Re: 36 hour online game/research exercise

Posted by Steve Smith on
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/36-hour-online-game-research-exercise-tp7583780p7583785.html

REC --
Steve --

No worry, we'll do the research while riding in driverless cars, and the cars will monitor the eyeballs of the pedestrians for inattention to surroundings.  All the eyeballs in parallel and all the driverless cars in the intersection pooling their views.
But of course...  and the higher functioning (meaning more highly attuned/resonant with the systems of the moment) will be tapped in to those feeds, seeing the world as if through the many faceted eyes of many insects.   As the motorcycle discussions here a while back attest, well practiced (old, or bold, but not old and bold?) riders already do something (more mamallian, however) like this.

I suggest hexahedral shaped cars that pack perfectly into long range (trains, plains and ferries) transporters... the passengers hardly need know when their car moves from roadway to dirigible...   (nod to Bucky's Dymaxion Car).

This would all be moot if the conspiratorial auto makers hadn't bought up all the patents on flying cars and burned them... they just don't want us having 3 dimensions to navigate in...  they want us to have more accidents... put in more road miles... more wear and tear... all so they can make more money </faux conspiratorial rant>

Yes, they've bundled up all that futurama into the promo video, but the idea of using a game to sort things out sounds intriguing.  I wonder if I get to express my feelings about insurance companies ala GTA.
Yes, I'm completely hooked on most if not all of the concepts presented here.  I'm just the choir mumbling to itself between stanzas of "Hallelujiah! Hallelujiah! Hallelujiah!".   

<mumble> The Amish are reputed to ask "who will we become if we use this (or that) technology"... while they are definitely anachronistic kooks in many ways, I think it is a legitimate question.  For example, if everyone owns a smart phone, will we all be found texting while driving, squinting at our screen to read the newspaper, jacked in (ears) staring at a screen (oblivious to the humans and other dangers around us), unable to read a map or find our way without GPS, unable to schedule a meeting without 6 or 8 txt messages back and forth, including several to fine-tune the actual arrival times ("I'll be 7 minutes late"... "that's ok, it will give me time to finish the vibration analysis on the quadcopter drone I'm deploying to Syria later today") </mumble>

One thing I think that can come out of these radicalized (and I mean "radicalized" in the best way) perspectives is possible phase transitions of entire systems.   While I have plenty of issues with Obamacare in it's details, I'm all for the kind of "annealing" of perspective that is caused by looking at things in a radically (by some standards) new way.

Why not go all the way with crowd sourcing and allow us all to "invest" in our future "dis-ease", not just by funding research into it's mitigation, but also funding it's amelioration.   By the time you need to be in a dementia ward (or alzheimers or "memory care" unit), maybe you (and your heirs) will own a big stake in it and can, in fact, have a say in it's policies and employees, etc. ?     Why buy insurance when you could be 'investing' instead?      Once was a time when slick insurance salesmen sold "insurance" as "investment", maybe it is time the tables were turned?   The new "investment fund" will be backing research into all the dis-ease-es indicated in your genetic and personality profile and the new "hedge fund" will be buying in to the many ways to reduce the personal misery you will experience if/when some of the more pro-active solutions fail (yes, we'll all now live past 120 but we will suffer 20 years of one form of dementia on the way out?)

I'm very good with the idea of returning to work as play and play as work (I think this was deeply designed by Darwin's Daemon into mammalian genetics, primates very likely, hominids for sure).   As snarky as I am about all this, it fascinates me a great deal... it can't be all bad (one woman's Dystopia is another orca's Utopia).  (I'll now return to binging on Terry Gilliam movies ... e.g. Brazil)

-- sas --

-- rec --

On Tue, Sep 10, 2013 at 11:28 AM, Steve Smith <[hidden email]> wrote:
On 9/10/13 10:12 AM, Roger Critchlow wrote:
UCSF is running an online game to explore possible avenues of development for medical research, education, and practice, from 8AM Sep 11 to 8PM Sep 12 at http://www.ucsf2025.org/.  There are some interesting ideas in the promotional video already, such as open sourcing the biomedical research literature and getting insurance companies to microfund medical research.
Roger -

This is a very slick vision-caste/vision-quest worthy of the best "day after tomorrow" piece of fiction.  Each of the elements they identify: New models of education with ad-hoc components built in; Crowd sourced data, research, and funding;  Viz - Big as well as ubiquitous; etc.  are very compelling.

I could take a curmudgeon stance on all of these elements and poke holes in them based on existing "tried and true" paradigms, and I'm sure many will, just as others will grasp at the shiny new toys and hope-triggers implied by it all and declare a premature "success".

This vision is probably familiar to many of us in technology as we have probably helped in small ways to build the collective consciousness of the possibilities suggested here.  In some sense, it is a "ripe" future.

The only fundamental criticism I have of the vision involves *further* speeding up and fragmenting human attention and awareness.   It suggests something like becoming part of a hive mind.   The vision as caste here, suggests that we would only experience the benefits of such. If Utopian literature is of any use, it illustrates for us how Utopias and Dystopias are duals.

Fortunately I trust the young (and not so) people in my life to be able to both embrace the possibilities suggested here and consider the downsides of what this type of vision offers them for their careers, their health, and the very qualitative quality of life that is being suggested.

If we thought texting while driving was unsafe, just imagine "doing research while driving"...

- Steve


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