Virtual Horizons & Futurology for 2021: Žižek on The Great Reset

With much ballyhoo and bellyaching about the absurdly miserable year of 2020, our collective calendars have finally turned to 2021. The year-end was marked by effusive declarations of relief and hope, even though these admissions of optimism were often tinged with cynical self-awareness reflecting the continuing complexities of our current moment (i.e. coronavirus vaccines are officially being rolled out, although infections are currently exploding in the U.S., and a new strain of the virus has been discovered; and it remains likely that Trump will leave office soon, despite ongoing efforts to delegitimize the election outcome, and nevermind what sort of policies we can reasonably accept from a Biden administration). 

In an essay published on New Year’s Eve by Jacobin, Slavoj Žižek considers the prospects of the immediate future in terms of a dichotomy between a socialist reset and a corporate “great reset”:

“When we try to guess how our societies will look after the pandemic will be over, the trap to avoid is futurology — futurology by definition ignores our not-knowing. Futurology is defined as a systematic forecasting of the future from the present trends in society. And therein resides the problem — futurology mostly extrapolates what will come from the present tendencies. However, what futurology doesn’t take into account are historical “miracles,” radical breaks which can only be explained retroactively, once they happen.”

The phrase “great reset” has proliferated through think-pieces and professional publications to describe the ways in which the effects of the pandemic will shape social reality and rearrange policy priorities for the foreseeable future. It is also the title of a proposal by the World Economic Forum for how the global economic recovery should be directed. The proposal thus represents the dissemination of managerialist and technocratic visioning statements on the behalf of an aristocratic elite who assume the mantle for guiding civilization’s progress. Žižek addresses some of the most visible exemplars of this group:

“The human face of this ‘leading with transparency, authenticity, and humanity’ are Gates, Bezos, Zuckenberg, the faces of authoritarian corporate capitalism who all pose as humanitarian heroes, as our new aristocracy celebrated in our media and quoted as wise humanitarians. Gates gives billions to charities, but we should remember how he opposed Elizabeth Warren’s plan for a small rise in taxes. He praised Piketty and once almost proclaimed himself a socialist — true, but in a very specific twisted sense: his wealth comes from privatizing what Marx called our ‘commons,’ our shared social space in which we move and communicate.”

[...]

“We are thus facing a horrible false alternative: a big corporate reset or nationalist populism, which turns out to be the same. “The great reset” is the formula of how to change some things (even many things) so that things will basically remain the same.”

[...]

“So is there a third way, outside the space of the two extremes of restoring the old normality and a Great Reset? Yes, a true great reset. It is no secret what needs to be done — Greta Thunberg made it clear. First, we should finally recognize the pandemic crisis as what it is, part of a global crisis of our entire way of life, from ecology to new social tensions. Second, we should establish social control and regulation over economy. Third, we should rely on science — rely on but not simply accept it as the agency which makes decisions.”

The distinction that Žižek makes between relying on science and delegating agency to techno-scientific forces is a crucial one. This past November I participated in a workshop organized by the Communicative Cities Research Network on the topic of urban communication in the pandemic era. My brief contribution to the proceedings comprised my musings on urban responses to the pandemic in light of prevailing trends in “smart city” policies. The emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic initially seemed to reinforce ways of envisioning cities and urban space that characterizes “smart city” urban imaginaries. The propagation of smart city frameworks, particularly those promoted by corporate firms and technology vendors, has been characterized as a “techno-utopian policy mobility” and expression of a “technoscientific urbanism” in which infrastructural packages are sold to beleaguered municipalities as technical “solutions” for intractable urban problems.

One of the problems with these approaches is that by foregrounding technological formulations of urban life, these programs function to depoliticize practices of city planning, obfuscate the social inequalities inherent to urban development, and foreclose opportunities to formulate an emancipatory or oppositional urban politics. The smart city imaginary of transposable technical solutions as promoted by technology vendors has emerged from the conditions of entrepreneurial urbanism and neoliberal policy approaches. The technoscientific tenor that characterizes many smart city discourses is especially amenable to neoliberal applications as it addresses urban problems through a veneer of objectivity, neutrality, and ideological agnosticism. These technocratic approaches attempt to depoliticize what are in actuality politically charged development and governance programs.

The COVID-19 pandemic makes clear the need for science, technology, and engineering to solve urban problems and maintain quality of life. However, it is crucial to be wary of the ways in which a technocratic veneer obscures the ideological underpinnings and inherent value judgments that direct policy programs, as well as the ways in which technocratic imaginaries limit the scope of our potential urban futures.

Žižek concludes his article thusly:

“Futurology deals with what is possible, we need to do what is (from the standpoint of the existing global order) impossible.”

In regards to urban futures and imaginaries, my response to Žižek’s distinction between the possible and impossible draws on a particular notion of virtuality understood not as absent or imaginary but as the potentiality for change, as the as-yet-unrealized. 

The emancipatory potential of virtuality in urban imaginaries is deeply implicated in the Lefebvrian right to the city. Lefebvre's call for a "right to the city" extended beyond access to housing and public space to advocate for spontaneity, sociability, and the utilization of urban environments based on use rather than exchange value. While the formulation of “the right to the city” is effectively an empty signifier, it signals the struggles of urban denizens to exert influence over the shaping of their built environment, to exercise autonomy in their communities, and to realize the use value of public space as a common good in the face of homogenizing capitalist development that aims to render and remake space only on the basis of exchange.

A common rejoinder to urban rhetoric invoking the “right to the city” is to ask for examples of cities or communities that have successfully realized the right. While the phrase has been adopted as a by various activist groups, and has appeared in certain government policies, there are no obvious examples of how the right has been actualized. Yet the virtuality of the right to the city is essential to its continued functioning as a rallying cry of radical urban politics.

The right to the city represents a virtual horizon of urban life and a radical vision for the city to come. Lefebvre’s call has been taken up by urbanists and activists as a rallying cry for expanding urban imaginaries beyond the actual to the possibilities offered by invention and processes of becoming. The right to the city therefore renders the realms of imagination and virtuality as key battlefields for urban struggles. Among the many crises facing cities today - ecological catastrophes, yawning social inequality, infrastructural breakdown, etc. - we might accordingly refer also to a crisis of imagination.

Mind-controlled exoskeleton opens World Cup; AI will crash the stock market; Cortana's personality

• The 2014 World Cup kicked off yesterday with a futuristic twist on the opening ceremonies. A paraplegic kicked a soccer ball using an exoskeleton designed by the Walk Again Project:

The exoskeleton -- a system comprising a helmet implanted with a microchip that sticks out from the underside; a T-shirt loaded with sensors; metal leg braces; and a battery worn in a backpack -- is set in motion when the user envisions himself making the kick. The chip translates those electronic commands to a digital language that powers the skeleton, which then moves accordingly. The T-shirt vibrates to enhance the user's sensation of movement (and eliminate the need to look at his feet to see if he's stepping forward).

• Unfortunately, as io9 reports, the moment was not well-covered by TV networks:

Talk about dropping the ball. Earlier today, Juliano Pinto — a 29 year-old paraplegic — successfully kicked off the 2014 FIFA World Cup by using a mind-controlled exoskeleton. But sadly, most TV networks failed to show it.

After months of hype, the official broadcast of the opening ceremonies showed only a fraction of it, while some TV networks missed the event altogether. Commentators criticized the organizers for casting aside the moment in favor of performing acts. 

• Thomas Frey at the Futurist Speaker blog forecasts the coming AI crash wars:

The invasion of high-frequency trading machines is now forcing capitalism far away from anything either Adam Smith or the founders of the NYSE could possibly find virtuous. 

We’re not about to let robots compete in the Olympics, driverless cars race in the Indianapolis 500, or automated machines play sports like football, basketball, or baseball. So why is it we allow them to play a role in the most valuable contest of all, the world wide stock exchange? 

With crude forms of AI now entering the quant manipulator’s toolbox, we are now teetering dangerously close to a total collapse of the stock market, one that will leave many corporations and individuals financially destitute.

• Microsoft has announced their version of apple's Siri virtual assistant. coming to Windows smartphones: Named Cortana, after the AI character from the Halo video game series, she is coming to Windows smartphones, and as Brad Molen at engadget reports, developers programmed her with a distinct personality:

Confident, caring, competent, loyal; helpful, but not bossy: These are just some of the words Susan Hendrich, the project manager in charge of overseeing Cortana's personality, used to describe the program's most significant character traits. "She's eager to learn and can be downright funny, peppering her answers with banter or a comeback," Hendrich said. "She seeks familiarity, but her job is to be a personal assistant." With that kind of list, it sure sounds like Hendrich's describing a human. Which is precisely what she and her team set out to do during Cortana's development; create an AI with human-like qualities.

Microsoft's decision to infuse Cortana with a personality stemmed from one end goal: user attachment. "We did some research and found that people are more likely to interact with [AI] when it feels more human," said Hendrich. To illustrate that desired human-machine dynamic, Hendrich pointed to her grandmother's experience with a Roomba vacuum: "She gave a name and a personality to an inanimate object, and it brought her joy." That sense of familiarity is exactly what Microsoft wants Window Phone users to feel when interacting with Cortana on their own devices.

Guns with Google Glass, city of driverless cars, Kurzweil on hybrid thinking

 

• Tech companies and weapons manufacturers are exploring the crossover potential for firearms and wearable technology devices like Google Glass. Brian Anderson at Motherboard reported Austin tech startup TrackingPoint's foray into this inevitable extension of augmented reality applications and posted the company's concept video:

"When paired with wearable technology, PGFs can provide unprecedented benefits to shooters, such as the ability to shoot around corners, from behind low walls, and from other positions that provide exceptional cover," according to a TrackingPoint press release. "Without PGF technology, such positions would be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to fire from."

The steadied rise of wearable technology is unlocking a dizzying number of potential killer apps. Indeed, If there was any lingering doubt that wearable tech is coming to the battlefield, the Glassification of a high-profile smart weapon should put any uncertainties to rest.

If being able to track and drop a moving target with single-shot accuracy at 1,500 feet using a long-range robo rifle wasn't sobering enough already, to think basically anyone can now do so over a hill, perhaps overlooking a so-called "networked battlefield" shot through with data-driven soldiers, is sure to be even more so.

• Another recent Motherboard article reported on a model city being built in Michigan for the purpose of test driving self-driving cars:

The simulation is run by a proprietary software, and programmers will code in dangerous situations—traffic jams and potential collisions—so engineers can anticipate problems and, ideally, solve for them before the automated autos hit the streets. It's laying the groundwork for the real-world system planned for 2021 in Ann Arbor.

There will surely be some technical barriers to work out, but the biggest hurdles self-driving cars will have to clear are likely regulatory, legal, and political. Will driverless cars be subsidized like public transit? If autonomous cars eliminate crashes, will insurance companies start tanking? Will the data-driven technology be a privacy invasion?

• In other robo-car news, this article by Philip Ross provides an extensive look at the future of driverless vehicles:

Today you can buy a top-of-the-line S-Class car from Mercedes-Benz that figuratively says “ahem” when you begin to stray out of your lane or tailgate. If you do nothing, it’ll turn the wheel slightly or lightly apply the brakes. And if you’re still intent on crashing, it will take command. In 5 years, cars will be quicker to intervene; in 20, they won’t need your advice; and in 30, they won’t take it.

Accident rates will plummet, parking problems will vanish, streets will narrow, cities will bulk up, and commuting by automobile will become a mere extension of sleep, work, and recreation. With no steering column and no need for a crush zone in front of the passenger compartment (after all, there aren’t going to be any crashes), car design will run wild: Collapsibility! Stackability! Even interchangeability, because when a car can come when called, pick up a second or third passenger for a fee, and park itself, even the need to own the thing will dwindle.

• Ray Kurzweil recently delivered a TED talk on hybrid computing. Video available on the TED site, which summarizes the talk thusly:

Two hundred million years ago, our mammal ancestors developed a new brain feature: the neocortex. This stamp-sized piece of tissue (wrapped around a brain the size of a walnut) is the key to what humanity has become. Now, futurist Ray Kurzweil suggests, we should get ready for the next big leap in brain power, as we tap into the computing power in the cloud.

• Finally, this post at SingularityHub covers Muse, a headband that monitors brain activity and may enable brain-to-computer interaction:

The headband picks up four channels from seven EEG sensors, five across the forehead and two conductive rubber ear sensors. Together, the sensors detect the five basic types of brain waves, and, unlike conventional sensors, they don’t need to be surrounded by gel to work. Software helps filter out the noise and syncs the signal, via Bluetooth, to a companion app. The app shows the user the brainwave information and offers stress-reduction exercises.

A bit further down the road of possibilities is brain-to-brain networking. Last year, researchers at the University of Washington used EEG sensors to detect one person’s intention to move his arm and used it to stimulate the other person’s brain with an external coil and watched as the second person moved his hand without planning to.

Inside Korea's gaming culture, virtual worlds and economic modeling, Hollywood's Summer of Doom continued, and more

• I've long been fascinated by the gaming culture in South Korea, and Tom Massey has written a great feature piece for Eurogamer titled Seoul Caliber: Inside Korea's Gaming Culture. From this westerner's perspective, having never visited Korea, the article reads almost more like cyberpunk fiction than games journalism:

Not quite as ubiquitous, but still extremely common, are PC Bangs: LAN gaming hangouts where 1000 Won nets you an hour of multiplayer catharsis. In Gangnam's Maxzone, overhead fans rotate at Apocalypse Now speed, slicing cigarette smoke as it snakes through the blades. Korea's own NCSoft, whose European base is but a stone's throw from the Eurogamer offices, is currently going strong with its latest MMO, Blade & Soul.

"It's relaxing," says Min-Su, sipping a Milkis purchased from the wall-mounted vending machine. "And dangerous," he adds. "It's easy to lose track of time playing these games, especially when you have so much invested in them. I'm always thinking about achieving the next level or taking on a quick quest to try to obtain a weapon, and the next thing I know I've been here for half the day."

• As a cyberpunk/hyperreality aside, the city of Hong Kong has put up a blue-sky backdrop for when the real sky is too smoggy for tourist photos.

• In yet another cyberpunk dystopian tangent, I recently came across Chris Rogers' site Fragments of a Hologram Rose: Re-seeing Blade Runner, with an assortment of content and analysis relating to the film.
• And one final cyberpunk diversion: this video is the first part of a lecture by University of Michigan professor Eric Rabkin covering cyberpunk, postmodernism, and beyond:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kue_gd8DneU&w=420&h=315]

• Writing for The New Economy, Aaran Franda examines how the virtual economies seen in games like EVE Online provide valuable perspectives on real world economic activity:

Creation and simulation in virtual worlds appear to offer the best domain to test the new ideas required to tackle the very real problems of depravation, inequality, unemployment, and poverty that exist in national economies. On that note the need to see our socioeconomic institutions for the games that they really are seems even more poignant.

In the words of Vili Lehdonvirta, a leading scholar in virtual goods and currencies, the suffering we see today is “not some consequence of natural or physical law” it instead “is a result of the way we play these games.”

• Jon Evans at Tech Crunch looks at jobs, robots, capitalism, inequality, and you:

The global economy seems to be bifurcating into a rich/tech track and a poor/non-tech track, not least because new technology will increasingly destroy/replace old non-tech jobs. (Yes, global. Foxconn is already replacing Chinese employees with one million robots.) So far so fairly non-controversial.

The big thorny question is this: is technology destroying jobs faster than it creates them?

[...]

We live in an era of rapid exponential growth in technological capabilities. (Which may finally be slowing down, true, but that’s an issue for decades hence.) If you’re talking about the economic effects of technology in the 1980s, much less the 1930s or the nineteenth century, as if it has any relevance whatsoever to today’s situation, then you do not understand exponential growth. The present changes so much faster that the past is no guide at all; the difference is qualitative, not just quantitative. It’s like comparing a leisurely walk to relativistic speeds.

• This recent episode of Radiolab focused on talking to machines:

We begin with a love story--from a man who unwittingly fell in love with a chatbot on an online dating site. Then, we encounter a robot therapist whose inventor became so unnerved by its success that he pulled the plug. And we talk to the man who coded Cleverbot, a software program that learns from every new line of conversation it receives...and that's chatting with more than 3 million humans each month. Then, five intrepid kids help us test a hypothesis about a toy designed to push our buttons, and play on our human empathy. And we meet a robot built to be so sentient that its creators hope it will one day have a consciousness, and a life, all its own.

• This video shows a demo of using Google Glass for interactive augmented reality:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pHCwaaactyY&w=420&h=315]

• A recent Guardian article by Juliette Garside warns that our digital infrastructure is exceeding the limits of human control:

"These outages are absolutely going to continue," said Neil MacDonald, a fellow at technology research firm Gartner. "There has been an explosion in data across all types of enterprises. The complexity of the systems created to support big data is beyond the understanding of a single person and they also fail in ways that are beyond the comprehension of a single person."

From high volume securities trading to the explosion in social media and the online consumption of entertainment, the amount of data being carried globally over the private networks, such as stock exchanges, and the public internet is placing unprecedented strain on websites and on the networks that connect them.

• In an "anti-videogame manifesto," Keith Burgun argues for intrinsic rewards and against grinding in videogames:

What I want is systems that have intrinsic rewards; that are disciplines similar to drawing or playing a musical instrument. I want systems which are their own reward.

What videogames almost always give me instead are labor that I must perform for an extrinsic reward. I want to convince you that not only is this not what I want, this isn’t really what anyone wants.

• This video from PBS Digital Studios' Off Book looks at the rise of competetive gaming & e-sports:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GpO76SkpaWQ&w=560&h=315]

• Will Luton at GamesIndustry International writes about the celebrification of game developers:

This 'celebrification' is enlivening making games and giving players role models, drawing more people in to development, especially indie and auteured games. This shift is proving more prosperous than any Skillset-accredited course or government pot could ever hope for. We are making men sitting in pants at their laptops for 12 hours a day as glamorous as it could be.

Creating luminaries will lead to all the benefits that more people in games can bring: a bigger and brighter community, plus new and fresh talent making exciting games. However, celebritydom demands storms, turmoil and gossip.

• The ongoing survey of Hollywood's Summer of Doom continues with Isaac Chotiner's New Republic article, Hollywood is in trouble and we're all going to pay:

Spielberg's theory is essentially that a studio will eventually go under after it releases five or six bombs in a row. The reason: budgets have become so gigantic. And, indeed, this summer has been full of movies with giant budgets and modest grosses, all of which has elicited hand-wringing about financial losses, the lack of a quality product (another post-apocalyptic thriller? more superheroes?), and a possible connection between the two. There has been some hope that Hollywood's troubles will lead to a rethinking of how movies get made, and which movies get greenlit by studio executives. But a close look at this summer's grosses suggest a more worrisome possibility: that the studios will become more conservative and even less creative.

• Finally, video of Slavoj Žižek and Paul A. Taylor discussing the difficulty of conveying philosophical ideas in today's media:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F4mDNMSntlA&w=420&h=315]

Hacker's death, wearable tech, and some Cyberpunk

• White hat hacker Barnaby Jack was found dead in San Francisco this week; he was 35 years old. From the Reuters article on his death:
  

His genius was finding bugs in the tiny computers embedded in equipment, such as medical devices and cash machines. He often received standing ovations at conferences for his creativity and showmanship while his research forced equipment makers to fix bugs in their software.

Jack had planned to demonstrate his techniques to hack into pacemakers and implanted defibrillators at the Black Hat hackers convention in Las Vegas next Thursday. He told Reuters last week that he could kill a man from 30 feet away by attacking an implanted heart device.

• Writing in the MIT Technology Review, Don Norman asks whether wearable devices can augment our activities without distracting us from the real world:
  

Without the right approach, the continual distraction of multiple tasks exerts a toll that disrupts performance. It takes time to switch tasks, to get back what attention theorists call “situation awareness.” Interruptions disrupt performance, and even a voluntary switching of attention from one task to another is an interruption of the task being left behind.

Furthermore, it will be difficult to resist the temptation of using powerful technology that guides us with useful side information, suggestions, and even commands. Sure, other people will be able to see that we are being assisted, but they won’t know by whom, just as we will be able to tell that they are being minded, and we won’t know by whom.

• This CNN.com article looks at "wearable tech that will turn man into machine by 2015" via an hour-by-hour breakdown of a hypothetical day in the life of a wearable tech aficionado:
  

9am to 1pm: Throughout the day you connect to your Dekko-powered augmented reality device, which overlays your vision with a broad range of information and entertainment. While many of the products the US software company is proposing are currently still fairly conceptual, Dekko hopes to find ways to integrate an extra layer of visual information into every part of daily life. Dekko is one of the companies supplying software to Google Glass, the wearable computer that gives users information through a spectacle-like visual display. Matt Miesnieks, CEO of Dekko, says that he believes "the power of wearables comes from connecting our senses to sensors."

• In another article from the MIT Technology Review, Rachel Metz ponders the possibility of smart contact lenses:
  

Researchers at Belgian nonelectronics reseach and development center Imec and Belgium’s Ghent University are in the very early stages of developing such a device, which would bring augmented reality–the insertion of digital imagery such as virtual signs and historical markers with the real world–right to your eyeballs. It’s just one of several such projects (see “Contact Lens Computer: It’s Like Google Glass Without The Glasses”), and while the idea is nowhere near the point where you could ask your eye doctor for a pair, it could become more realistic as the cost and size of electronic components continue to fall and wearable gadgets gain popularity.

Speaking on the sidelines of the Wearable Technologies conference in San Francisco on Tuesday, Eric Dy, Imec’s North America business development manager, said researchers are investigating the feasibility of integrating an array of micro lenses with LEDs, using the lenses to help focus light and project it onto the wearer’s retinas.

• Ben Gilbert at engadget reports on prototypical Universal Translators ala Star Trek:
  

The biggest barrier, beyond the translation itself, is speech recognition. In so many words, background noise interferes with the translation software, thus affecting results. But Barra said it works "close to 100 percent" when used in "controlled environments." Sounds perfect for diplomats, not so much for real-world conversations. Of course, Google's non-real-time, text-based translation software built into Chrome leaves quite a bit to be desired, making us all the more wary of putting our faith into Google's verbal solution. As the functionality is still "several years away," though, there's still plenty of time to convert us.

• DVICE writer Colin Druce-Mcfadden looks at the potential of life-size humanoid holograms:
  

There will be limitations, however. It's easy to think that a life-sized human being, standing in your living room, would be capable of giving you a hug, for instance. But if that breakthrough is coming, it hasn't arrived yet. Holodeck creations these are not. And images projected through the magic of HoloVision won't be able to follow you into the kitchen for a snack either — not unless you've got a whole network of HoloVision cameras, anyway.

• Cyborgology contributor davidbanks addresses "what's really disturbing about retailers tracking your every move":
  

The implications of Euclid’s technology do not stop at surveillance or privacy. Remember, these systems are meant to feed data to store owners so that they can rearrange store shelves or entire showroom floors to increase sales. Malls, casinos, and grocery stores have always been carefully planned out spaces—scientifically arranged and calibrated for maximum profit at minimal cost. Euclid’s systems however, allow for massive and exceedingly precise quantification and analysis. More than anything, what worries me is the deliberateness of these augmented spaces. Euclid will make spaces designed to do exactly one thing almost perfectly: sell you shit you don’t need. I worry about spaces that are as expertly and diligently designed as Amazon’s home page or the latest Pepsi advertisement. A space built on data so rich and thorough that it’ll make focus groups look quaint in comparison.

• In the New York Review of Books, James Bamford says the NSA knows "much more than you think":
  

Of course the US is not a totalitarian society, and no equivalent of Big Brother runs it, as the widespread reporting of Snowden’s information shows. We know little about what uses the NSA makes of most information available to it—it claims to have exposed a number of terrorist plots—and it has yet to be shown what effects its activities may have on the lives of most American citizens. Congressional committees and a special federal court are charged with overseeing its work, although they are committed to secrecy, and the court can hear appeals only from the government.

Still, the US intelligence agencies also seem to have adopted Orwell’s idea of doublethink—“to be conscious of complete truthfulness,” he wrote, “while telling carefully constructed lies.” For example, James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, was asked at a Senate hearing in March whether “the NSA collect[s] any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans.” Clapper’s answer: “No, sir…. Not wittingly.”

• Kotaku reports on using the Oculus Rift to pilot a drone:
  

The drone is carrying a laptop so it can communicate with the headset, but right now the sticking point is range; since it's using wi-fi to communicate, it'll only get to around 50-100m.

• Now for the Cyberpunk promised in the post title: the script-writer of the film adaptation of the Deus Ex video game series says the movie will be "a cyberpunk film, not a video game film":
  

"It's not a video game movie, it's a cyberpunk movie," Cargill said. "Eidos Montreal has given us a lot of freedom in terms of story; they want this movie to be Blade Runner. We want this movie to be Blade Runner."

• io9 recently linked to this interview with William Gibson from the Paris Review:
  

INTERVIEWER

There’s a famous story about your being unable to sit through Blade Runner while writing Neuromancer.

GIBSON

I was afraid to watch Blade Runner in the theater because I was afraid the movie would be better than what I myself had been able to imagine. In a way, I was right to be afraid, because even the first few minutes were better. Later, I noticed that it was a total box-office flop, in first theatrical release. That worried me, too. I thought, Uh-oh. He got it right and ­nobody cares! Over a few years, though, I started to see that in some weird way it was the most influential film of my lifetime, up to that point. It affected the way people dressed, it affected the way people decorated nightclubs. Architects started building office buildings that you could tell they had seen in Blade Runner. It had had an astonishingly broad aesthetic impact on the world.

• Finally, a piece by Tim Leary on the "Cyberpunks":
  

The concept was formally introduced in William Gibson's 1984 punkn novel, NEUROMANCER.  Although this first novel swept the Triple Crown of science fiction--the Hugo, the Nebula, and the Philip K. Dick awards--it is not really science fiction.  It could be called "science faction" in that it occurs not in another galaxy in the far future, but 20 years from now, in a BLADE RUNNER world just a notch beyond our silicon present.

      In Gibson's Cyberworld there is no-warp drive and "beam me up, Scotty."  The high technology is the stuff that appears on today's screens or that processes data in today's laboratories: Super-computer boards.  Recombinant DNA chips.  AI systems and enormous data banks controlled by multinational combines based in Japan and Zurich.

Mice memory implants, augmented reality trends, predictive policing, more

• In case you haven't already heard, scientists have implanted false memories into the brains of mice.

Scientists have created a false memory in mice by manipulating neurons that bear the memory of a place. The work further demonstrates just how unreliable memory can be. It also lays new ground for understanding the cell behavior and circuitry that controls memory, and could one day help researchers discover new ways to treat mental illnesses influenced by memory.

• The inevitable Total Recall references have already appeared. Others have gone with Inception as the pop culture touchstone.
• I recently discovered the Augmented Reality Trends website. Some noteworthy posts: How augmented reality aids advertising.

Augmented reality blurs the line between the virtual and real-world environment. This capability of augmented reality often confuses users, making them unable to determine the difference between the real world experience and the computer generated experience. It creates an interactive world in real-time and using this technology, businesses can give customers the opportunity to feel their products and service as if it is real right from their current dwelling.

AR technology imposes on the real world view with the help of computer-generated sensory, changing what we see. It can use any kind of object to alter our senses. The enhancements usually include sound, video, graphics and GPS data. And its potentials are tremendous as developers have just started exploring the world of augmented reality. However, you must not confuse between virtual reality and augmented reality, as there is a stark difference between them. Virtual reality, as the name suggests, is not real. It is just a made up world. On the other hand, augmented reality is enhancing the real world, providing an augmented view of the reality. The enhancements can be minor or major, but AR technology only changes how the real world around the user looks like.

• And a profile of SeeMore Interactive and their work on augmented reality shopping:

Augmentedrealitytrends.com: Why augmented reality and why your prime focus is on retail industry?

SeeMore Interactive: We recognize the importance of merging brick-and-mortar retail with cloud-based technology to create the ultimate dynamic shopping experience. It’s simply a matter of tailoring a consumer’s shopping experience based on how he or she wants to shop; the ability to research reviews, compare prices, receive new merchandise recommendations, share photos and make purchases while shopping in-store or from the comfort of their home.

• Brian Matchick at Geek Exchange writes about how Deep Learning brings A.I. one step closer to Hal, Skynet, and the Matrix:

Deep learning is based on neural networks, simplified models of the way clusters of neurons act within the brain that were first proposed in the 1950s. The difference now is that new programming techniques combined with the incredible computing power we have today are allowing these neural networks to learn on their own, just as humans do. The computer is given a huge pile of data and asked to sort the information into categories on its own, with no specific instruction. This is in contrast to previous systems that had to be programmed by hand. By learning incrementally, the machine can grasp the low-level stuff before the high-level stuff. For example, sorting through 10,000 handwritten letters and grouping them into like categories, the machine can then move on to entire words, sentences, signage, etc. This is called “unsupervised learning,” and deep learning systems are very good at it.

• This Economist article looks at predictive policing and American company PredPol (amazingly, a sly sub-section heading is the only reference to the book or film Minority Report and it's pre-crime unit and pre-cog mutants.):

Intelligent policing can convert these modest gains into significant reductions in crime. Cops working with predictive systems respond to call-outs as usual, but when they are free they return to the spots which the computer suggests. Officers may talk to locals or report problems, like broken lights or unsecured properties, that could encourage crime. Within six months of introducing predictive techniques in the Foothill area of Los Angeles, in late 2011, property crimes had fallen 12% compared with the previous year; in neighbouring districts they rose 0.5% (see chart). Police in Trafford, a suburb of Manchester in north-west England, say relatively simple and sometimes cost-free techniques, including routing police driving instructors through high-risk areas, helped them cut burglaries 26.6% in the year to May 2011, compared with a decline of 9.8% in the rest of the city.

• The BBC web site has published an article on the cities of the future:

Although they may all look very different, the cities of the future share a new way of doing things, from sustainable buildings to walkable streets to energy-efficient infrastructure. While some are not yet complete – or even built – these five locations showcase the cutting edge of urban planning, both in developing new parts of an existing metropolitan area and building entirely new towns. By 2050, it is forecast that 70% of the world’s population will live in cities. These endeavours may help determine the way we will live then, and in decades beyond.

• This piece from Vice's Motherboard examines Bill Gates' nuclear power company TerraPower and alternative nuclear fuel thorium:

Mention thorium—an alternative fuel for nuclear power—to the right crowd, and faces will alight with the same look of spirited devotion you might see in, say, Twin Peaks and Chicago Cubs fans. People love thorium against the odds. And now Bill Gates has given them a new reason to keep rooting for the underdog element.

TerraPower, the Gates-chaired nuclear power company, has garnered attention for pursuing traveling wave reactor tech, which runs entirely on spent uranium and would rarely need to be refueled. But the concern just quietly announced that it's going to start seriously exploring thorium power, too.

• Unsurprisingly, a porno movie filmed using Google Glass has already wrapped:

Google might have put the kibosh on allowing x-rated apps onto Glass (for now) but that hasn't stopped the porn industry from doing what they do best: using new technology to enhance the, um, adult experience. The not yet titled film stars James Deen and Andy San Dimas.

• Speaking of Google, the company's research department recently announced details about their Machine Vision visual recognition program:

There has always been a basic split in machine vision work. The engineering approach tries to solve the problem by treating it as a signal detection task using standard engineering techniques. The more "soft" approach has been to try to build systems that are more like the way humans do things. Recently it has been this human approach that seems to have been on top, with DNNs managing to learn to recognize important features in sample videos. This is very impressive and very important, but as is often the case the engineering approach also has a trick or two up its sleeve.

• From Google Research:

We demonstrate the advantages of our approach by scaling object detection from the current state of the art involving several hundred or at most a few thousand of object categories to 100,000 categories requiring what would amount to more than a million convolutions. Moreover, our demonstration was carried out on a single commodity computer requiring only a few seconds for each image. The basic technology is used in several pieces of Google infrastructure and can be applied to problems outside of computer vision such as auditory signal processing.