From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Wed Jul 03 2002 - 18:06:52 MDT
Just came back from watching the movie.
Technology: yes, very standard macrotech with some fun tricks (the
spiders reminded me of the robots in Red Dwarf :-). Carnivorous plants
out of a cartoon (but it is nice to see a believable female mad
scientist!).
The graphical user interface is very doable today; I think the gesture
recognition software my brother wrote for his masters thesis would work
perfectly for it (I also wrote a gesture recognizer for mine too, but I
admit his is better; it is a HMM system with computer vision - those lit
gloves would make it trivial to use with high resolution). I think the
issue is rather: what would you want such an interface for? It seems
ideal for doing some of the image enhancement stuff and quickly
shuffling data, but when you have to shuffle data then you will likely
need some automatic organizers to keep track of everything. Points for
style, but not exactly what we need for programming or office work.
Theme: The glass and cameras really made me think of the transparent
society. But this is a society similar to Brin's *bad* transparent
society he describes in his book: some people have access to all the
information and can send out the spiders to get more, everybody else
just have the media images. Although there are hints of oversight, it
seems that it is mostly a formality - the system is perfect, and the
aims are so good, so there is not much reason to keep track of it. Big
mistake - critical thinking is always necessary. Well worth thinking
about when defending the open society and thinking of sysops.
The scene with Agatha in the shopping mall was impressive. *This* is how
a super-intelligence would act.
Of course, as a Swede I found Peter Stormare's eye surgeon and his
assistant (Caroline Lagerfeldt) hilarous - the entire audience were
laughing at their dialogue...
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension! asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/ GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y
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