I’m utterly unenthused about the article I’m writing, so I’m taking a break and listing a few of the gorillas of the science fiction pulps:
- the bodyguard/assassins of an immortal Egyptian priest who, with his high tech weapons and his atomic power plant, intends to conquer the world and…
I’m about to see Steven Pinker talk!
And you’re probably not. Sorry.
Start telling the stories that only you can tell, because there’ll always be better writers than you and there’ll always be smarter writers than you. There will always be people who are much better at doing this or doing that - but you are the only you.
Tarantino - you can criticize everything that Quentin does - but nobody writes Tarantino stuff like Tarantino. He is the best Tarantino writer there is, and that was actually the thing that people responded to - they’re going ‘this is an individual writing with his own point of view’.
There are better writers than me out there, there are smarter writers, there are people who can plot better - there are all those kinds of things, but there’s nobody who can write a Neil Gaiman story like I can.
Everywhere we look in pop culture today, some of the coolest expressions are created by humans imitating machines. Exhibit A would be the surging popularity of popping, tutting, and dub step dancing. You’ve seen these dancers on YouTube: the best of them look exactly like robots dancing, with the mechanical stutter of today’s crude robots trying to move like humans. Except the imitators robotically dance better than any robot could — so far.
[…]
Since technology isn’t new, why this infatuation with imitating machines now? I think there are several reasons.
First, it’s a blank artistic frontier. Other than a few tip-toes into the territory over the years (the tin man in Wizard of Oz, Frankenstein, etc), the continent of acting out a machine’s life is wide open.
Secondly, we have a much better idea of what we think a machine’s life is. We’ve all heard robotic voices in our phones and GPS units, so it is easier to imitate one now. There are enough robotic arms and prototype humanoid robots that we can fake one and everyone knows what we are faking. As robots continue to improve their imitation of us, the differences will become more subtle, and the art of imitation, the art of tutting and botting, will become more subtle. But here at the beginning, the otherness of robots is blatant, distinctive, and near enough to copy.
Lastly, but not least, we are slowly changing our attitudes about robots. For as long as robots have existed (let’s say 50 years) we humans have viewed them as inferiors, sub-human, and to be pitied because for all their powers they lacked our spiritual essence of consciousness. They were less than human in almost any way we could measure. But slowly, robots are becoming better than humans in small, narrow fields. Each time a robot does something better than us, the very notion of “robotness” is elevated. Botness is incrementally something that is valued, something that we envy. When computerized machines in our cars can brake our car better, faster, and more dependably than we can, then being a robot is not as much of an insult as it used to be. As robots balance a bicycle/motorcycle better than we can, we envy them. When they remember more than we can, we will envy them.
Today’s dancing robots let us imitate them by their clear signs of vibration and inferiority. But someday we may not be able to imitate their fluid dancing at all — we’ll only be able to envy them. We may not be able to imitate their hyper-real human-like voices at all. We may wind up in a long century of full-time envy of robots. Kids may announce to inquiring parents that what they want to be when they grow up is a robot.
Jaron Lanier is worried that we lower ourselves as we imitate our machines and gadgets, but what happens if our machines and gadgets raise our ambitions and inspire our better angles? What if we ourselves want to be as great as our mechanical creations? What happens when we switch from pitying robots to envying them?
The girlfriend has just introduced me to the wonders of Mendeley.
http://www.mendeley.com/profiles/mike-hernandez1/
Don’t know what I did before it! My PDFs organized and available online, annotations and highlighting super-easy, and generated citations.
Plug over. I would do it again.
inspeeeeector spaaaaacetime
flying through time (and also space!)
