[ExI] Future Movie Quality Benchmarks?

[Brent Allsop]

Tranhumanites,

I'm not to worried about addiction.  Especially in the long term.  The 
brain is quite protected with safeguards, and no matter how fun it is, 
eventually you'll tire of the experience.  Unless, you are modifying 
things with drugs or something.

I also originally asked for when people think we'll start interfacing 
directly with  neurons.  I'm sure we are making much more progress in 
this area than most of us hear about.  You occasionally hear rumors of 
artificial cochleas, artificial retinas, and they occasionally  the 
direct stimulation of the primary visual cortex.  (Which last I heard 
only produces 'sprites' or sparks of white light that can be organized 
in a very low resolution 2D image.)

How much progress are we making with this?  How do you follow this field 
better, and how much longer before direct neural stimulation becomes 
common place, or something someone that wasn't blind, for example, might 
be interested in?

And of course, soon after you start hacking the brain, then you get true 
free will, or the ability to choose what you want to want.  In other 
words, if you need to take out the garbage, and that is what you really 
want to do (rather than being addicted to some game), you'll be able to 
reprogram your brain so that taking out the trash will be much more than 
organismic, or more fun than any game could be without such 
modifications.  I get so tired of fighting and resisting what my 
primitive creator wanted me to do, and instead attempting to do more of 
what I want to do.  I'm looking forward to this kind of complete free 
will, where I can chose what I want, when I want it, more than anything.

Brent



On 5/30/2011 1:54 PM, Kelly Anderson wrote:
> On Mon, May 30, 2011 at 4:02 AM, Anders Sandberg<anders at aleph.se>  wrote:
>> How do we callibrate that without too much
>> effort?
> Perhaps "too much effort" will become some day become affordable with
> the continued decrease in the cost of computation. In other words,
> what is today's "too much effort" is tomorrow's effortless.
>
>> But the biggest problem isn't really the input fidelity but the ability to
>> tell a compelling story or create an immersive environment. Note how well
>> told the little story of the ad was - he stopped the action at just the
>> right moments to create brief cliffhangers, he moved so that the flames
>> looked good, you get the explanation for the initial mystery (why is he just
>> sitting there?) gradually. The problem with interactive media is that they
>> require a different kind of storytelling, and we are still in the early
>> days. Truly immersive interactive media likely require realtime
>> storytellers, presumably some kind of AI.
> There are two types of entertainment here, passive and participatory.
> Today's passive entertainment includes movies, television, even 3D
> stuff where you just watch. Our participatory entertainment today is
> video games. Group participation in multi-player video games is a step
> up from there. What you seem to be getting at here is pushing the
> passive entertainment up into a participatory realm. To get to the
> right solution, start then with video games, not movies. An immersive
> 3D environment can still be passive, which is what was shown in the
> commercial. Pausing and then playing again (even in another room)
> doesn't count as being very highly interactive in my book.
>
>> And of course, then there is the addiction question. We are already
>> experiencing many things through our entertainment that are far more
>> rewarding than most things we can experience in real life. Better
>> entertainment might also mean more addictive entertainment.
> Yes, there is a lot of addiction in video games and television. The
> video game designers are aware of this, and do things intentionally to
> increase the addictive nature of the game. Eventually, I think that
> they will pass laws against this sort of thing, but today it's a case
> of the technology being ahead of the legislators. It is funny to me
> that people go to jail for selling marijuana (which isn't even all
> that addictive), but they get big piles of cash for designing World of
> Warcraft. I'm not a big promoter of additional laws, it's just funny
> that it's currently so inconsistent. The right solution might be to
> make the drugs legal, then educate everyone about the addictive nature
> of all of these things.
>
> -Kelly
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