing redundancy of human labour. It is with regards to the latter question where my pessimistic me speaks up.

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I don't think the robot uprising is the real threat, it's just the funny threat. The real threat is all this robotic military equipment making warfare and the eradication of "unwanted" people achievable, in a way that is absolutely terrifying to picture in ones mind, all without having to put a human face on any of it (joke: it is a robot that looks like a human but without a face). The scary thing is that people are building these devices, to then control them as they are deployed against other people.

 

I wouldn't worry too much about that, on a whole human societies are trending towards less violence, more respect for life and rights and less totalitarian. (Read Better Angels of our Nature)

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The nice thing about getting to a post-scarcity society is that most people don't bother to fight if they have the resources to pursue their own interests. This is why we're pursuing it (getting done with efficient communication, working on cheap energy, which then enables cheap matter from asteroids and solves the population problem (colonizing the rest of the solar system).

 

Honestly the real armageddon scenario now is a rehash of The Moon is a Harsh Mistress where asteroid mines are re-purposed into mass-driver like missiles aimed at the Earth.

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Honestly the real armageddon scenario now is a rehash of The Moon is a Harsh Mistress where asteroid mines are re-purposed into mass-driver like missiles aimed at the Earth.

I'm more concerned with global warming and the extinction-rate of various life-forms on this planet.

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I'm more concerned with global warming and the extinction-rate of various life-forms on this planet.

 

That too.

 

Edit: Revised list of world-ending crises (aka Extinction Filters):

 

1) Global Warming

2) Extinction of species causing ecological collapse/"Rise of the Jellyfish" oceans

3) Asteroid miners eventually holding the Earth hostage to asteroid strikes because we didn't set up a responsive asteroid detection/course alteration mechanism

4) Robot war/"Grey Goo" scenario

 

Cheap Energy solves 1, which helps avoid 2, but enables 3.  It all hinges on humanity in general dropping the ball in a substantial way, which is scary because we are kind of a bipolar hivemind when taken as a species.

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I'm more concerned with global warming and the extinction-rate of various life-forms on this planet.

 

Are there any studies on the minimum required bio-diversity to keep the earth from total ecological collapse? Seems like a super interesting topic.

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Interesting example of ecological collapse is the Easter Island story. It's also why field scientists are cataloging and sampling biodiversity as much as funding allows.

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Honestly the real armageddon scenario now is a rehash of The Moon is a Harsh Mistress where asteroid mines are re-purposed into mass-driver like missiles aimed at the Earth.

 

Ha! I think that worrying about anything other than "reliance on fossil fuels leading to global warming severely and forever changing the planet on a global scale" is not supportable. There are so, so, so many steps between now and "oh, we have the ability to alter the orbits of asteroids such that they can be used as weapons." The thing that is happening right now is the extreme effects of climate change. Right, fucking, now. Extreme heatwaves, terrifying weather patterns, global droughts, this is the current worry. Also, sometimes I worry about the eventual horrifying earthquakes that will ravage the entire east coast of North America. I was just reading Kim Stanley Robinson's Aurora, which is fun, but it reminded me that the rising sea levels means we lose all beaches, around the world. Beaches came about through years and years of erosion. Raise the water, lose the beaches! Gah. 

 

This, I know, is a REAL BUMMER. I have friends who are earth science PhDs with research focusing on the effects of climate change, and they're envious of my being able to talk with kids about black holes and galaxies, while they have to be the bummer patrol. But people need to know this, and need to think about this. There are so many things people need to understand about the real worries in the world, even if they are major bummers, and it's more fun to worry about dumb stuff like (heavy, eye-rolling sigh) "zombie uprisings."

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Don't worry, by the time your "Soylent Green" retirement moment comes around, we'll have perfect virtual reality recorded beaches to show you. Of course for full immersion, in the VR you'll be reclining on a beach chair.

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So re: the whole transgressive art thing, I feel like the biggest reason it's important to have stuff like that out there is that if it becomes excessively stigmatized it sends the message that having transgressive feelings is as bad as the actual transgressive act. If the social consequences of admitting that you feel a certain way or have a certain urge are identical to the consequences of acting on that urge, we no longer have any real incentive to avoid acting on those destructive urges. If you tell someone that they're already bad or evil for having certain thoughts, they have no reason to avoid taking action upon those thoughts other than, hopefully, an innate moral compass which supersedes those lessons.

 

I dunno I'm kinda sleepy at the moment and not sure I'm making sense. I've made a bunch of fucked up art in my day, and the above reasoning is why I still feel that it was (mostly) an ethically sound thing to do. That might just be rationalization though. Never can tell for sure.

 

I guess my point is, yeah gross art can reinforce existing societal biases towards gross behavior, but also a stigma towards gross art pre-pathologizes the gross impulses which exist in all of us to one degree or another. I feel like the important thing is mostly to build a consensus on what's gross and why, in which case stuff like the intellectual idolization of R Crumb's work, and not the work itself, is probably the main issue.

 

edit: I should also mention that I think something like The Binding of Isaac has a lot of value beyond just being weird and transgressive too. It loads so much symbolic imagery around a vague but intentional narrative that, whether by happenstance or intent (I suspect some of each), some genuinely interesting ideas emerge.

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Problem Machine,

Yes I really agree with that. (I had a much longer response typed out but I am deleting it because I realized I don't want to trigger a whole protracted thing.)

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His previous response was so long it required three posts, due to character limit. That's a lot of agreement, indeed!

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So re: the whole transgressive art thing, I feel like the biggest reason it's important to have stuff like that out there is that if it becomes excessively stigmatized it sends the message that having transgressive feelings is as bad as the actual transgressive act. If the social consequences of admitting that you feel a certain way or have a certain urge are identical to the consequences of acting on that urge, we no longer have any real incentive to avoid acting on those destructive urges. If you tell someone that they're already bad or evil for having certain thoughts, they have no reason to avoid taking action upon those thoughts other than, hopefully, an innate moral compass which supersedes those lessons.

 

I dunno I'm kinda sleepy at the moment and not sure I'm making sense. I've made a bunch of fucked up art in my day, and the above reasoning is why I still feel that it was (mostly) an ethically sound thing to do. That might just be rationalization though. Never can tell for sure.

 

I guess my point is, yeah gross art can reinforce existing societal biases towards gross behavior, but also a stigma towards gross art pre-pathologizes the gross impulses which exist in all of us to one degree or another. I feel like the important thing is mostly to build a consensus on what's gross and why, in which case stuff like the intellectual idolization of R Crumb's work, and not the work itself, is probably the main issue.

 

edit: I should also mention that I think something like The Binding of Isaac has a lot of value beyond just being weird and transgressive too. It loads so much symbolic imagery around a vague but intentional narrative that, whether by happenstance or intent (I suspect some of each), some genuinely interesting ideas emerge.

 

I wonder if Chris agrees with this or not...

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I guess my point is, yeah gross art can reinforce existing societal biases towards gross behavior, but also a stigma towards gross art pre-pathologizes the gross impulses which exist in all of us to one degree or another. I feel like the important thing is mostly to build a consensus on what's gross and why, in which case stuff like the intellectual idolization of R Crumb's work, and not the work itself, is probably the main issue.

 

edit: I should also mention that I think something like The Binding of Isaac has a lot of value beyond just being weird and transgressive too. It loads so much symbolic imagery around a vague but intentional narrative that, whether by happenstance or intent (I suspect some of each), some genuinely interesting ideas emerge.

 

This is a really good point. Being conscious of bad messages can help innoculate us against absorbing them unintentionally, for sure, and still allow space all sides of the human condition. I still think an artist has some (not all) responsibility to assess how the audience is likely to understand their work though, whether it's a critical audience that can make the distinction or a hot-headed one that will use it to feed a nasty world-view.

 

So re: the whole transgressive art thing, I feel like the biggest reason it's important to have stuff like that out there is that if it becomes excessively stigmatized it sends the message that having transgressive feelings is as bad as the actual transgressive act. If the social consequences of admitting that you feel a certain way or have a certain urge are identical to the consequences of acting on that urge, we no longer have any real incentive to avoid acting on those destructive urges. If you tell someone that they're already bad or evil for having certain thoughts, they have no reason to avoid taking action upon those thoughts other than, hopefully, an innate moral compass which supersedes those lessons.

 

I dunno I'm kinda sleepy at the moment and not sure I'm making sense. I've made a bunch of fucked up art in my day, and the above reasoning is why I still feel that it was (mostly) an ethically sound thing to do. That might just be rationalization though. Never can tell for sure.

 

I agree with the first line of this, it's really important for people to distinguish between their impulses and reality ("defusion") for all sorts of healthy psychological reasons. For one, being able to distinguish between "my brain keeps say I'm worthless" and "I actually am worthless" is a pretty important life skill. I don't really agree on the incentive thing. I don't think "making dark art" is necessarily taking the place of "doing dark things" for the artists. 

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This is a really good point. Being conscious of bad messages can help innoculate us against absorbing them unintentionally, for sure, and still allow space all sides of the human condition. I still think an artist has some (not all) responsibility to assess how the audience is likely to understand their work though, whether it's a critical audience that can make the distinction or a hot-headed one that will use it to feed a nasty world-view.

I agree with this, though I might not have 5 years ago or so! More likely I would have just avoided thinking about it and gone into some kinda freeze peach dodge as has become so so familiar by now. It's a super hard thing to do that though, especially working within the boundaries of a piece itself. Working outside those boundaries, making a statement as an artist or whatever, is likely to just be not seen at all by a lot of people who need to hear the message. It's actually a really tricky problem; realizing that it's one of those that can probably never be perfectly solved has been necessary for my sanity.

 

I agree with the first line of this, it's really important for people to distinguish between their impulses and reality ("defusion") for all sorts of healthy psychological reasons. For one, being able to distinguish between "my brain keeps say I'm worthless" and "I actually am worthless" is a pretty important life skill. I don't really agree on the incentive thing. I don't think "making dark art" is necessarily taking the place of "doing dark things" for the artists.

I may have accidentally overstated my case if that's what was inferred. What I mean is that there's a line between there being social consequences for what one feels and thinks and for what one does, and art lies right along that line in a very tricky way. So, while I don't think in many cases it takes the place of doing 'dark things', and would actually find that implication kind of offensive as an artist, I do think it becomes an important performative statement that "this is the shit that's in me, and I know it's gross shit but it's part of me". Being unable to make that statement safely implies a certain kind of 'thought crime', where there are consequences based on ideas and feelings rather than action -- but again, art and speech straddles that line between feelings and action, so still tricky.

 

One thing that certainly should be brought up, though, is that it's totally possible to create 'dark art' without sharing it, and the act and methodology of sharing form a big part of the overall statement. Creation and publishing should be regarded as separate acts, and the impact on an audience you address in your first point is perhaps more strongly affected by the act of sharing than the work itself.

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