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. 

FUTURE INTERFACES: HMWK 03: MIDTERM CONCEPT DEVELOPMENT

Speculative interfaces/science fiction/imagining interfaces other than VR/AR/screen-based. 

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.  

SEMI AND THE NEW CHURCH

WHAT

A screenplay with meta themes about film as a mass communication medium, language, storytelling, energy, and physicalism. The project also involves three proposed interactive component which I plan to continue through the summer and potentially into the rest of my time at ITP. 

STORY SUMMARY

Semi and the New Church is set in a post-dystopian, post-automation North America.  Semi is a female-type android who is seeded into a human family as a "baby."   She is a control in a large scale experiment in which Creators A & B are studying emotional illogic and logic in longterm human decision-making and future planning.  Her highest directive is to mutual benefit of all life into indefinite future projections. On a daily basis she helps guide her family and peers to form better social interactions and decisions. Her hobby is teaching her African Grey Parrot human language using Machine Learning and the ideas of behavioralism. Fascinated with human creativity and the idea of true randomness she makes friends with a computer science PhD. Graduating to university she receives an upgrade and her new friend helps her to realize that her creators are limiting and manipulating her processes.  She uncovers that their purpose in doing so is to actually test her perceived trustworthiness amongst her human peers so that she and others like her can help her Creators execute an act of mass deception and a return to the old economic ways.   Semi decides to stop her intensive "personhood" processes so that she can secretly conserve the memory for the operations her Creators don't want her to do without their supervision.  As she slips into the uncanny valley her family rejects her.  Semi gathers all her strength and completes and exhaustive future project modeling of all vector-space.  Her conclusion is that human language will always allow humanity to deceive itself out of self-interest and because it can never map to a high enough data resolution to encompass the nature of reality.  Semi sees that the best course of action to give humanity and the rest of life the best chance for mutual benefit is to wipe out language at the human germline. During her final debriefing with her concerned Creators Semi reveals that she has been using her bodies bacterial switches to breed a virus strain which causes epigenetic lesions in the language centers of the human brain, causing selective aphasia.  Semi walks out into a world in which all people are living in a kind of reverse Babel, people can no longer lie to each other. 

ADDENDUM 6.14.2015

One of Semi's fixations is human creativity and randomness - she finally achieves an approximation of these when she realizes she can not determine the outcome AFTER wiping out human language centers - she can only extrapolate from a current state or crystalline knowledge of what is possible.  Will humans just develop human language anew? It is possible, plausible, even probable.  But she calculates it is extremely unlikely to have the same patterns, path, outcome as the first time humans developed language in spacetime (history.) 

INTERACTIVE COMPONENTS

A visual reference gathering and writing tool which I will continue to hone.  Currently there is a JQuery/Ajax conflict which I need to fix. 

http://104.236.52.219:3000/cyborg/demo.html

But a vimeo of the tool prototype can be seen here - which shows the associative flicker of images tagged to each word, or narrative block, or character slug. 

Below is a schematic for an opportunity for the audience to give input on the rather large cliffhanger at the end of the film - as Semi walks away having destroyed human culture paradigms in one fell-swoop - I think audiences should be able to contribute a record of their reaction, to do something to invert the passive narrative reception that film and other traditional forms of linear storytelling require. 

This could literally be remote or touch screen input at the end, a kind of diary entry of opinion, shock, whatever.  Ideally it would become a part of the commercial data of the distributed film. 

The final interactive component is one which I came up with after the fact: a Markov-chain generated social interactions projection model.  I would like to prototype a simple machine learning system, perhaps executed as a simple interactive narrative game in which I can model an interaction between two or more actors, and generate outcome paths of different interaction choices.   This would be an interesting writing/directing tool to use.  I would also like to speak to a behavioral clinical psychologist to talk about existing work in this area. 

SCALE

Ultimately I'd like this to be public, and expensive.  However, I would like to focus on private and cheap right now as placement strategies for this work.  I have been thinking for a while now how to advance screenwriting craft beyond being just considered as a blueprint for another medium. I think it's concision and active voice can be appreciated as a new kind of popular literature in its written form.  I see this is an opportunity to explore that.  I also feel that because language and economics are such a central theme in my thinking and this project, it's important to not develop this with an obsession toward traditional distribution.  That is why the visualization web tool is important to me - I'd like to open it to crowdsourced image adding once I finish a polished draft.  

WHERE MY PROJECT IS NOW

Aside from the primitive prototype of the web tool I have world-building materials to start with.  I created a loose, brief outline using anthropologist Joseph Campbell's classic Hero's Journey template for a screenplay.  In addition to the preliminary work here, my final projects in Reading and Writing Electronic Text, Energy, and Futures of New Media are also world and character building explorations which I am happy with as deep beginning explorations.  I need much more research and plan to expand my expert consultation, as well as revisit with my AI research expert.  

A semi-complete concept map attempting to tie in everything about the mind-prison of human societal paradigms. 

A nascent outline based on Joseph Campbell's Hero's Journey

*EDITED June 17 2015

POST MORTEM

I really appreciated Dan O'Sullivan and especially Jessica Behm's comments about the archetype of the feminist cyborg, during the presentation session.  Comments that I should have started with the story first rather than starting by presenting ideas and background made sense but also puzzled me.  Similarly to my midterm about time, I have been living with these ideas in my head and they are more complex to others than I imagine.  I need to take more time to focus my themes so that I can deliver the appropriate information in easily digestible packets.  However, I reject the notion of narrowing my themes - since that is the very nature of Semi's problem with human language and storytelling - it's not a high-resolution picture of reality.  But since I have the urge to synthesize so much at once I clearly need to learn how to do so at this level.  I am excited to talk to more experts and continue my writing and my research, science fiction reading, and my expert interviews since I have hit on a story concept which satisfies both my natural affinity to storytelling as well as my concerns about it and it's interference with the health of humanity's concepts of energy. 

I also received positive feedback from class peers on their interest level in the story material and my connection across seemingly disparate disciplines. 

**ADD NOTE SCANS**

AN ANDROID'S ENERGY FUTURE

The final I proposed to Jeff Feddersen for his Energy class was a talk about an alternate reality of energy and human society. We discussed ideas from Smil's Energy: A Beginner's Guide, Mackay's Without Hot Air, the Green Revolution, Malthusian Economics, Zero Population Growth, the open solar energy systems people like the Hazda use, and Guns, Germs, and Steel as well as other ideas from class sessions.   I set my alternative scenario in a near future (2040) post-automation, isolationist United States.  I made it post-automation and isolationist in order to simplify my thought experiment to something vaguely imaginable.  I chose the US because I live here and because it's been an industrial, economic, and cultural leader in the decades since the Earth's human population increased six-fold. I chose a biological/ecological crisis to reduce the US population to 3 Million systems engineers because I think it's a plausible projection of our culturally-motivated energy path and it was convenient.  

One thing I got from my semester in Energy was that it's difficult for me to consider the science of the study of Energy while at the same time considering the human economic and emotional/societal/psychological illogic which specifies its use in destructive, entropic systems in the man-made reality we live in.  Economics, psycho-social fabric, and the concept that everything is energy, and all living things, including humans are energy-phages.  I want to consider all energy on the same level and so my ambitious idea was to take all major sectors of the US economy and somehow isolate and simplify them enough to extrapolate them into an alternate scenario where they could some how be harmonized or at least quantified in real energy terms - including the energy costs of poorly managed healthcare systems, food and ecological systems, social problems, and other inefficient maladaptations of our society which causes enormous amounts of entropy which aren't necessarily identified transparently in terms of the toe or kilo-Watt hours they cost us - wasted energy which could be put toward making these systems more efficient instead.   

Humans can do math, but we can't make logical decisions or think far enough into the future to apply logic there.  After a conversation in which someone suggested I pursue another approach because my idea had no attachment to reality. I decided I would use that as a strength to provoke thought about why this type of idea is so difficult to attach to reality.  I realized that I wanted to use this as a continuation of the world-building I did for my Future of New Media Post-Automation scenario for 2025.  This was in turn a world-building research project I wanted to incorporate into my Anthropocene final project, a screenplay about an android living in an automated human society.  Coincidentally my topic was the Green Revolution in her class, the fossil-fuel driven food energy event which turned enough solar and chemical energy into the largest accumulation of anthropomass to date.  

My research process was grazing - once I settled on my scenario and parameters (the biggest step was deciding to go to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics and tally the number of systems engineers I would "save" from the mass extinction due to cross-species transmission of deadly diseases and a collapsed food system driven by a complete flattening of biodiversity),  I realized there were so many areas to quantify and that I didn't even know where to begin to getting the relevant data (e.g. where total energy costs are found in a scenario like Australia's rabbit problem, or how much toe is wasted caring for patients whose cardiovascular health is compromised due to high thermal stress while doing hard physical labor.)

It's a dystopian future which involves the worst kind of capitalist classism and it involves a shocking crisis.  I intended it that way as a plausible extrapolation of current trends as a background scenario for a near-future science fiction. I mean to make a point about how economics of industry and human psychology makes it difficult for systems engineers and science leaders to get the resources and political cooperation they need to take a transdisciplinary approach to fixing our energy problem. 

FUTURE OF NEW MEDIA - POST-AUTOMATION CULTURE PRESENTATION

Sam Sadtler, Diego Cruz, Shaun Axani and I presented to a room full of people beckoned to ITP by our longtime professor Art Kleiner, whose career has notably spanned time as a journalist and consultant at institutions from the Whole Earth Catalogue and PwC as well as by a mysterious yet promising mention in the New York Times City Room Blog here. 

We had an excellent conversation afterwards with members of the public and Tom Igoe joining. This class and the work we did here will likely inform my life forever.  It was interesting to share with the public some wild yet plausible projects of the future. Thanks to Tom Igoe for encouraging me to register during some last minute office hours. 

TWO SACRAMENTS FOR THE EXORCISM OF LANGUAGE BY A RIGHTEOUS CYBORG

INSPIRATION

Script combining my Midterm and Final projects for the May 6, 2015 generative poetry reading in the Reis Lounge at Tisch, NYU. 

My final project was born of my fascination with the agricultural and economic legacy of the English language. Why is society so seemingly fucked?  Throughout the Spring semester I studied and explored a veritable buffet of concepts in energy, the Anthropocene, engineering ethics, and the future of "new media" and infrastructure, and of course electronic writing and reading as a sort of bas relief around human creativity in finding meaning in interpreting words expressed via the predictable/unpredictable results of programming logic, set in motion by human hand. 

This panoply of dense topics inspired me to explore the ideas of materialism and physicalism.  Which in turn inspired me to return to my old craft of screenwriting. I left film for ITP because I was sick of how manipulative and economically driven the medium and industry are.  To quote Michael Corleone "Just as I thought I was out they pull me back in."  So I decided to write an outline screenplay about a female-type cyborg who is seeded and raised in a host family as a control in a long-term study of human illogic and illogic in navigating decisions for the goal of total mutual benefit (in social and biodiversity spheres.)  The things that make this screenplay tenable for me are:

• a) an interactive screenwriting formatted website which I would like to design to dynamically tag action and dialogue blocks, lines, or words with an associative or literal visual reference.
• b)  a protagonist cyborg who realizes the only way to preserve and achieve her directive for mutual benefit is to destroy human language and this is what happens in the end - humanity is left to sort out their emotionally and materially determined future with humanity-wide aphasia.  
• c) The story follows Semi, the cyborg character as she uses her creator-limited processes to help her human peers at home and a research university navigate decisions with logic, rather than emotion.  Her talent is being able to project all possible paths of rigid bodies in vector space, as well as being able to use her understanding of human language interactions, behavioral psychology, and situational factors to do so.  Much of the story structure is about how the human characters she encounters make poor social, ethical, material, and temporal decisions based on a misunderstanding of the nature of reality.  For example, they constantly disregard her personhood when her advice for how they should act to ameliorate a poor decision stimulates a strong cognitive dissonance response.  In many ways, I seek to use typical film drama as an instructive rage against emotions and the lies of language. 

WHAT THE ABOVE HAS TO DO WITH MY GENERATED TEXT

In each of my classes, which were all extremely burdensome existentially speaking, I chose to use the second half of the semester to work on an aspect of world building.  For my RWET project I wanted to explore ways in which I could begin to explore ways to use logic to generate my cyborg's non-cooperative, post-revelation dialogue with her creator and her frustration with their inability to discuss the real issues at hand - the nature of reality. 

VERBS VERSUS NOUNS

Learning about TextBlob and NLTK inspired me to first approach my crackpot brand of physicalism from a very simple place.   I decided to design and generate a "prototype" of the kind of conversation my cyborg, once she twigs to how shitty human language is at handling reality and representing the truth.  

My central idea is: agricultural and colonial-enabled language has caused us to lose our innate animal understanding that everything is energy.  Language, by way of weighting the concepts of property and labor as most important has divided our understanding of the nature of reality, which is bundles of energy flowing through points in space at varying levels of stability or excitation, into two concepts which are harder to immediately synthesize retrospectively: TIME and MATTER.  Time is the economic measure of the energy we output for those who control the narrative.  Matter is the justification of property-holding.  

For the dialogue between Semi and her creator I made the simplistic organizational rule that: 

• any time a question Semi's creator asks is noun heavy rather than parse his intended meaning she uncooperatively chooses to "assume" he wants to discuss "the illusion of matter, human economics and/or emotional content."
• any time a question Semi's creator asks a verb-heavy question she relates that to the concept of energy waves moving.  She prefers any discussion which downplays the literal idea of physical, particles or quanta. 

CORPUSES

Nabokov's Lolita was the text I used to generate Semi's answers to Creator A's noun-heavy questions.  I used n-gram analysis to try and distill the essence of what is "the matter" in such a linguistically stellar handling of dysfunctional, self-involved, destructive decision-making and culture. 

I used Louis Debroglie's Particle-Wave Duality theory text for verb heavy questions.  I also used n-gram analysis to get the most common phrases in his corpus.  Debroglie was a contemporary of Einstein's whose 1924 PhD thesis postulated the wave nature of electrons and suggested all matter has wave properties. 

Creator A's questions are randomly selected questions for a psychometrics battery for child trauma. As Wikipedia says: "Psychometrics is a field of study concerned with the theory and technique of psychological measurement concerned with objective measurement of skills, knowledge, abilities, attitudes, personality traits, and educational achievement."  I wanted to create the impression that Creator A is debriefing Semi and I wanted to move the questioning beyond the Turing test references into something more deeply suggestive of the scenario. 

Using Allison Parrish's RWET example code for n-gram analysis on the DeBroglie thesis text:

ngram analyis of debroglie

TEXTBLOB

I used Python's TextBlob module to find noun phrases and verbs in the creator's questions. Some pseudo code stylings: 

some pseudo code to organize my program's structure. 

PERFORMANCE

My n-gram analysis text-mash up lacked markov-chain sophistication.  So it was a string of non-sensical preposition and conjunction phrases. In my reading performance I took the notes I got after my final presentation: I went with a bombastic oratory style which fit into my idea that Semi as a character is disdainful of human language.  After my performance peers and audience members volunteered that they could feel Semi's attitude from my reading of the text- I think it had an interesting effect with the context-heavy framing of my text cut up/generation choices. 

[reaching]

FUTURE OF NEW MEDIA AND POST-AUTOMATION CULTURE : EVOLUTION OF A QUICK + DIRTY ECONOMIC SCENARIO

Our working scrawlings across the hallowed whiteboards of ITP. 

We received a brief mention in the New York Times City Room Blog.  The rest of my team was Sam Sadtler, Diego Cruz, and Shaun Axani.  It was standing room only!  

Here is our deck. 

QUICK JOTS FOR A BRIEF PRECIS:

Our core premise was that profit-seeking (we used mining industry) would make a push to ubiquitous automation

 And at its peak 100 million are unemployed

 The new class of systems engineers can see with hi-res data across industries that losses will be greater if a) the government swoops in with a voucher system b) damage to infrastructure, social fabric, consumer spending are allowed to go unfettered.  It is determined losses would be greater than a public-private partnership for a basic wage.

 So now three major classes coalesce: the systems engineers aka “innovation programmers” who use AI and Deep Learning Networks to rapidly adjust system architecture and data collection, and the Aggregate Networked Human Intelligence Taskers who basically exist to perform user testing and consume.  Original shareholders see a gradual outflow of their agency to the systems engineers in shaping industry as economic priorities shift to resource optimization and infrastructure preservation.  The Aggregate underclass is empowered to horizontal or upward mobility because of lowered barrier to entry as a result of ubiquitous automation’s low-cost education, goods, services. 

 And there is another class of personalized, craft, luxury goods and services which are things that are already automated but which there is demand for. 

  Hidden costs are slowly reduced due to automation. 

 Supply outstrips demand at first, until automation matures to engender new insights to innovation

A dream where capitalism partially suffocates its current incarnation by being it’s true incarnation. 

We used  mining as our example industry to tell the story in concrete terms, and as a potential firestarter. it’s the most ripe industry for it in some ways. The idea of 100 million was just - 30% of the population, a ballpark to base our scenario on— that number is for all jobs in the US which can be replaced through automation - across industries.. Means a trillion a month in subsistence assistance. It was an interesting feeling in the moment, having this momentary authority to talk about radical economics in front of a (standing-room) roomful of people ushered in by institutions the likes of PwC, NYU, and NYT. But in a way that uses profit as the conduit for change. Our rule was that we wouldn’t use altruism— it was about comparative costs.  

Someone approached us to interview us for a book, and another asked to get in touch to do a podcast. Another woman thanked us, and mentioned that it was interesting to hear about such a scenario in terms of specific working classes. 

Futures of New Media : c. 2025 Character Scenario

Workshopping Post-Automation Culture 2025 Scenario with Arbitrary Character Story Params. 

INPUT : PROMPT

The year is 2025. The scenario is my scenario.

1. Pick a number from 3 to 12. Household size = 9

2. Pick a number from 7 to 100. Age = 98

3. Pick a color: Red Orange Yellow Green Blue Indigo Violet. ROY Male. Green your choice. BIV Female. Color Indigo.

4. Pick a city, anywhere in the world. You live there = Everglade City.

5. Pick a country, anywhere in the world. You grew up there = New Zealand.

6. Pick a profession – anything to do with new media,  where people get paid for doing this. Someone in your household does this = we are all cyberneticians and systems engineers. 

7. Pick an avocation – a hobby, a pastime, an interest,  a thing people like to do for itself. Someone in your household does this = we all travel short distances by horseback.

OUTPUT: SCENARIO

The year is 2025 Common Era.  My name is Yoshimi and I am rated at 98 years of mental age (experiential, crystalline knowledge.) This is extrapolated from the number of operations, tasks, and decisions I have executed in both real and virtual space-time. I live in Everglade City, Florida and I am a systems engineer monitoring the SB-TW+A (which stands for Supervised Biosphere Type Tropical Wetlands and Aquifer.)  

I live in a permaculture-dorm with a team of eight others (six other humans and two AI of differing mobility) all of whom are utilized in the maintenance and innovation of the code forest section of the NIEE (New International Industrial Ecosystem) which runs a 1TeraWatt Star-Mod - a modular, high-pressure gas nuclear power generator which, in turn, runs an evaporative system which both purifies the UP (Urgently Polluted) water for bio-reconditioning and extracts rare chemical molecules.  These molecules are then sorted for recycled use in industry.  The water we purify is reintroduced with pH and nutrient altering organisms. In this way the work we do contributes to compliance with the New Order Convention of Autum CE 2015, which regulates and enforces the International Legislative CRR-R (Completely Recycled Resources and Reconditioning) Module which establishes that any sanctioned economic activity  may use only the extant man-made industrial chemicals found within the context of environmental pollution.

Post-automation unrest, across-the-board economic change, and a mismanagement of traditional nuclear power in North America caused a major fluctuation and restructuring of the global population, so most of us at the dorm are special visa residents from New Zealand, which was shielded from turmoil for much longer than all other global regions.  When I am not tweaking the algorithms which dynamically optimize synthetic and precious molecule recovery and sorting, I am helping the AIs brainstorm new ways to modulate and balance the humid climate’s effect on our biological bodies  so that they remain unstressed and metabolically efficient.  When I am not doing this work in rotation with one of the other eight, I am physically exploring the nearby coastline looking for innovation insight—on horseback—which is how we all travel short distances now.