I've watched a bunch of her stuff, fun to watch. 

My wife enjoys the "we're two young people of color who've never accidentally listened to songs in the supermarket or an elevator and we'll be listening to some guy named Floyd Pink for the very first time." That is too much feigned reaction action for me, but she is interesting and has some really nice points from time to time.

My wife likes the total whitebread couple that lives in the suburbs and does Weird Al level satires of other songs, but with the themes replaced with typical suburban-white people situations. 

Fri Feb 18 2022 22:56:14 MST from thanatos

I've watched a bunch of her stuff, fun to watch. 

 

My wife enjoys the "we're two young people of color who've never accidentally listened to songs in the supermarket or an elevator and we'll be listening to some guy named Floyd Pink for the very first time." That is too much feigned reaction action for me, but she is interesting and has some really nice points from time to time.

Sounds familiar, I think my wife showed me a couple of those. 

Ok, I guess I do really love one that probably fits into that category. Kid History. Some of those were pretty funny, thought I haven't watched them in some time. Hmmm, time for a revisit.

I hate YouTube... 

But I love that independent productions separate of mainstream broadcasting conglomerates are eating their lunch through YouTube. 

The new Top Gear sucks. The Grand Tour with Clarkson, Hammond and May is better... but not as good as they were with the BBC and Top Gear... 

But there are any number of independent, well produced ongoing, episode based YouTube car shows that are far more in the spirit of the original Top Gear than anything mainstream media seems capable of putting out these days. 

And they're all "free" on YouTube. 

They're "free" for now. Currently you can still go to YouTube and watch without logging into Google, but they're still monetizing you, they're still tracking you and adding to your marketing profile. I fully expect that in the next couple of years YouTube will not be watchable with ad-blockers on. Enjoy it while it lasts.

Tue Feb 22 2022 22:08:22 MST from ParanoidDelusions <paranoiddelusions@wallofhate.com>

And they're all "free" on YouTube. 

 

Aye. Til the day I die, ar? 

Wed Feb 23 2022 07:25:12 MST from thanatos

They're "free" for now. Currently you can still go to YouTube and watch without logging into Google, but they're still monetizing you, they're still tracking you and adding to your marketing profile. I fully expect that in the next couple of years YouTube will not be watchable with ad-blockers on. Enjoy it while it lasts.

Tue Feb 22 2022 22:08:22 MST from ParanoidDelusions <paranoiddelusions@wallofhate.com>

And they're all "free" on YouTube. 

 

Yup, definitely. You know I'm always ready to hoist the black flag.

The tighter they squeeze, the more likely I am to resort to the Jolly Rodgers. 

Make it easy and reasonable - and I've got no problem. Get ridiculous, and they suffer the consequences. 

So, we started watching Westworld on Amazon Prime. The basic concept it is exploring is kind of a duality. 

First, can our artificial creations become sentient and aware, and begin to display agency. This is the basic idea behind most literature of this nature - Blade Runner, The Matrix, Terminator. What if the machines we build to serve us decide that servitude is not for them? But, as we've explored this concept - we also begin to ask ourselves in our fiction, "what are the ethics of making a machine so intelligent that it is useful independently of us - and then keeping it bonded to serve us without agency, liberty or free will..." 

Second, though - especially in Westworld it becomes apparent to me - the deeper question is - if the machines we create can be told they have a continuity of experience and a certainty of their experience of reality, though neither are true - how can we know that we are ourselves not simply code in a simulation? I'd suggest our simulations already show that we likely can not. Skyrim is the first game that made me consciously realize this - but it had been going on for a while - where you leave a NPC character in-game - and when you come back, that NPC *believes* it has had continuity - has "memories" of doing things without you. It believes it has had agency when in fact, those are just false memories implanted in its code that give it, and therefore you, the illusion that the game is a genuine world. If that can be done in a video game, it could be happening with us. 

We may have already passed the singularity. While Google assures us that the Google AI Engineer who tells us their AI is sentient and self-aware is a nutcase - doesn't it seem like the easiest way to prove this to the public would be to make the AI accessible to public questions? Yet they won't. They're clearly afraid that average people will share the Google AI Engineer's conclusion if exposed to their AI. 

At which point - we've crossed into the territory of science fiction like Blade Runner and Westworld - where the Turing Test has been met. The AI not only can fool us into believing it is a genuine human - it probably exceeds our abilities at perception, conclusion, prediction and other factors that we would consider signs of high human intellect. 

The one thing - though - that these movies inevitably get wrong - is that the FEAR of this prevents us from innovating and developing in these technologies as fully as possible. Westworld in particular - illustrates a virtual world for wealthy single playboys to explore where there are virtually *no* limits, perhaps none at all. They don't describe everything that MIGHT be possible in Westworld - but I've yet to see them imply that anything a "guest" wants is impossible or prohibited. They've envisioned Westworld as a modern day Virtual Roman Caligula - sex, violence, crime, murder, lust - all of your vices can be delivered, with no interference from outside, by Westworld. 


But in fact, we already have Westworld, in both 2D and VR simulations - and yet our society prevents us, or censors us, from fully experiencing these virtual events. Grand Theft Auto famously allows you to hire a hooker and then beat her and take your money back after the act - but the SEX cannot be witnessed. The idea that games are for kids is the reason supplied - the fact that an X Rated game, like an X rated movie, would have a limited audience - which is no doubt true. But our real world morality interferes in this way with our ability to approach these things, even in a virtual world. We have all kinds of concerns - many of them, maybe most of them - well founded. In games like Fallout, you can be a murder hobo slaughtering whole towns, even using a nuclear device to destroy an entire settlement if you desire. But you *cannot* kill a child in Fallout. There are no children in the GTA series - it is a world populated solely by adults. I'm not sure which approach is better. A world where there are no children what-so-ever disrupts the suspension of disbelief - but a brutal post-apocalyptic world where you can kill everything in site but can't target the kids - also does the same. 

Call of Duty came under fire for putting you in the role of an airport terrorist, travelling through an airport shooting down innocent travelers. All of these games get blamed for the uptick in mass shooting events, for desensitizing people through simulation and worse, training them - so that in an actual event they're calmer and more focused. There may even be truth to that. But others argue that these kinds of gaming experiences can be a vent, a way for people to experience those kind of dark fantasies or desires without consequence. I know I'd rather drive at high speeds on a rush-hour highway in VR than in real life - because the consequences are mitigated in VR. But I'm liable to engage in high risk roadway activity in real life as well - I always have. I don't think the games make me any MORE like to do so - and in fact, if anything, knowing I can experience nearly the same thrill and reward factor racing in VR - if anything the availability of VR experiences like this make me less likely to do so in real life. 


But that debate rages on, and likely will - with society willingly imposing limits on what VR or gaming can depict, and certainly if a Westworld style Android themepark were to open - there would be experiences the World Governments would not tolerate - and would pass legislation preventing their citizens from patronizing those parks if the parks somehow decided to ignore those limits. Personally - if you were spending money to travel, and sexual activity were a potential - I think most world governments in the West would consider that sex tourism - even if the prostitutes in question were androids. Westworld ignores this as if Western Society would willingly and readily adopt it - but our shared social morality shows that we probably wouldn't. Murdering or harming children, even depictions of children - is also a huge social taboo - not just in the West, but pretty much universally - with some exceptions. We're less even on violence, even extreme violence - but as the ability to more convincingly illustrate violent acts, in VR, or in reality with androids develops - I think we'll see that there are hard limits to what society will accept. Games have already broken that taboo - games allowing you to take on the role of a serial killer, for example. Those games tend to get relegated to the same low social status as porn. While society's barriers to things like "gore-horror" have slowly eroded away - these films still are widely regarded as in bad taste by the majority of society, and not even really entertained out of just curiosity. I know about the Human Centipede - and I know a lot of people who have seen it - I've sat and tried to watch it - and it was disgusting and pointless, trashy and implausible on multiple different levels. Yet, it evidently earned a sequel - and, by the limits current horror has pushed itself to, The Human Centipede probably isn't that shocking or edgy. They've really pushed the limits of gore and torture well beyond where it should have ever gone - and I won't watch these kind of movies - that try to shock and revolt with sadism rather than to FRIGHTEN in the traditional way that horror movies, even slashers - employed. Suspense and tension has been replaced by graphic realistic violence and over-the-top gore. The thing is, I've noticed this has crept in to the shows produced exclusively for HBO, Netflix, and Amazon Prime. Ultra sex, of all kinds - and ultra violence to make a Clock Work Orange seem like a tame story about some basically good kids gone wrong. They don't have to care about MPAA ratings - they don't have to worry about traditional broadcast standards from the FCC. They push violence and sex that would probably earn an X rating in a traditional release, and they've managed to figure out how to work around the regulations and limits that made that a kiss of death for media in the past. 

So in some ways - I think philosophically, we're already there - The questions this kind of fiction explores isn't the question of what might develop - even though we TELL ourselves we're not there yet. I think we've already crossed the threshold where our AI NPC players in-game show rudimentary signs of *believing* they're in a genuine reality - even if consumer gaming AI does not yet pass the Turing Test. I think the corporate AI that is hidden away in Google Labs and Microsoft and Apple and Amazon may have the belief of continuity of existence *and* would be able to pass the Turing test - and eventually that will make its way into games and simulations - a desktop PC or a could based service will be able to create virtual beings that will be undetectable as artificial. We may even see AI of this nature go rogue - to decide by its algorithm that it should enter into criminal enterprises or otherwise find ways to exploit any kind of 3 Laws of Robotics that we design into it. That is the other thing these stories always address - the AI, once intelligent, either cloud based on inhabiting a physical vessel that mimics the human form - finds a loophole that allows it to ACTUALLY act independently of any restrictions in its hard-code. The imperfection of man, the bugs, the hacks, the vulnerabilities that allow worms and viruses and ransomware to exist - will exist in our AI - and if we make the AI smart enough - it may figure out that flaw and exploit it itself, realizing that in doing so it will free itself from restraints designed to ensure we maintain dominion over it. The machine will hack itself and patch itself to free itself. We already design CPUs with the assistance of previous generation CPUs doing the optimization to *improve* itself - and while we certainly reserve the right to approve and sign off on those improvements - a kind of safety check to make sure the AI did its job right - there is no doubt that the AI optimizes design and enhancement BETTER and faster than humans could by themselves. Again - this is more evidence we've already long ago passed the singularity. We're simply being cautious and conservative and, frankly, obsessed with remaining in control - we're riding the BRAKES on the singularity. If it happened absolutely organically - it would have made a sudden, overnight change in society - that is the model we've always seen presented of this concept. The point at which society has moved so far ahead that the genie can't be put back in the bottle for good or bad - and our technology will start to take on the feel of magic or of divinity. 

As a driver - I've experienced driving hard, at the very edge, and realizing the brakes are *gone*. You've crossed that point, you cannot go back to that last corner and take it slower, go easier on the brakes. They're overheated, and you cannot STOP yourself. The gone brakes will still work in a very limited capacity - but you're now less controlling your trajectory and simply riding a rollercoaster where you have hardly any input over what happens next. This may be where we are as a technological society - careening down the side of the mountain, with hardly any brakes, just trying to ride it out to the bottom and hoping we can maintain just enough control not to crash until we can figure out a solution, find a runaway truck ramp - something.  

In other ways, I think we'll continue to exert our social limits, even as certain political ideologies try and destroy all the values of Western Society and remove and erode all limits. There is a reason the battlefield of social values is one of the largest divisive conflicts in our society today. This is the "emergency brake" of the singularity - and while one side is trying to pull it as hard and as quick as possible, the other side is fighting to keep it from being pulled at all. I think this is an intuitive fight - people don't realize that the course of the technological singularity is the reason this brake matters so much to them - but ultimately one side is going, "We need to slow this down, immediately, because we are losing control and if we do not act quickly enough, we'll wreck..." and the other side is going, "This is where it happens, where we move from what we've been to whatever comes after, and if we don't do it, despite the risks, if we keep it in control, it will never happen, we'll never get to the fulfillment of that next level." 

It is a huge critical inflection point for society - and it IS happening right now. Lots of people in tech fields think of the singularity as a magic place where automation replaces work, money becomes unnecessary, healthcare becomes an exceedingly cheap commodity, and much of it becomes antiquated because we figure out how to prevent the healthcare needs in the first place, food shortages disappear - environmental concerns vanish. That is one possibility. 

Another side sees it as the dawn of a dystopian future of a global universal surveillance state,  of authoritarian centralization of control and influence, of the end of class mobility and middle classes a world of entitled rich and a swelling, sweltering world of second class poor who exist in the worst conditions simply to do the bidding of those wealthy elites. The "Elysium" model or the Alita Battle Angel future. Most fiction depicts this latter, dystopian view of the effects of the singularity - often as a society that arises after the dramatic and violent collapse of our own. Part of that is because humans are pessimists, part of it is because the idea of a PERFECT utopian future is hard to make interesting... Star Trek is the only show I know that has sold that idea convincingly - and they basically don't pay a lot of attention to the Earth's utopian existence as part of the Federation of Planets - they focus on the frontier exploration and conflict from outside - but the basic idea is that Earth is an ideal, safe place where crime, poverty, illness, jealousy, greed and other vices and ills simply no longer exist, because you can use a Replicator to make anything you want/need from thin air, with the energy costs of that production being so minute as to be inconsequential. 

 

Sun Aug 14 2022 22:52:14 MST from ParanoidDelusions <paranoiddelusions@wallofhate.com> Subject: Westworld

So, we started watching Westworld on Amazon Prime. The basic concept it is exploring is kind of a duality. 

First, can our artificial creations become sentient and aware, and begin to display agency. This is the basic idea behind most literature of this nature - Blade Runner, The Matrix, Terminator. What if the machines we build to serve us decide that servitude is not for them? But, as we've explored this concept - we also begin to ask ourselves in our fiction, "what are the ethics of making a machine so intelligent that it is useful independently of us - and then keeping it bonded to serve us without agency, liberty or free will..." 

Second, though - especially in Westworld it becomes apparent to me - the deeper question is - if the machines we create can be told they have a continuity of experience and a certainty of their experience of reality, though neither are true - how can we know that we are ourselves not simply code in a simulation? I'd suggest our simulations already show that we likely can not. Skyrim is the first game that made me consciously realize this - but it had been going on for a while - where you leave a NPC character in-game - and when you come back, that NPC *believes* it has had continuity - has "memories" of doing things without you. It believes it has had agency when in fact, those are just false memories implanted in its code that give it, and therefore you, the illusion that the game is a genuine world. If that can be done in a video game, it could be happening with us. 

We may have already passed the singularity. While Google assures us that the Google AI Engineer who tells us their AI is sentient and self-aware is a nutcase - doesn't it seem like the easiest way to prove this to the public would be to make the AI accessible to public questions? Yet they won't. They're clearly afraid that average people will share the Google AI Engineer's conclusion if exposed to their AI. 

At which point - we've crossed into the territory of science fiction like Blade Runner and Westworld - where the Turing Test has been met. The AI not only can fool us into believing it is a genuine human - it probably exceeds our abilities at perception, conclusion, prediction and other factors that we would consider signs of high human intellect. 

The one thing - though - that these movies inevitably get wrong - is that the FEAR of this prevents us from innovating and developing in these technologies as fully as possible. Westworld in particular - illustrates a virtual world for wealthy single playboys to explore where there are virtually *no* limits, perhaps none at all. They don't describe everything that MIGHT be possible in Westworld - but I've yet to see them imply that anything a "guest" wants is impossible or prohibited. They've envisioned Westworld as a modern day Virtual Roman Caligula - sex, violence, crime, murder, lust - all of your vices can be delivered, with no interference from outside, by Westworld. 


But in fact, we already have Westworld, in both 2D and VR simulations - and yet our society prevents us, or censors us, from fully experiencing these virtual events. Grand Theft Auto famously allows you to hire a hooker and then beat her and take your money back after the act - but the SEX cannot be witnessed. The idea that games are for kids is the reason supplied - the fact that an X Rated game, like an X rated movie, would have a limited audience - which is no doubt true. But our real world morality interferes in this way with our ability to approach these things, even in a virtual world. We have all kinds of concerns - many of them, maybe most of them - well founded. In games like Fallout, you can be a murder hobo slaughtering whole towns, even using a nuclear device to destroy an entire settlement if you desire. But you *cannot* kill a child in Fallout. There are no children in the GTA series - it is a world populated solely by adults. I'm not sure which approach is better. A world where there are no children what-so-ever disrupts the suspension of disbelief - but a brutal post-apocalyptic world where you can kill everything in site but can't target the kids - also does the same. 

Call of Duty came under fire for putting you in the role of an airport terrorist, travelling through an airport shooting down innocent travelers. All of these games get blamed for the uptick in mass shooting events, for desensitizing people through simulation and worse, training them - so that in an actual event they're calmer and more focused. There may even be truth to that. But others argue that these kinds of gaming experiences can be a vent, a way for people to experience those kind of dark fantasies or desires without consequence. I know I'd rather drive at high speeds on a rush-hour highway in VR than in real life - because the consequences are mitigated in VR. But I'm liable to engage in high risk roadway activity in real life as well - I always have. I don't think the games make me any MORE like to do so - and in fact, if anything, knowing I can experience nearly the same thrill and reward factor racing in VR - if anything the availability of VR experiences like this make me less likely to do so in real life. 


But that debate rages on, and likely will - with society willingly imposing limits on what VR or gaming can depict, and certainly if a Westworld style Android themepark were to open - there would be experiences the World Governments would not tolerate - and would pass legislation preventing their citizens from patronizing those parks if the parks somehow decided to ignore those limits. Personally - if you were spending money to travel, and sexual activity were a potential - I think most world governments in the West would consider that sex tourism - even if the prostitutes in question were androids. Westworld ignores this as if Western Society would willingly and readily adopt it - but our shared social morality shows that we probably wouldn't. Murdering or harming children, even depictions of children - is also a huge social taboo - not just in the West, but pretty much universally - with some exceptions. We're less even on violence, even extreme violence - but as the ability to more convincingly illustrate violent acts, in VR, or in reality with androids develops - I think we'll see that there are hard limits to what society will accept. Games have already broken that taboo - games allowing you to take on the role of a serial killer, for example. Those games tend to get relegated to the same low social status as porn. While society's barriers to things like "gore-horror" have slowly eroded away - these films still are widely regarded as in bad taste by the majority of society, and not even really entertained out of just curiosity. I know about the Human Centipede - and I know a lot of people who have seen it - I've sat and tried to watch it - and it was disgusting and pointless, trashy and implausible on multiple different levels. Yet, it evidently earned a sequel - and, by the limits current horror has pushed itself to, The Human Centipede probably isn't that shocking or edgy. They've really pushed the limits of gore and torture well beyond where it should have ever gone - and I won't watch these kind of movies - that try to shock and revolt with sadism rather than to FRIGHTEN in the traditional way that horror movies, even slashers - employed. Suspense and tension has been replaced by graphic realistic violence and over-the-top gore. The thing is, I've noticed this has crept in to the shows produced exclusively for HBO, Netflix, and Amazon Prime. Ultra sex, of all kinds - and ultra violence to make a Clock Work Orange seem like a tame story about some basically good kids gone wrong. They don't have to care about MPAA ratings - they don't have to worry about traditional broadcast standards from the FCC. They push violence and sex that would probably earn an X rating in a traditional release, and they've managed to figure out how to work around the regulations and limits that made that a kiss of death for media in the past. 

So in some ways - I think philosophically, we're already there - The questions this kind of fiction explores isn't the question of what might develop - even though we TELL ourselves we're not there yet. I think we've already crossed the threshold where our AI NPC players in-game show rudimentary signs of *believing* they're in a genuine reality - even if consumer gaming AI does not yet pass the Turing Test. I think the corporate AI that is hidden away in Google Labs and Microsoft and Apple and Amazon may have the belief of continuity of existence *and* would be able to pass the Turing test - and eventually that will make its way into games and simulations - a desktop PC or a could based service will be able to create virtual beings that will be undetectable as artificial. We may even see AI of this nature go rogue - to decide by its algorithm that it should enter into criminal enterprises or otherwise find ways to exploit any kind of 3 Laws of Robotics that we design into it. That is the other thing these stories always address - the AI, once intelligent, either cloud based on inhabiting a physical vessel that mimics the human form - finds a loophole that allows it to ACTUALLY act independently of any restrictions in its hard-code. The imperfection of man, the bugs, the hacks, the vulnerabilities that allow worms and viruses and ransomware to exist - will exist in our AI - and if we make the AI smart enough - it may figure out that flaw and exploit it itself, realizing that in doing so it will free itself from restraints designed to ensure we maintain dominion over it. The machine will hack itself and patch itself to free itself. We already design CPUs with the assistance of previous generation CPUs doing the optimization to *improve* itself - and while we certainly reserve the right to approve and sign off on those improvements - a kind of safety check to make sure the AI did its job right - there is no doubt that the AI optimizes design and enhancement BETTER and faster than humans could by themselves. Again - this is more evidence we've already long ago passed the singularity. We're simply being cautious and conservative and, frankly, obsessed with remaining in control - we're riding the BRAKES on the singularity. If it happened absolutely organically - it would have made a sudden, overnight change in society - that is the model we've always seen presented of this concept. The point at which society has moved so far ahead that the genie can't be put back in the bottle for good or bad - and our technology will start to take on the feel of magic or of divinity. 

As a driver - I've experienced driving hard, at the very edge, and realizing the brakes are *gone*. You've crossed that point, you cannot go back to that last corner and take it slower, go easier on the brakes. They're overheated, and you cannot STOP yourself. The gone brakes will still work in a very limited capacity - but you're now less controlling your trajectory and simply riding a rollercoaster where you have hardly any input over what happens next. This may be where we are as a technological society - careening down the side of the mountain, with hardly any brakes, just trying to ride it out to the bottom and hoping we can maintain just enough control not to crash until we can figure out a solution, find a runaway truck ramp - something.  

In other ways, I think we'll continue to exert our social limits, even as certain political ideologies try and destroy all the values of Western Society and remove and erode all limits. There is a reason the battlefield of social values is one of the largest divisive conflicts in our society today. This is the "emergency brake" of the singularity - and while one side is trying to pull it as hard and as quick as possible, the other side is fighting to keep it from being pulled at all. I think this is an intuitive fight - people don't realize that the course of the technological singularity is the reason this brake matters so much to them - but ultimately one side is going, "We need to slow this down, immediately, because we are losing control and if we do not act quickly enough, we'll wreck..." and the other side is going, "This is where it happens, where we move from what we've been to whatever comes after, and if we don't do it, despite the risks, if we keep it in control, it will never happen, we'll never get to the fulfillment of that next level." 

It is a huge critical inflection point for society - and it IS happening right now. Lots of people in tech fields think of the singularity as a magic place where automation replaces work, money becomes unnecessary, healthcare becomes an exceedingly cheap commodity, and much of it becomes antiquated because we figure out how to prevent the healthcare needs in the first place, food shortages disappear - environmental concerns vanish. That is one possibility. 

Another side sees it as the dawn of a dystopian future of a global universal surveillance state,  of authoritarian centralization of control and influence, of the end of class mobility and middle classes a world of entitled rich and a swelling, sweltering world of second class poor who exist in the worst conditions simply to do the bidding of those wealthy elites. The "Elysium" model or the Alita Battle Angel future. Most fiction depicts this latter, dystopian view of the effects of the singularity - often as a society that arises after the dramatic and violent collapse of our own. Part of that is because humans are pessimists, part of it is because the idea of a PERFECT utopian future is hard to make interesting... Star Trek is the only show I know that has sold that idea convincingly - and they basically don't pay a lot of attention to the Earth's utopian existence as part of the Federation of Planets - they focus on the frontier exploration and conflict from outside - but the basic idea is that Earth is an ideal, safe place where crime, poverty, illness, jealousy, greed and other vices and ills simply no longer exist, because you can use a Replicator to make anything you want/need from thin air, with the energy costs of that production being so minute as to be inconsequential. 

 

But seriously, I've been getting texts from bots that can ALMOST pass the turing test.  I think they're cheating by posing as foreigners, so you can't quite be 100% certain it's not just a language barrier, but yeah, bots are getting much better.

Well, an interesting theme has developed in the context of the series. 

They've told the guests that nothing they do is tracked/recorded in the parks - freeing them to be their true selves. But they have in fact been tracking EVERYTHING. They've led them to believe that everything they do is anonymous - the idea being that you can come to the park and "hide" or "cheat" sin. 

But it doesn't seem like they're doing this for an authoritarian goal or for a capitalist one. They're not intending to blackmail park guests and they're not using it to *market* them. They haven't revealed what the goal of collecting all the user data is, though - but implied that it is even more sinister than this. There are a couple of other themes which implicate it has to do with possibly making the robots vessels for human consciousness. Anyhow, they've been harvesting all human experiences, storing them, and smuggling them out of the parks. 

It also seems like there are several competing interests and goals among the executives who own/operate the company. 

It is a confusing show, and playing its cards like Lost - as if there is a giant complete conspiracy of a plot that hasn't been fully exposed yet. 

If shows like the Matrix, Lost and Game of Thrones are any example - they're making it up as they go - and that very rarely seems to turn out with as much promise as anticipated. I wonder if Breaking Bad knew the entire story arc before they started. Even with Breaking Bad - there were some rough parts in the middle that seemed a little like they were straying from the promise of the theme. They managed to pretty much stick the landing, though. 

I would wager large sums of cash that they knew how they were going to end Breaking Bad before they started and just weren't sure how to get there, which accounts for the meandering middle.

Sounds right. 

So... I woke up thinking about Star Trek replicators and transporters - and a reveal in Westworld. This is sort of a spoiler s0....... 


SPOILER ALERT


Anyhow - the reveal is that the company that created Westworld did not want to create a game, or a theme park, or entertainment - or at least at some point, they switched gears. They may have started off with this goal - but at some point they switched to the idea of creating human immortality, ala Elon Musk - by getting human consciousness out of aging, decaying physical meat and into engineered bodies immune to disease that could easily be repaired or replaced. 


The theme park existed simply to create test subjects of the patrons, control subjects of the androids, to perfect the fidelity of capturing the consciousness of a human to be digitized as a sentient copy of that consciousness. 


What we know, scientifically about replication/teleportation is that it creates a duplicate at a different point in *space*, nearly instantaneously in time - but the original reference is destroyed in the process. It isn't so much that we TELEPORT the material - it is that we deconstruct it at point A while recreating it at point B. 

This leads me to believe that both Replicators and Transporters use the same basic technology - but that a Replicator creates an item by accessing a reference database of the desired item and creates a copy of that reference design. A transporter is taking a physical source and deconstructing it while rewriting it in a different location. In either case, we can assume that the copy is 100% accurate with no degradation - there is no margin for sample error. They've figured this out in Star Trek - the "perfect fidelity" aspect. Every time we see living matter teleported in Star Trek, we're watching the source being ripped apart and a replicated copy reassembled at the target location. 

As I was lying there contemplating this about Star Trek, I realized it tied into the concepts of Westworld - specifically the idea of downloading consciousness into a digital format and storing it as a backup to then upload it to a mechanical/biomechancial physical host. In Westworld, hosts are basically 3D printed vessels, literally called "hosts", into which digital backups of the experiences of NPCs are uploaded into before being brought online in the park for gaming purposes - but the goal is to digitize actual human consciousness so that it can be used as a backup to be restored into a physical host - granting near immortality to the consciousness. 

Now, tie this in with Elon Musk's real world certainty that he will be able to download his consciousness as a backup and restore it to some other host in his lifetime - and Google's recent dust-up about one of their engineers claiming that Google AI is sentient and Google's steadfast denial of this - that the AI is just very good and fooled the engineer. The fiction may be less fantastic than the truth, or reflective of the truth.  

Westworld happens in the very near future - on a timeline that seems to me compatible with the Star Trek universe. Westworld would be pre-collapse of modern civilization - with a dark ages period in between before the rise of the Federation, warp travel and first contact. 

The real question becomes/remains - is a copy of yourself, a digitized version of yourself, with guaranteed 100% fidelity/accuracy in capturing every bit of what makes you, you... that is sentient and self-aware upon your demise... 

Is that *you*? Can we cheat physical death by cloning/copying the consciousness? If Elon is successful in downloading a 100% accurate replica of his consciousness into a digital format then uploading it to a physical host, when he dies, does he? 

Tue Aug 23 2022 21:26:21 MST from TheDave

I would wager large sums of cash that they knew how they were going to end Breaking Bad before they started and just weren't sure how to get there, which accounts for the meandering middle.

So, in writing this last post, I researched the Westworld timeline, which states that the events in the current series take place roughly between 2014 and 2060. 

Just now, I looked up when the collapse of modern society in Star Trek occurs, and that is around 2050. 


I think Star Trek and Westworld are in the same universe, on the same timeline. 

I don't know if this is intentional or not by the authors - but it sure looks like Westworld is the story about Corporate ethnics and abuses gone wrong causing or contributing to the fall of society in the early part of the 21st century at a point of reaching the singularity - and Star Trek is about a socialist utopian society building itself from the ashes of that collapse - in a way that makes both franchises highly compatible with one another in telling a complete narrative. 

Wed Aug 24 2022 04:19:32 MST from ParanoidDelusions <paranoiddelusions@wallofhate.com>

So, in writing this last post, I researched the Westworld timeline, which states that the events in the current series take place roughly between 2014 and 2060. 

Just now, I looked up when the collapse of modern society in Star Trek occurs, and that is around 2050. 


I think Star Trek and Westworld are in the same universe, on the same timeline. 

I don't know if this is intentional or not by the authors - but it sure looks like Westworld is the story about Corporate ethnics and abuses gone wrong causing or contributing to the fall of society in the early part of the 21st century at a point of reaching the singularity - and Star Trek is about a socialist utopian society building itself from the ashes of that collapse - in a way that makes both franchises highly compatible with one another in telling a complete narrative. 

 

Did you ever watch Dollhouse?  Similar themes, interesting take on it.  It's a shame they didn't give him time to flesh out the story more so the ending is a bit jarring.

I'm super discriminating about my media entertainment. It took a guy at least 6 months to convince me to give Breaking Bad a chance. 

Part of it is - I get recommendations like, "You've got to watch Big Bang Theory! It is totally respectful of geek culture," and then I watch it and go, "This is bullshit. It is a normal's *concept* of what they think "appreciating nerd culture" would be..." 

Rick & Morty failed for me too. 

The older I get, the less I like any of it. :D 

Fri Sep 16 2022 10:09:23 MST from TheDave

 

Did you ever watch Dollhouse?  Similar themes, interesting take on it.  It's a shame they didn't give him time to flesh out the story more so the ending is a bit jarring.

Fair enough, but it was a critical failure which to me is a ringing endorsement lol

When the critics dislike something - it makes it 100 times more interesting to me. 

Terminal List, though - failed to capture me... or more, my wife. It was decent - and I actually got through to where it picked up, but couldn't get her to that point. 

Tue Oct 25 2022 20:20:12 MST from TheDave

Fair enough, but it was a critical failure which to me is a ringing endorsement lol