TEMPLE: A TEMPLATE FOR A SOCIO-ECONOMY BUILT AROUND MINDFULNESS AS A TRANSITIONAL SYSTEM FOR END-STAGE DIGNITY AND OPTIMAL ENTROPY

Mindfulness (and other therapeutic or coping) interventions are allowed the status of mere bubbles in our stress-fraught society.  The spirit of this work is inspired by the Center for the Study of Existential Risk and their concern for any threat posed to "all humanity" no matter how small the probability. 

For 7-week seminar Crafting Mindful Experiences class taught by Fred Muench we were encouraged to prototype/ideate an app, device, experience which elicits mindfulness in everyday life.  

Scaling up several orders of magnitude from the letter of this prompt I decided to contemplate further on the post-automation world-building I began with the world of Semi and The New Church created as my final in Temporary Expert: the Anthropocene Edition with Marina Zurkow and the post-automation culture story we told as the culmination of Art Kleiner's long-standing Future of New Media course, both in Spring 2015.  These world-building projects are also related to the speculative world-building project I presented in Jeff Feddersen's Energy class (THE WAY WE LIVE NOW: An Android's Energy Future). 

At the center of this concept is a recognition that humanity cannot sustain current levels of economically-driven societal (and environmental) entropy ("growth".)  Even more integral are two related concepts (which require more state-of-research discovery/citations): 

a) that it is possible for humans to engineer an non-abusive institution for behavior modification and post modern (and post-modern) resource redistribution

b) that the focus on stress-as-positive-competition-facilitator is a construct of economic/industrially-driven science

TEMPLE attempts to encompass and expand on social support and stress-coping mechanisms of religious institutions and traditional culture but holistically adapted to future system entropy and globalization.  TEMPLE relies upon the reality that globalization and automation is total.  Labor and systems of credit, profit and consumption as we understand it are recently no longer functional in all global regions. 

Here is an image of the fractal arrangement of the experiential chambers which denizens of a post-Capitalist transitional society must go through as their daily duty (or data tithe, labor).  This is the institution of the "New Church" set within the universe of Post-Automation Culture and with the data-generation-driven new "economy" from my Testing Tomorrow's "Your Daughter's Daughter's Data: An Enfranchisement Manual."

Aggregate, anonymized data is collected (biofeedback, natural language processsing, etc) in order to allow the semi-automated system to gauge community health and developments (much like a managed wild-life population.)  The data collection is in fact a way of generating the "revenue" required for the resource distribution.  Visitors come here to receive mindfulness experiences/therapy/self-inventory and to request goods and services they feel they need.  A cleansing and enrobing intake area and other security measures ensure that all citizens (including pariahs) can take equal part in the community-synchronization ritual of TEMPLE.  

A series of interlinked experiential chambers make up a continually novel mindfulness journey through TEMPLE'S campus.  Some are communal (humming/mantra) some are individual (e.g. proprioception-oriented self-inventory, human time-scale meditation, biofeedback mindfulness meditation,  kindness and forgiveness meditation). 

A docent (AI or human) advises each individual at the culmination of the individual's journey.  Regardless of the docent's advisement - the requestor may receive the good or service they have requested.  This mechanism is a part of the central tenet of TEMPLE which assures social security.  TEMPLE is the defacto method for optimal resource redistribution.

It is assumed that some visitors will abuse the "ask and you shall receive" mechanism - but the proportions of Zipf's law allows for a much lower overall level of entropy across the entire social fabric.  Additionally, abusers of the system must continually go through the mindfulness practice of the system in order to get their goods - so some abusers of the system may eventually cease the advantage-taking. The system can be likened to "re-parenting" for human society as a whole. 

Fittingly, the visuals/model for TEMPLE were created in Google Sketchup with open source 3D models I found and modified - in the spirit of our coming future.  Read more in a rough draft write-up.

Future iterations will include an mock-up of a journey through a minimum series of experiential chambers, specific user profiles and use-cases,  researches and arguments for specific interactive and passive cognitive/psychological mechanisms, more details on the legal history, logistics, and structure of fictional economic system suggested here,  and a sample proposal for funding from entities such as Google, IARPA, Disney, CSER to research a real-world prototype - a la the recent Dutch living wage experiment.  Perhaps the latter as a PhD program application. 

DECLASSIFIED + REBRANDED: FUTURE INTERFACES FINAL

PRESENTATION:

This project was developed during Future Interfaces— a 7 week class with Ken Perlin and David Lobser.  I presented this final as an R&D sales person pitching to a room of developers at a tech industry conference (a performance of a near-science-fictional scene.)

Medium: 3D/2D Google Sketch-up Model

ALL USE CASES PRESENTED SHARE:

collapsing spacetime (and making it sensible in space)

different data rates/descretizations for each use case - reveals potential usefulness

user can 'tune' to narrow bandwidth of assigned microwave signals to find specific data object groupings and time discretizations for historical events

different dimensional thinking - allows for immediate physical sensing in physical space of specific types of information - users can utilize geography-based historical event sensing (4D shapes, probability densities, etc) to find new ways to think about predictive or forensic models

NOTE: 

use cases utilize different time scales/even frequencies, actuators/perceptual modes, sensors.  This concept is based around a new paradigm to embodying the collapsing of spacetime to allow the user to be able to examine/understand ephemeral or transient events in real space.  Events are spatially realized/sensed out-of-time. 

ENFRANCHISEMENT MANUAL; OR, YOUR DAUGHTER'S DAUGHTER'S DATA

CONTEXT (TESTING TOMORROWS: SPECULATIVE DESIGN)

A weekend course taught by Chris Woebken and Richard The.  The prompt was to think of three common New York situations and then speculate on each's intersection with a recent tech/science development or a prediction made by reputable futurists.

I was most interested in the idea of New York City as a closed loop of consumer data collection, advertisement/user testing, consumption and have recently been startled by someone's presentation on the development of LinkNYC.  The tech discovery I mashed with was DNA as a new option for potentially infinite data storage. The inspiration for this came from the notion (via my Stratosphere of Surveillance class) that the data we generate over the course of hours daily actually amounts to work and the processing, and, especially, storage of this data costs virtually nothing for the corporations who broker it at our expense.  We reproduce our digital selves in ever-greater detail for corporations to trade and use and we do it for free without any idea of how it may be used 10 years or 1000 years from the moment we hover over the 'like' button on a political posting on our social network 'of choice.'

THE PROJECT

Then, I rapidly penned a scenario in which: 

• data storage is infinite and all the earth's inhabitants generate trackable data
• an international agency (the UN??) becomes a regulatory body imposing data/server farm usage rates on corporations against their profit margins and the volume of data accessed quarterly, or whatever.
• post-automation corporations discover with the aid of a Watson-like AI (analyzing the law, consumer & GDP trends, and dividends) that the optimal profit-yielding trajectory to take would be to create a public shareholding company in which every world citizen is a recipient of a universal wage as a form of social security.  
• At first shareholders and boards dislike this notion but then a Supreme Court case (or whatever) finds that because it is convinced by the AI's confidence assessment for the ultimate profitability AND because it is illegal for corporations to act against the best interest of the shareholders they must comply.  Thus a robust public-private partnership is formed. 
• a new type of economy emerges

RAPID EVOLUTION OF THE PROJECT

We next had to develop the concept further and present to two guest critics for the next day (second and final class session.) 

So I had one of my favorite things - another future scenario which rejects the notion of labor-as-right-to-exist.  But now what? Richard The had a great suggestion: make an object, an artifact which told a little piece of the story.  He suggested a receipt as an example of something from this fictional future world which could bring it into relief and spark discussion.  

In our first class session we discussed an example of extreme speculative design: a remarkable answer to a call for design ideas to communicate with earthlings 10,000 years from now to stay away from the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste site in a way that would be anthropologically certain to communicate a message no matter what the future paradigms become: artificially creating a glow-in-the dark feral cat population and an intentionally seeded myth to go with it about the source of their unnaturalness.  

So taking inspiration from these, and my penchant for what I call "boomerang" technologies, I got the idea to design a tattoo - something that anyone from virtually any population - no matter how tech impoverished/bereft/resistant they were - could use as a social security number and universal personal identifier to ensure their right to their own data revenue.  I had the idea that the human writable, machine readable tattoos could take after the familial histories procedurally encoded in the tapestries, pottery, totem poles, insignia of many traditional cultures all over the planet.  It made sense, since I wanted this data ID to be something that any mother could imprint on her child almost immediately after birth - in the same way vaccines, umbilical cords, circumcisions are handled. 

I went over the material I had in class with Richard and then put together the following: 

Note the Human-readable QR code is something developed at MIT - I used it as an example design for this concept because it reminded me of Mongolian Tamga and echoes in some way my idea of human-writeable, machine readable ID encoding. 

My brainstorming/rapid iteration materials:

QUESTIONS

There were some intriguing and validating questions and comments which arose such as: 

"So this is a utopia." Yep. 

"So this is a dystopia." Yep. 

"So...do people still do work in this world?" - Not necessarily. 

"What's the...how are social norms and law reinforced?" That's the beauty part, see? 

"How does business still work? What are the corporations making things for anymore?"  Makes you think doesn't it? Like, what's the point after all the money gets sucked up to the top via Trickle Down Economics? (My answer is really that the AIs which run this post-automation world have increasingly more data.  There is still the human artifact embedded in the corporate structure which is that the corporations still need consumers with money to buy things to generate profit.)  Another interesting thought is that this user-data based business model is one developed by the corporations - they are making money off of our time and as such it reminds me of the cryptocurrency Bitcoin and the way value is assured (and generated?) by computer-based human labor.  

"There is maybe still work after all the window-washing is done with. Like creative things, and design."  Yes, you can see my Future of New Media presentation on Post-Automation Culture from April or 2015 for more on that! :D We called them 'Innovation Programmers.' 

There were other intriguing comments such as one which pointed to the idea that though I refer to my scenario as 'total registration' in this future world - there may arise factions who do not wish to be registered despite the fact that they may not (? or may?) have rights to the same redistributed resources as all the registered people.  Here's hoping everyone doesn't have to get a tattoo on their chest as a baby! (But I would say to that negative thought: maybe we won't have to wear make up and heels and ties and eat tons of glucose all the time in front of the boobtoob either.  Or pump gas or do computers.  I might trade for a chest tattoo if I could climb trees and let sand run through my hands all day thinking of natural calculus that I can whisper to an AI that looks like a whispy cloud on my shoulder.)

The moral of the story is, I'm not the first person to think of these things - but its certainly all I've been caring about lately.  Notably my scenario/speculative system got firmly labeled "fiction" by one of the critics, and Chris Woebkins put it here on the spectrum thingy where we all put our proposals on the first day of class: 

Just this side of impossible.  Anything that we say is a 'little bit' impossible is impossible. 

That being said, this was a speculative design class.  And it occurs to me that the fact that topium and feasibility were the coordinates really says something about design, and speculation, as word-concepts.  

Future Interfaces HMWK #1: 12 ideas > 3 culled

1) ANALOGIZING IRL WITH IPS

I. An AR interface that allows every given, discrete system a user interacts with to be recognized via computer vision and other sensing systems and cross-referenced in a global library of systems.  The system is then visually outlined and tracked (over the course of the day, or month, or lifetime) as if it were an Information Processing System with INPUT, FUNCTIONS, and OUTPUT.   This could be seen as a societal alternative to the economic (credit, debt, work, worth) tracking systems we have had in place and continue to build. 

2) KINESIS

An AR or VR interface which allows energy expenditure of the user/experiencer/protagonist to be tracked via  (piezoelectric?) contact with the ground.

Inspiration comes from the idea that certain animals like cats are very sensitive to ground vibrations - and the idea that this is a way a user can understand the surrounding world. 

If a user takes many heavy footsteps - in sand, grass, mud, or on a marble flooring surface - the kinetic energy output will vary and should reflect some level of organismal entropy or energy waste.  Opportunity to examine other cues of contact with the ground - such as resting period, or body surface contact to ground surface area. This kind of 'kinetic metadata' may tell an illuminating story of the user/organism's energy expenditure and struggle with gravity and the stochastic boundaries of its surrounding world.  Also incorporates predictive trajectory but value added is the energy expenditure/footstep (contact instances/frequency with ground replace or help calculate time discretization) I see this as part of a larger 360 VR interface. 

3) SPACESHIP

An orb with a windshield-like view which accommodates the human field of vision (200 degrees field-of-view).  The rear 160 degrees of view is a blank 'tallying' interface which allows elements (story characters,  past spacial trajectory, artifacts, documents, to be held for reference.)  The ground area can also carry the kind of trajectory and kinetic expenditure information as touched on in "KINESIS."

This is a tool/interface/HUI for narrative-telling, narrative-absorbing, and narrative interweaving - for entertainment purposes or for work stylings and organization.  

4) TIME TRAVEL/TELEPORTATION

A way to tell stories such as a traditional narrative feature film with temporally concurrent spatial grid of 360 VR cameras.  The user/experiencer can wander through the finite block of time and space at will - following visual and auditory cues to various nodes in the story's space.  The user becomes the editor and there are a many unique 'cuts' as there are frames per second x the number of camera nodes.  Filmic transitions are augmented according to same principles as traditional film editing but they are quite different as space and time are continuous and non-selective.  

An interesting note about this idea is that it is effectively observation-only time travel.  A future effect is that if the writing, or reality of a mystery is deep, tight, and diverse enough one could spend a very long time inside the 'continuum.' Perhaps humanity will find a good one and the human perceptual universe will condense into this small spacetime box.  The ultimate in diversion. 

5) MET (MULTI-AGENT ENERGY TELECOMMUNICATION)

AR which interfaces with an all-inclusive energy system.  Users plugged into this augmented reality interface are revealed trajectories of 'lowest entropy' on a continuum of time discretization scales.   Perhaps if all users where guided, by visual representations of unified energy flows (kinetic, radiative, social, societal, biospheric, gravitational, solar, nutritive) then this would become every human/user's life work - remaining collectively at the lowest state of entropy. Predictive entropy trajecotories for thoughts and social interactions would be included in concrete energy expenditure terms - NLT and social networking prediction would have to be sufficiently advanced to see into various futures.  As a result, perhaps metabolic processes, as well as interpersonal, societal, and environmental entropy or stress would remain so low that the human life span would increase while harmful forms of energy waste would decrease. An alternative, physical way of achieving "immortality" while exponentially increasing our collective, and individual knowledge base.  This is a hyperbolic post-automation system which supersedes all forms of advertising, PR, data collection/surveillance, economy and governance and seeks to bring the human species back to a pre-language, pre-agricultural communion with nature.  

This is a fictional/exemplary/hypothetical AI-mediated multi-agent VR system I am incorporating in a screenplay about a human-trajectory peer android, as well as in a documentary I am working on with Sabrina Osmany about AI-mediated immersive interfaces.  

The inspiration for this stems from Spring 2015 semester in which I studied Energy (a survey of terms, trends, history, and physics) and the Green Revolution in a class on the Anthropocene.  What is needed is a unified term for thermodynamics, and energy in closed and open systems.  For example, Joules are an appropriate option for a unit which represents a current energy state of any given system or object, however, our linguistic obsession with 'time' obfuscates this and so understanding devolves and compartmentalizes into specialized terms like t.o.e. (tonnes of oil equivalent) which are impossible for any given human organism to understand and make decisions around, collectively or individually. 

This is of course ambitious but indeed cuts right to the heart of what humanity hungers for. 

6) SYNESTHESIA MACHINE

A way to map different senses and allow the human brain to perceptually explore different kinds of input in tandem or in place of another.  A way to understand energy waves and explore the edges of the nature of reality versus the nature of perception.  See sound, hear color, feel color, see and hear texture, texture informs taste, taste informs texture.  Requires a neurological "jacking" in to a sensory signal mapping processor or information processing system. 

7)TIME COLLAPSER

inspired by Rust Cohle's quote about time being "a flat circle" - allows user to see spaces which persistently remain unchanged over 'time.'  Concretely reveals patterns in rate of change.  Like a spatial time lapse. A way to identify spatial connection to things that persist through time.  A kind of time machine hack and an archaeological/forensic tool. 

8) PHYSICS ENGINE IN YOUR HEAD

inspired by the writings of Ernie Davis - he refers to the physics engine in our heads.  An accelerated way to learn about real world physics which would take a lot of time normally to learn through experience.  Augmented reality which temporarily breaks away from the current trajectory into an alternative path (i.e. see what that rock thrown at a window would actually do without having to throw the rock)

9) NETWORKED HUMAN INTELLIGENCE 

A way (using NLT and brain interface) to distribute information processing using human "neural networks" together with an AI mediated distro system.  Perhaps a way to prevent AI from learning too much content or too many weighted connections - an information and learning firewall.  The AI network is geared towards learning how to slowly shift the networking distribution processes to an exclusively human brain comprised deep neural network.  A form of telepathy.  Making AI do interim work to help humans collectively reach an event horizon/singularity. 

10) SEEING EMOTIONS

An AR interface which selectively allows only human emotion to be perceived, for example.  It prevents us from seeing physical features and only allows us to see Infrared maps of human emotion.  

11) BOOMERANG TECHNOLOGY

Using slips/gaps/edges between energy flows. The idea that language separated humans from a pre-language level of fitness/evolutionary success and thus technology became an addictive way to interface with the environment and other individuals in our species and other species. How to move away from technology as a material and separating element. Unification and lowest energy usage. Reference to boomerangs is the elegance but far reach of this technology.  Just a stick shaped the right way.  Intuitive.  Divining rod. What are other examples of "simple" technologies which are yielded from a very high level of understanding.  Echolocation. Polynesian current charts. Quantum vibration-finding. 

12) DESTROYING LANGUAGE

preventing the user from hearing/processing language - forces users to communicate differently in a world/interpersonal interface. 

13) EVERYTHING IS KELVINS

An ontological object oriented programming language for physics simulation/computer graphics based on Kelvins - absolute temperature.  Liquid, gas, solids, things more readily recognized as pure or higher states of energy such as different wavelengths of light or sound. 

RELEVANT: 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_and_life

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectral_density#Power_spectral_density

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelvin

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_Life%3F