[ExI] Life @ Playstation

[Brent Allsop]

Hi Spike,

Yea, I've done exactly that - visited some nursing homes, including ones 
for loss of mind/memory.  It's almost as painful for me, even though I 
know they aren't in as much pain, as going to a  major hospital's burn 
unit.  And, just as you say, so much more could be done for them with 
technology.  I've also recently started volunteering with Meals on 
Wheels - and I'm getting to know some of the people we deliver to - 
regularly, so am looking forward to asking them if they are interested 
in anything like this.

As with most things, it all comes down to time.  Trying to provide an 
income for my family, and working on the startup Canonizer.com, doesn't 
seem to leave much time for such.

I'm sure if we could find a group of people interested in helping older 
people in one location or one particular nursing home, which would be 
able to help with some of the busy / training / support work, with our 
direction, that could go a long way.  And it'd help if we could find a 
nursing home which already had at leas some computers available for 
residents to use.

There are lots of people in the Mormon church that volunteer at old 
folks homes.  I'm sure if we could find enough of these kind of people, 
at least in a single prototype location, we could get something started.

Maybe we should get a kickstarter.com project going.  I bet lots of 
people would be willing to pay lots of funds to get a few seed / test 
old folks homes started, to see if we could make something like this 
work?  If lots of people were willing to help a bit, that would sure 
make things easier / doable.

Brent Allsop




On 11/4/2012 5:33 PM, spike wrote:
>
> 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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