[FRIAM] exploiting the uncanny valley...

Fri Jan 22 12:32:20 EST 2021

Good point...  esp  MMORPGs

I'm a big fan of WJW (and erstwhile friend, some 2 decades ago)

At your reference, I read suarez including Daemon this last year or so...

Ready Player  I and Ready Player II  come to mind.
> Steve,
>
> the sloshing space might be in the world of games that are blurring
> the boundary between on-line and physical reality - Pokemon go would
> be a trivial and simplistic example. This is an emerging SF trope -
> see Waltern Jon Williams, /This is Not a Game/ - or my favorite Daniel
> Suarez /Daemon/ and /Freedom/ (same story over two novels).
>
> davew
>
>
> On Fri, Jan 22, 2021, at 9:46 AM, Steve Smith wrote:
>>
>> Jon -
>>
>> I appreciate your observation about approaching the UV from either
>> side, there is definitely an asymmetry, though as with  my earlier
>> references to "estuarial" it seems like there must be some
>> intermediate territory where one can wash or slosh back and forth
>> each direction and find some commutivity?   I suspect *someone* has
>> done some research/investigation on this in the realm of Max Headroom
>> <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=reMRbvXfqAo>?   I didn't bother to
>> Google but it seems like synchronicity if someone hasn't done a
>> Headroom workup on Trump, especially with "Network XXIII, a world
>> where nothing matters but ratings!".
>>
>> I am also reminded (as I often am) of the Inter-reality
>> <https://journals.aps.org/pre/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevE.75.057201>
>> work of Gintautas and Hubler when I see the coupling, for example, of
>> the slime-mold and the robot face and when I think of the coupling of
>> individuals in social network contexts like Instagram (followers and
>> influencers) where the fans influence the influencers as much as
>> vice-versa, or in odd hysteresis loops.
>>
>> I think your point about identity and sources of information are very
>> relevant (and related to what I said last paragraph about who is
>> leading and who is following or who's influencing the influencers).
>>
>> - Steve
>>
>>
>>> From a naive glance, there appears a misleading duality, that of
>>> approaching the valley from one side or the other. For instance, the
>>> use of puppets to bring the non-human closer to the human: Jim
>>> Henson's work, the dancing figures in Kimmel's piece, the neural net
>>> fake exemplified by "Nixon's moon landing"
>>> <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2rkQn-43ixs&ab_channel=NowThisNews>,
>>> neural net fever dreams of photorealistic models that never existed
>>> <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=36lE9tV9vm0&t=385s&ab_channel=TeroKarrasFI>,
>>> or the now all-to-common place notion of an embedded avatar as in
>>> "Snow Crash", "All Tomorrow's Parties", "The Matrix" ...
>>>
>>> From the other side come humans moving closer to the non-human or
>>> even simply a different human: plastic surgeries and botox'd lips,
>>> Thailand's cross-dressing prostitutes, internet catfishing,
>>> Victor-Victoria, "Boy's don't cry", butoh dance, (acting in general?).
>>>
>>> What seems strange to me is that in any puppet-puppeteer case it is
>>> not always clear that it is one bringing the other closer to the
>>> valley. It doesn't even appear to be directly a function of *being
>>> human* as in the case of this slime mould driven robot face
>>> <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P0i-Df4w4KY&ab_channel=NewScientist>.
>>> Here a non-human puppeteers a non-human face, the combination of
>>> which drives an observer toward the uncanny valley.
>>>
>>> Other times, it isn't about misrepresentation but rather identity
>>> tracing or a transformation of representation. There is the holding
>>> fixed of Dorothy as she moves from black-and-white to Technicolor,
>>> the holding fixed of Mary Poppins as she enters an animated-context,
>>> or the transformation of Milo to "animated Milo" as he passes
>>> through the phantom tollbooth.
>>>
>>> There are also those themes that appear in some religions and sci-fi
>>> where humans themselves are vessels available to "ride" as puppets:
>>> Ghost in the Shell, Altered Carbon, or in the case of loa. An
>>> interesting, though tangential, case is that of stop motion
>>> animation. Here, it isn't really puppetry nor strictly animation.
>>> Like the former, there is something of an artifact in the world.
>>> Something that is there to be manipulated. Like the latter, these
>>> manipulations are enacted by something outside of time, part of a
>>> time outside of time, in-between the frames.
>>>
>>> Perhaps the most disconcerting aspect of such a frontier isn't being
>>> able to tell the difference between a fake or not, but not caring
>>> about the sources of information. With deep fakes come a kind of
>>> modularity, one where *voice* is treated like a backend to be
>>> swapped out. The *voice of Nixon* is lost among many or any.
>>>
>>> Here, China has already taken the plunge
>>> <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5iZuffHPDAw&ab_channel=NewChinaTV>.
>>> We can all see that these news anchors are AI, and no one questions
>>> this fact. What becomes questionable, or rather obscured, is whose
>>> perspective we are presented with. But, this is already the case at
>>> once whenever scripted news is decoupled from whatever it is to be
>>> journalism. Again, I cite the *Telecom act* and the disappearance of
>>> the radio disc jockey.
>>>
>>> Lastly, there is the cyborg revolution. I am thinking of Donna
>>> Haraway's "Cyborg Manifesto"
>>> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Cyborg_Manifesto>, or every time I
>>> prepare a post by googling, looking through my books, or more
>>> generally consulting my extended mind.
>>>
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