[FRIAM] dancing on the edge of the uncanny valley

[Steve Smith]

PS.   One of the comments in the Daily Beast article suggested that 
deep-fakes are used for signal compression...   I have experienced 2 
examples of this which are compelling:

 1. text/search-completion/anticipation where it feels as if the system
    already knows what I am likely to want to type next (I sometimes
    think it is training *mildly* on my own text, not just on a larger
    corpus).
 2. hand/eye/body tracking.   Early VR was hampered badly by lag in
    tracking caused both by transmission/queuing and processing delays 
    so a workaround was to build an anticipatory model which
    extrapolated trajectories of (for example, hand) motions... when
    overdone it gave you the sense that your hand was attached
    elastically to the VR rendering of a pointing device with inertia
    which was better than the raw *lag* experience.   head trackng was
    even more critical because cybersickness but in some ways easier
    because it was more constrained (6DOF neck/body movements more
    constrained than the nominally hip/torso/shoulder/elbow/wrist DOF of
    the hand).  I always wondered if a properly coupled system (in the
    inter-reality (Guintatas) sense) would lead to entrainment similar
    to what (I think) martial artists, gymnasts, dancers experience when
    they train?  This is probably a very real issue/experience in
    robotic exoskeletal development?

On 6/24/22 7:50 AM, Steve Smith wrote:
> https://www.thedailybeast.com/amazon-unveils-new-ai-tool-for-alexa-to-turn-a-speech-snippet-into-a-voice 
>
>
> Marcus confronted me a month or more ago with something along the 
> lines of " who says learning isn't just imitation? ", and it *really* 
> hit home.   Play seems to be a lot about mock-work and mock-fighting 
> and it seems widely accepted that a great deal of learning happens 
> through emulation of the expertise of others.
>
> When I consider those who have passed in my life, I think I much 
> prefer to hear-through-memory their voices (and visages) over 
> recordings. Synthesizing voices or visages seems to compound the 
> uncanny valley effect.   Bad enough to get it eeriely-nearly right 
> with something less visceral than the affect of a loved one since passed.
>
> During the first gulf war (1991) I worked with a voice/speech 
> researcher who "went dark" for about a year.   He remained cagey about 
> this work even after he came out of that period of silence and 
> misdirection, but eventually the general nature of the work was 
> declassified (though not details) and it was about synthesizing voices 
> by modeling the vocal tract, and the application that made it so 
> skitchy was battlefield communications of Saddam Hussein.   This was 
> still in an era of analog communication with various analog scrambling 
> techniques standing in for what we do today with digital encryption 
> and authentication.  I have no idea if it was ever deployed or 
> effective operationally, but the examples he used for demonstration 
> with well known voices.   I doubt anyone could argue that this speech 
> synthesizer in any way "thought" like Saddam Hussein, but the larger 
> organizational unit (Iraq army), might well "act as if" the intention 
> injected by the synthesized voice was part of their collective psyche.
>
> Back to the original premise of whether a well-enough 
> practiced/trained learning classifier system has any emergent 
> properties that are parallel to animal/human cognition.  This seems 
> entirely up in the air to me, but Glen's recent rant/rave about "what 
> it's like" and splitters v smooshers was mildly compelling to me.
>
> A big shift in my own perception of self/change was when someone I 
> respected offered the idea of "trying it on" and "acting as if" as a 
> model for personal transformation.  In retrospect it seems obvious 
> that by emulating some *one* (real or idealized) one might actually 
> become *more like* that person (real or idealized).   Of course, this 
> is about a change of affect/self/consciousness, not emerging from 
> whole cloth (sand?).
>
>
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