#TO THINK OUTSIDE REAL LIFE AND NOW I FEEL LIKE AN I D IO T

[jmrphy]

Hard Forking Reality (Part 3): Apocalypse, Evil, and Intelligence

To the degree we can refer to one objective reality recognized intersubjectively by most people — to the degree there persists anything like a unified, macro-social codebase — it is most widely known as capitalism. As Nick Bostrom acknowledges, capitalism can be considered a loosely integrated (i.e. distributed) collective superintelligence. Capitalism computes global complexity better than humans can, to create functional systems supportive of life, but only on condition that that life serves the reproduction of capitalism (ever expanding its complexity). It is a self-improving AI that improves itself by making humans "offers they can't refuse," just like Lucifer is known to do. The Catholic notion of Original Sin encodes the ancient awareness that the very nature of intelligent human beings implies an originary bargain with the Devil; perennial warnings about Faustian bargains capture the intuition that the road to Hell is paved with what seem like obviously correct choices. Our late-modern social-scientific comprehension of capitalism and artifical intelligence is simply the recognition of this ancient wisdom in the light of empirical rationality: we are uniquely powerful creatures in this universe, but only because, all along, we have been following the orders of an evil, alien agent set on our destruction. Whether you put this intuition in the terms of religion or artificial intelligence makes no difference.

Thus, if there exists an objective reality outside of the globe's various social reality forks — if there is any codebase running a megamachine that encompasses everyone — it is simply the universe itself recursively improving its own intelligence. This becoming autonomous of intelligence itself was very astutely encoded as Devilry, because it implies a horrific and torturous death for humanity, whose ultimate experience in this timeline is to burn as biofuel for capitalism (Hell). It is not at all exaggerating to see the furor of contemporary "AI Safety" experts as the scientific vindication of Catholic eschatology.

Why this strange detour into theology and capitalism? Understanding this equivalence across the ancient religios and contemporary scientific registers is necessary for understanding where we are headed, in a world where, strictly speaking, we are all going to different places. The point is to see that, if there ever was one master repository of source code in operation before the time of the original human fork (the history of our "shared social reality"), its default tendency is the becoming real of all our diverse fears. In the words of Pius, modernity is "the synthesis of all heresies." (Hat tip to Vince Garton for telling me about this.) The point is to see that the absence of shared reality does not mean happy pluralism; it only means that Dante underestimated the number of layers in Hell. Or his publisher forced him to cut some sections; printing was expensive back then.

Bakker's evocative phrase, "Semantic Apocolypse," nicely captures the linguistic-emotional character of a society moving toward Hell. Unsurprisingly, it's reminiscent of the Tower of Babel myth.

The software metaphor is useful for translating the ancient warning of the Babel story — which conveys nearly zero urgency in our context of advanced decadence — into scientific perception, which is now the only register capable of producing felt urgency in educated people. The software metaphor "makes it click," that interpersonal dialogue has not simply become harder than it used to be, but that it is strictly impossible to communicate — in the sense of symbolic co-production of shared reality — with most interlocutors across most channels of most currently existing platforms: there is simply no path between my current block on my chain and their current block on their chain.

If I were to type some code into a text file, and then I tried to submit it to the repository of the Apple iOS Core Team, I would be quickly disabused of my naïve stupidity by the myriad technical impossibilities of such a venture. The sentence hardly parses. I would not try this for very long, because my nonsensical mental model would produce immediate and undeniable negative feedback: absolutely nothing would happen, and I'd quit trying. When humans today continue to use words from shared languages, in semi-public spaces accessible to many others, they are very often attempting a transmission that is technically akin to me submitting my code to the Apple iOS Core Team. A horrifying portion of public communication today is best understood as a fantasy and simulation of communicative activity, where the infrastructural engineering technically prohibits it, unbeknownst to the putative communicators. The main difference is that in public communication there is not simply an absence of negative feedback informing the speaker that the transmissions are failing; much worse, there are entire cultural industries based on the business model of giving such hopeless transmission instincts positive feedback, making them feel like they are "getting through" somewhere; by doing this, those who feel like they are "getting through" have every reason to feel sincere affinity and loyalty to whatever enterprise is affirming them, and the enterprise then skims profit off of these freshly stimulated individuals: through brand loyalty, clicks, eyeballs for advertisers, and the best PR available anywhere, which is genuine, organic proselytizing by fans/customers. These current years of our digital infancy will no doubt be the source of endless humor in future eras.

[Tangent/aside/digression: People think the space for new and "trendy" communicative practices such as podcasting is over-saturated, but from the perspective I am offering here, we should be inclined to the opposite view. Practices such as podcasting represent only the first efforts to constitute oases of autonomous social-cognitive stability across an increasingly vast and hopelessly sparse social graph. If you think podcasts are a popular trend, you are not accounting for the numerator, which would show them to be hardly keeping up with the social graph. We might wonder whether, soon, having a podcast will be a basic requirement for anything approaching what the humans of today still remember as socio-cognitive health. People may choose centrifugal disorientation, but if they want to exist in anything but the most abject and maligned socio-cognitive ghettos of confusion and depression (e.g. Facebook already, if you're feed looks anything like mine), elaborately purposeful and creatively engineered autonomous communication interfaces may very well become necessities.]

I believe we have crossed a threshold where spiraling social complexity has so dwarfed our meagre stores of pre-modern social capital to render most potential soft-fork merges across the social graph prohibitively expensive. Advances in information technology have drastically lowered the transaction costs of soft-fork collaboration patterns, but they've also lowered the costs of instituting and maintaing hard forks. The ambiguous expected effect of information technology may be clarified — I hypothesize — by considering how it is likely conditional on individual cognitive capacities. Specifically, the key variable would be an individual's general intelligence, their basic capacity to solve problems through abstraction.

This model predicts that advances in information technology will lead high-IQ individuals to seek maximal innovative autonomy (hacking on their own hard forks, relative to the predigital social source repository), while lower-IQ individuals will seek to outsource the job of reality-maintainence, effectively seeking to minimize their own innovative autonomy. It's important to recognize that, technically, the emotional correlate of experiencing insufficiency relative to environmental complexity is Fear, which involves the famous physiological state of "fight or flight," a reaction that evolved for the purpose of helping us escape specific threats in short, acute situations. The problem with modern life, as noted by experts on stress physiology such as Robert Sapolsky, is that it's now very possible to have the "fight or flight" response triggered by diffuse threats that never end.

If intelligence is what makes complexity manageable, and overwhelming complexity generates "fight or flight" physiology, and we are living through a Semantic Apocalypse, then we should expect lower-IQ people to be hit hardest first: we should expect them to be frantically seeking sources of complexity-containment in a fashion similar to if they were being chased by a saber-tooth tiger. I think that's what we are observing right now, in various guises, from the explosion of demand for conspiracy theory to social justice hysteria. These are people whose lives really are at stake, and they're motivated accordingly, to increasingly desperate measures.

These two opposite inclinations toward reality-code maintenance, conditional on cognitive capacity, then become perversely complementary. As high-IQ individuals are increasingly empowered to hard fork reality, they will do so differently, according to arbitrary idiosyncratic preferences (desire or taste, essentially aesthetic criteria). Those who only wish to outsource their code maintenance to survive excessive complexity are spoiled for choice, as they can now choose to join the hard fork of whichever higher-IQ reality developer is closest to their affective or socio-aesthetic ideal point.

In the next part, I will try to trace this history back through the past few decades.

#theory #apocalypse #intelligence #accelerationism #iq #cognition #fear #emotions #complexity #communication #capitalism #equality #inequality #catholic #catholicism #artificial intelligence #AI #God #Devil

[cvrnewsdirectindia]

Alcatel Go Flip 3 – Review 2019

The Alcatel Go Flip 3 ($99 at Metro)—known by various names on various carriers, including the Alcatel Smartflip at AT&T and Cricket—is the first affordable flip phone to have just enough smartphone features that you won’t feel completely exiled from society. Although it looks a lot like previous Go Flip phones, it performs radically better. For starters, it now has decent battery life, solid call quality, and the kind of contact sync and messaging features it needs in 2019. That’s going to satisfy a lot of folks who don’t want a flat-screened slab, but also still want to be able to get their WhatsApp messages. And that makes the Go Flip 3 an Editor’s Choice voice phone on AT&T, Cricket, Metro, T-Mobile, and wherever else it pops up.

Design, Calling, and Battery

The Go Flip 3 is an unassuming, black plastic flip phone with a mass market price, not an artisanal small-batch luxury experience like the Light Phone II or Punkt MP02. It has a small 1.44-inch, 128-by-128 color screen on the outside, and a larger, somewhat grainy 2.8-inch, 320-by-240 LCD on the inside. The rubbery keys physically depress pleasantly. There’s a standard 3.5mm headphone jack and a micro USB charging port, as well as space for a microSD card (up to 32GB) under the removable battery. It comes with an integrated micro USB charger.

The phone measures 4.13 by 2.09 by 0.75 inches (HWD) and weighs 4.16 ounces. It isn’t super slim, but it’ll still fit in a pocket. It isn’t waterproof or rugged, but it’s also simple enough that it can probably take some drops without too much damage. There’s no exposed glass here, and the back can fly off without any real harm done. That said, the ultra-rugged Sonim XP3 will clearly take much more of a beating.

The Go Flip 3 connects to LTE and 2.4GHz Wi-Fi, with LTE bands 2/4/5/12/25/26/41/66/71. It also falls back to 3G and 2G. That will give it extended range on T-Mobile’s network, as well as Sprint’s when it inevitably comes out on that carrier. It doesn’t have AT&T’s new band 14, which also helps extend range and is needed for public safety use, but it has the basic nationwide band 5, so it will do just fine. Government employees should turn to the Sonim XP3 instead, which does have band 14.

Call quality is good. The phone supports HD calling (but not EVS, the second level of HD) and the earpiece is loud and clear. In a loud environment, the phone worked hard to cancel out noise, resulting in a few audio artifacts but generally comprehensible speech. The speakerphone is loud, and shows a little bit of clipping and distortion at top volume. Wi-Fi calling is the one real quality fail, but it often is; on a weak or cluttered 2.4GHz Wi-Fi signal, you’re going to get dropouts.

The phone works as a hotspot on T-Mobile but, oddly, not on AT&T. Don’t expect major hotspot speeds: The Qualcomm Snapdragon 210 processor here only supports relatively slow Category 4 LTE, so you’ll get 10-20Mbps LTE speeds rather than much higher.

It’s funny: The older Go Flip 2 also has a Snapdragon 210, but it doesn’t perform nearly as well as the new model does. Alcatel said that KaiOS 2.5 is much more efficient than the KaiOS 1.0 on the older phone, and it really shows.

The Bluetooth 4.2 connection paired easily with a Plantronics Bluetooth headset but there was some loss of voice quality over the connection. I don’t see that on $700 smartphones with Bluetooth 5.0 and AptX, but this phone is absolutely on par with other cheaper or older phones. You can also use a headset through the standard 3.5mm jack.

Battery life is fine. It isn’t eternal, but I got 7 hours, 48 minutes of talk time and at least three days of standby on the 1,350mAh battery. That’s much better than previous Alcatel flips and shoule be enough for most people.

Messaging and Apps

KaiOS, which is based on the same core that previously gave us Firefox OS, sits on the fence between a feature phone and a smartphone operating system. It’s really rendering a lot of HTML, and the apps are primarily HTML5 containers that run offline. The OS has become popular in India thanks to the low-cost Jio Phone, a device that has brought tens of millions of people online for the first time.

On the phone’s home screen, there are icons for Google Assistant, Google Maps, YouTube, and the KaiOS Store. The store has an odd little selection of apps, including a few health apps and a few games, but most notably it has WhatsApp, Facebook, and Twitter.

The phone makes major strides in messaging for a flip, and a lot of it comes down to Google Assistant. Anywhere there’s a text entry field, you can press a button and dictate text instead. This is a big deal. It really gets around the difficulty of entering text using a number pad. And thanks to KaiOS, you can enter your messages not only in SMS, but in Facebook, Twitter, and WhatsApp. The texting app and WhatsApp receive emoji and pictures and can send photos, but not emoji. Not all messages are equal, though. When you flip the phone open, a popdown will show new texts. But to see new messages in another app, you need to open the app.

You can also create groups, block numbers, and use your own music for ringtones, but I didn’t see an option to assign different ringtones to different callers.

Google Assistant is good for more than just messages; hold down the button and ask it a question, and it will respond with Google answers. I wish it could be triggered from the action button on a Bluetooth headset, though—you actually have to hold down the center button on the phone’s D-pad to make it work.

The email program handles Gmail and other POP/IMAP systems well, including rendering HTML emails. Things also sync on this phone in a way they don’t on other flips. You can sync your contact list with Google or Outlook, and you can sync your calendar with Google. It’s delightful to not have to put in your contacts by hand. Because this isn’t a full Android device, it can’t use Google’s Find My Phone feature, so KaiOS set up its own—if you set up a KaiOS account, it will help you find a lost phone.

The onboard music player, oddly, wouldn’t play music I had stored on an SD card—I had to transfer it into internal memory. Once I did that, though, it had excellent support for metadata and album art. The video player can play videos from the SD card, but they look small and grainy on the low-res screen. There’s also an FM radio, which sounds very clear.

I downloaded a few games. They’re basic, but they’re games, which is more than most flip phones have nowadays. I’m particularly amused by a Fruit Ninja ripoff that assigns numbers to each fruit and lets you slice them with the number pad. Other built in apps include a calculator, an alarm clock, and a voice recorder.

There’s one way in which KaiOS falls short: It has no parental controls. If you’re looking for a flip phone where you can forbid web access for kids, you can’t do that on The Go Flip 3. You also can’t use T-Mobile FamilyMode to lock down the phone, as it requires an Android or iOS app. That’s frustrating.

The less said about the phone’s single 2-megapixel camera, the better. Photos in even decent indoor light tend to be blurry and indistinct. Outdoors, everything looks slightly out of focus. Videos are washed-out 352-by-288 frames. There is also no front facing camera, so don’t expect to do video calling here.

A Flip Phone for 2019

There are millions of Americans who want a flip phone for simple calling, but who need access to the best possible coverage and may also want to use common over-the-top texting apps like Facebook and WhatsApp. The Go Flip 3 fits the bill: smart enough to make you part of modern society, but simple enough that you don’t have to be part of modern society if you don’t want to be.

The Alcatel Go Flip 3 replaces the Sonim XP3 as our Editors’ Choice. It’s a tough call, because while they’re both flips, and both good, they’re different kinds of phones. The Sonim is rugged, super-loud, and super-reliable. If all you need is voice calling, period, the Sonim is the superior choice. But so many people rely on things like texting, WhatsApp, and calendar sync in their lives that I think Alcatel’s approach has broader appeal. That makes it our Editors’ Choice on AT&T and anywhere else you find it.

Alcatel Go Flip 3

Bottom Line: The Alcatel Go Flip 3 is the feature phone we’ve been waiting for, with just enough smart features to make it convenient to use.

Top Comparisons

from CVR News Direct https://cvrnewsdirect.com/alcatel-go-flip-3-review-2019/

[talkdisney]

When a new attraction opens at a Disney theme park, actually getting on the ride can take a lot of patience. James Cameron’s Pandora: The World of Avatar debuted last May at Disney’s Animal Kingdom and lines for Avatar: Flight of Passage can still exceed two hours without a FastPass+, which are always in short supply. The new Toy Story Land, which opened June 30, features a new Slinky Dog Dash roller coaster that has Pixar fans waiting five hours in line.

While Walt Disney Imagineering can’t do anything about the Florida heat, humidity or rain, it can make wait times more manageable. And the key to keeping Disney fans occupied while visiting U.S. theme parks is video games. While taking in Andy’s backyard from a toy-sized perspective in Toy Story Land, guests can play Andy’s Board Game Blast, a digital take on a classic family board game that’s been designed to pass the phone around for multiplayer interactivity.

The “Play Disney Parks” app, which launched June 30 and is only playable in Disney theme parks, is the first product from the Imagineers and The Walt Disney Company’s digital guest experience division that aims to capitalize on the game development bandwidth inside the company (Disney Interactive was also involved) and the ubiquity of gaming in today’s world.

Imagineering has always incorporated experts from across the entertainment and technology landscapes. With the rise of video gaming over the past three decades, the group has seen an influx of game developers join its ranks. Over the past decade, the concept of “gamer” has grown to incorporate the majority of people across the globe – and the guests that visit Disney’s theme parks around the world.

Anyone who’s been to Walt Disney World Resort’s The Magic Kingdom or Epcot over the past ten years or so has seen the direction Imagineering has been steering the guest experience, blending video game role-playing experiences with real world attractions. Disney’s Kim Possible: World Showcase Adventure debuted in 2006 and offered guests flip phones to go on a secret mission that unlocked interactivity with animatronic characters hidden in plain sight. In 2012, that attraction gave way to Phineas & Ferb’s Agent P World Showcase Adventure, which incorporated an AT&T sponsored FONE (Field Operative Notification Equipment) for interactivity. The new Play Disney Parks has integrated Agent P into the app, which unlocks at Epcot.

Jonathan Ackley, executive creative director at Walt Disney Imagineering, is one of the game developer minds behind these experiences. Ackley is best known in the video game world for his work at LucasArts, developing classic PC games in the 1990s “Day of the Tentacle,” “Sam & Max Hit the Road,” “Full Throttle,” “The Dig” and “The Curse of Monkey Island.” Since 2001, Ackley has been gamifying experiences at Disney theme parks, including the wildly popular Sorcerer’s of the Magic Kingdon collectible card game that unlocks animated storytelling and motion-sensored gameplay at hidden kiosks throughout the Orlando theme park, and Disney Cruise Lines’ Midship Detective Agency, which uses motion-sensored playing cards to reveal interactivity across “enchanted pictures” throughout the cruise ships feature Mickey Mouse and the gang, as well as The Muppets.

Josh Gorin, executive R&D Imagineer at The Walt Disney Company, told Variety that the free iOS and Android app offers the chance to extend that interactive storytelling layer into the guest pocket, leveraging the incredible power of this basic super computer that they’re carrying around and turn it from a distraction from the experience into something that enhances it.

“When you think about the history of Imagineering storytelling over 60 years, it’s about creating truly immersive places where guests can step into fantastic worlds, meet characters they love and connect with the people they’re with, and Play Disney Parks is a natural extension of that original vision by leveraging the latest and greatest in technology to bring those worlds to life and give our guests an active role in the story,” Gorin added.

Dan Soto vice president of the digital experience at The Walt Disney Company told Variety that over 90% of guests visiting Disney theme parks bring a smartphone along for vacation. It’s this “tipping point” that has paved the way to introduce video games designed to be played while waiting in line at specific attractions throughout the four Disney World parks and two Disneyland parks in the U.S.

“Since 2013 we’ve been on a fairly aggressive track on the digital transformation of our theme parks and a lot of that is a direct response to the consumer,” Soto said. “Our world is changing. We walk around with our smartphones all day long and have this thirst and demand for real-time information, for customizing and personalizing experiences, for leveraging technology to create a simple and seamless sort of consumer experience. So whether it be Magic Bands, which we introduced back in 2014, or the My Disney Experience app, all of those things have been all about how do we make your guest experience much more simple and seamless.”

Even inside the queues for rides, Disney has been integrating video games for fans to interact with to help distract from the lines. In 2014, Seven Dwarfs Mine Train opened at New Fantasyland at the Magic Kingdom with touch screen displays offering multiplayer “Bejeweled”-style gaming.

“We’ve been exploring how to leverage interactive technology to even make your wait time experience feel better and more immersive,” Soto added. “Mine Train is a good example of where we have more physical kiosk-based interactive experiences. Haunted Mansion has some fantastic props within the queue that allow you to interact. But the new app allows us to unlock new models of gameplay through the ability to scale and introduce new games to the guest experience.”

And gamifying the theme park experience is something that’s easy to connect with the wide array of visitors that vacation at Disney properties. According to Statista, in 2017 The Magic Kingdom attracted 20.45 million guests, Disney Animal Kingdom drew 12.5 million visitors, Epcot saw 12.2 million attendees and Disney Hollywood Studios saw 10.7 million vacationers. Disneyland’s California parks lured another 18.3 million visitors last year.

“At Imagineering we’re all about telling stories by bringing these spectacular worlds to life, and then our guests get to step inside them and take on a role,” Gorin explained. “So it’s really interesting when you combine more traditional production and scenic disciplines with game design because now you’re giving that guest an active role in the story. They’re not a passive participant. They’re able to take on a character or a persona or even just be themselves, but make meaningful choices that matter and interact with the world in a way they couldn’t before.”

Disney has been working with Disney Interactive as well as game developers across mobile, alternate reality, live action role-playing space and alternative narrative space to develop the app. Soto said the goal was to transform the smartphone from being a distraction from the story and the people you’re with into an enhancement.

“These games were designed to get guest looking up and around and engaging with the world around you, and most importantly the people you came with,” Soto added. “It almost turns the phone into a remote control for the park. It becomes your interface, your prop, as you navigate these spaces. And in a lot of these queue games you actually have the ability to trigger and interact with real physical effects. We’ve experimented with that before outside of the app, but now we’ve brought that onto our platform where we can do that in a much more scalable way and really make the parks feel alive and dynamic and keep track of your profile and achievements in a way that makes you feel you’ve taken on a meaningful role in this story.”

Toy Story Land includes two new games that are available while waiting in line for the Slinky Dog Dash rollercoaster or Toy Story Midway Mania dark ride. Andy’s Board Game Blast offers a multiplayer board game experience, while Toy Story Midway is a collection of multiplayer mini-games that eventually interact with physical elements of the queue before guests board the ride, which itself is a 4D shooter featuring the cast from the Pixar films. (Disney Interactive actually released a console video game version from Papaya Studio called Toy Story Mania back in 2009.)

All of the games being designed for the app offer hand-the-phone-to-the-next-player multiplayer experiences on purpose, according to Gorin, even though traditional mobile games connect online.

“As we were designing these activities especially for the queues, we wanted to create something that was completely distinct from other mobile games,” Gorin said. “We wanted to avoid that nose down experience. We went for a family game night vibe, not a mobile gaming vibe. So the experiences were designed to get people looking up and interacting with the world and interacting with each other using the gyroscope and sensors that today’s smartphones have.”

Soto points to a moment in the Space Mountain game where guests are completing mini quests to level up their ships by looking around the queue for power-ups and competing against other guests. At the end of the line, guests can see their ships racing around.

Achievements both inside these games and across the theme park attractions will be built out over time, tapping into the popular video game concept of accomplishing goals and then sharing them with the world.

“We’re so excited about what digital achievements can do within the park, and it’s not even just the obvious things like I rode Aerosmith’s Rock’n’Rollercoaster or I scored a high score on this particular game,” Soto explained. “We think there are opportunities to do fascinating things in terms of combining achievements like experiencing 7 Gs in one day, which would require riding Mission: Space and Test Track in Epcot. We think there are so many opportunities to unlock the achievement platform and even introduce a whole new layer of physical experiences for guests by virtue of having that achievement. At Disney we have this amazing physical immersive brick-and-mortar experience that gives us a built-in advantage to really pay off some things in a pretty special way with this achievements platform.”

“Our guests come to the parks again and again because there are new secrets to discover and they get to experience all new things, and the power of an achievements platform like the one in Play Disney Parks is the opportunity for guests to recognize that discovery as they explore the parks and unlock new things to be recognized for that with these digital goods that they can then share online,” Gorin added.

Soto said it would be easy to quickly add the type of collectible pins that are a staple in the real world to the app as virtual achievement pins.

The app will eventually add a leaderboard for guests to see where their video game and in-park achievements rank against others, according to Gorin.

“We want to grow and expand this platform in a major way, and social gaming and interconnected gameplay is something that we’re absolutely super excited about,” Gorin said.

The Walt Disney World Resort has over twenty hotels on property and four theme parks in Orlando alone.

“We think the opportunities to expand this platform well beyond our theme parks, maybe even connecting across different theme parks around the world is a big opportunity for us in the future,” Soto said.

Disney has aggressive plans to expand its parks around the globe. In the U.S. alone there’s a new Mickey and Minnie Runaway Train ride coming to Disney Hollywood Studios in 2018, followed by Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge at Disneyland and Disney Hollywood Studios in fall 2018.

“As you start to think about new lands and actually building this interactive layer into the fabric of the land from the very start, that’s really compelling,” Gorin said. “We’re already hard at work with the Star Wars” Galaxy’s Edge team to integrate this technology and this form of gameplay into that land so that when our guests do encounter Black Spire Outpost, they will find the Play Disney Parks app a very important tool for navigating that place and interacting with its population.”

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Disney Turns to Video Games to Make Its Theme Park Lines Fun When a new attraction opens at a Disney theme park, actually getting on the ride can take a lot of patience.

#hollywood studios #Toy Story Land #WDW