[ExI] Life @ Playstation

[spike]

Hi Brent,

 

What I have had rattling around in my brain for years, decades actually
since long before we had anything like the computing horsepower we have
today, is an idea for creating devices which stimulate the minds of nursing
home patients.  One of the causes of their degradation is that nursing homes
are so boring.  All their life's challenges are behind them, they don't
really want to just spend hours talking to all their new acquaintances.  So
most of them just sit in silent misery.

 

Here is my request for those who have the intestinal fortitude to accept it:
go to any local nursing home, especially if they have a wing dedicated to
memory care patients in a lockdown.  Ask to see it.  They will tour you and
in most cases won't even ask why you are there.  Look at it for yourself.
Do it.  Surely some of the same ideas will occur to you as I have had: we
could rig up some kind of tech related to those games the kids have which
can take input from you from a head motion or even an eye motion.  We could
rig it up somehow with Second Life or one of the others, make it into a fun
game that doesn't require the patients study anything.  All they need to do
is look this way or that.  We could use those Wii controllers, the various
gaming technologies and so on, make it one HELL of a lot more fun to be old
and locked in, for DO LET ME ASSURE YOU my young friends, right not it sure
looks like NO FUN to me, and furthermore, if we had all this cool stuff, we
could probably keep the patients in their own home longer, and the savings
could be astonishing.

 

It kills me that I we have all this cool technology and we aren't using it,
or aren't using it effectively, and we should be, at least for rich people,
because rich people deserve the very best that money can buy.  They help us
all because they pay the up-front costs of developing all this stuff,
provide a market, then the rest of us can buy it more cheaply WHEN WE NEED
IT and we will.  Pardon please my occasional use of all caps, but friends I
mean it.  We can do better than this, and we should be.  Here we have all
these rocket scientists with nothing to do since the cold war rather
unexpectedly came to an end, all this lofty engineering skill with no good
outlet, yet here we sit with a perfectly clear desperate need, with a
ready-made market, our OWN PARENTS and grandparents to immediately benefit,
and all this to our benefit too, within a few decades.  

 

What if we fail?  Imagine that I can't figure out ways to get the coder
jockeys to work on this, and 30 yrs from now that is ME in one of those
evolution-forsaken places with nothing to do and what is left of a really
fun brain just rots away, and if so I would hafta hate myself for not
getting off my ass back in '12 when I was 52 and capable of at least
imagining the kinds of things we should be building.  Sheesh, it isn't even
all that difficult.  Do we have here, or anyone here friends with people who
know how to hack into that game system, what's it called?  The one that
watches your motions and uses that as an input.  Game hipsters please?  Is
that a Sony PlayStation 4?  Could anyone here clue me how to rig that PS4
game console to read head motions and set that to guide Second Life, or
suggest something else that can use simple right left commands, but not Duke
Nukem or Lara Croft.  It hasta work for gentle church ladies and such.  If
you accept my challenge, you will see most of the patients are women, and
they have zero interest in first-person shooters, but they might go for a
Waltons-ized version of Second Life.  Is there anything we can do with
speech recognition?  Is there already somewhere a Waltons-ized adventure
game?

 

Toss me a bone here friends.  What do we do next?

 

spike

 

From: Brent Allsop [mailto:brent.allsop at gmail.com] On Behalf Of Brent Allsop
Sent: Sunday, November 04, 2012 10:05 AM
To: spike
Cc: 'ExI chat list'
Subject: Re: [ExI] Life @ Playstation

 


Hi Spike,

Working on projects for nursing home geezers!?  Tell me more about this
project, sounds very fascinating!
I'm also thinking along these lines with Canonizer.com.  When you think
about moral wisdom, and how best to live one's life, who knows better than
old geezers?  If we could get all of these retired folks to spend time
'canonizing' things like the best moral behavior, and so on, amplifying
everyone's moral wisdom, the old retired people could help us have a concise
and quantitative moral reference far better than what we now have with
Wikipedia, (to say nothing of the primitive biblical morality - so many of
us are stuck in the mud with now) I think.  It's such a waste that we aren't
better at learning from all these wise and experienced people, in assisted
living homes and so on, and us completely ignoring and loosing all they've
learned when they die.

Imagine being able to select your own experts (via selecting your preferred
canonizing algorithm), and knowing, concisely and quantitatively, what kind
of moral information these very experienced chosen people all understand.
Dang, I so wish I had some way to learn and benefit, concisely and
quantitatively, from all their experiences.

Brent Allsop





On 11/4/2012 9:36 AM, spike wrote:

 

 

On Behalf Of Brent Allsop
Subject: Re: [ExI] Life @ Playstation

 


>.Hi Stefano,

>.Where are you getting all this from?  Especially specifics like "since
1870"?

>.All I have is anecdotal evidences, but here's a few things I see that seem
to say otherwise?

*	.
*	Mormon Transhumanism is certainly growing! ...

(!)

*	The average life span continues to go through the roof.
*	I, as a type 1 juvenile diabetic,  last year.So I just in time
dodged that bullet.
*	My son was diagnosed . didn't exist till last year.
*	Everyone thinks the costs of medical care are going up .

Excellent points Brent.  Well said.

*	We're continuing the working on the "Consciousness Survey Project"
at Canonizer.com - now with people like Dennett, Chalmers, Hameroff, Lehar,
and so many other contributing world class leaders.  .

 

I admire you for staying on this over the years, even if at times you must
have felt like the lone voice crying out in the wilderness.  It encourages
me to keep on with my favorite idea for which I have a hard time generating
funding or mass enthusiasm, the notion of rigging up virtual realities for
old geezers.  By this I mean of course older than I am geezers, the kind
that live in nursing homes and such.

 

Brent Allsop

Brent you are gift pal.  Best wishes with those medical sitches for you and
your son man.

 

 

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