We discuss with listeners whether an AI has imagination, and how it is seen by the general public.

We present new tools developped by Yoann to learn Japanese and compare the usage of Kanjis and Chinese characters.

For the main question of this episode, we try to assess whether or not there has been an ongoing anti-rationality vibe in our media and myths. It brings us to a lot of places, assessing the relationship between empathy and rationality, or even its place in storytelling: is rationality the enemy of drama and therefore not a good story driver? Or is it the core of any character growth? Is an excess of rationality why totalitarians dystopia fail, or is it just that they're missing key components of the human nature in their application of rationality... Is this all a matter of imperfect information? Or is it a warped rejection of determinism from the very depths of human nature?

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Listen to the full interview: Listen: http://163.172.97.59/ndp/ndp17-bonus-fullinterview.mp3

We first revisit what your storage system says about you to bring up the social aspects that we didn't study last time.

But the core of this episode is the reason why it took us a while to make it: we tried to interview an AI powered by GPT-3, the latest machine learning framework from OpenAI. You can listen to the raw interview, but there's a lot of ambiguity between what humans produced and what AI produced, and even though this ambiguity is a pretty cool piece of performative art, it may not be the best podcast experience :)

So in this episode, we debrief this interview and share the best highlights from it: what is GPT-3 good at? bad at? Is it intelligent? Is it conscious? What does any of these words even mean? What's the fundamental difference between its "brain" and ours? Can it replace us? Could it have written a better description?

All this and much more in an exclusive interview of our new AI overlords.

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Going back over our last episode, we wonder if we spend too long talking about main characters, as opposed to background NPCs, and then ask the real question: what is the main storyline of the real world?

We follow that up with Bioshock: it is a cult classic that we both didn’t try until fairly recently, and even though this genre of games doesn’t suit either of us, there’s still plenty to be said about the Bioshock universe and the philosopher that inspired it.

Finally, we go back to our tech/productivity side, continuing in a way the discussion from episode 6. Seeing that operating systems have lately abstracted the storage away from the user, is it the death of the file system? It seems that retrieval within a huge blob is more suited for the human brain, and successes like smartphones or Gmail seem to lean that way. But is there no redeeming qualities to a structured file system? Are we doomed to let all our data sit in a huge mix of everything, or is there still hope for the file-sorting lovers?

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We revisit our last episode’s conclusions: turns out that making an MMORPG is in fact a pretty arduous task, but maybe there’s interesting things we can still look forward to instead.

We then talk about recent recurring dreams about corpses and highschool diplomas, and how their oddities let us experience different parts of the brain.

Finally, we tackle a question that mixes game design and cognitive psychology: what creates empathy towards some NPCs. We examine examples like Undertale, Pokemon, Animal Crossing or Watchdogs, to understand some important factors like shared experiences, free will and anthropomorphism. We end up analyzing the difference between cinematographic games and choice-driven gameplay experiences to understand how they create different caring vectors.

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We review the comments for the counting base system: even though it was our longest episode yet, there is a lot that we still missed! It leaves us little time to talk about Masaaki Yuasa’s “Eizouken ni wa Te wo Dasu na!” and how it influenced the making of this podcast!

For the main topic, when we talked about No Man Sky a few months ago, we decided to dive deeper into why we don’t see more MMORPGs lately. We explore a wide range of reasons, from game design to supporting technology, passing obviously by the economic aspect (did free to play and loot boxes really kill subscriptions?), but also the societal and psychological aspects (after all, the internet, the world and people have changed a lot since WoW first came out).

Shownotes:

Our No Man Sky episode:

https://www.reddit.com/r/NotDailyPodcast/comments/ewdon1/ndp_11_no_man_sky_and_is_material_design_the_end/

Interesting stuff we didn’t tackle in the episode: what numbers do you pick within your base:

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

Eizouken anime:

https://myanimelist.net/anime/39792/Eizouken_ni_wa_Te_wo_Dasu_na

Amazing piece about how game designed changed from giving the illusion of a world to convenience:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0RxQRswLAmI

Story telling in Fortnite:

https://www.theverge.com/2019/10/14/20913541/fortnite-game-shutdown-black-hole-event-storytelling

Old Jesse Schell keynote about persistent worlds:

https://vimeo.com/18407613

Cute video from Nerd Slayer about economics of MMORPG production:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xLBMSoBdIzY

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One of the most interesting things to come out of this pandemic is that it serves as a free global cognitive science experiment for everyone, so we discuss what we can conclude about habituation.

In the main part, we discuss how we should celebrate the milestones of the podcast: using base 10 and celebrate “round numbers” seems so arbitrary... If we were to decide from scratch, could we choose a better base to count in without the bias of having 10 fingers? What even makes a good base? Come hear our argument and take part in the poll to decide how to number our episodes from now on :)

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We can’t exactly not talk about the thing on everyone’s mind, can we… but can we put an original spin on it?

Do not fear, though, we quickly move away from the grim reality to tackle a loosely defined topic drafted on Yoann’s notes: Are we approaching a Cultural Singularity? In the first part, we try to see if we could define it by looking at the layers of irony and self-awareness that riddle our communication in this post-truth era. In the second part, we dive into another approach, and see what we can infer from the technological singularity.

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We first discuss how Banana on the Wall widened our understanding of performance art since we last talked about Banksy, and spend a bit of time exploring Yoann’s impressions of No Man Sky.

We then turn to Material Design and its counterparts: recapping its history, we see that it’s definitely applying a scientific method to reverse engineer the human brain. Does this mean that it’s the Final Form of design? We try to answer this by thinking about the affordances of the medium that guide design evolution, and also by drawing a parallel with pop culture, a time-proven domain where we can clearly see generations as shared experiences.

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In this episode, we spend a bit longer than usual discussing the latest TV show written by Russel T. Davies, “Years and Years”, and where we think it did great or fall short. In particular, we also wonder why science fiction seems so grim lately…

But weirdly enough, our main topic of discussion about how theme parks are engineered and designed to be a bubble of happiness brings us back to the question of utopias and dystopias. What can this manufactured happiness teach us about our nature, and can it help with our daily lives?

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We’re comparing Banksy’s work to Oobah Butler and Thierry Guetta, the star of the movie Exit Through the Gift Shop, and which of them pushes contemporary art to its limits.

Then there’s a question I’ve long wanted to clarify: it’s super annoying to have a conversation with someone who has inconsistencies in their discourse, but is it really a problem in itself?

To answer this, we’re examining how humans are inconsistent by nature, and logical consistency is an acquired skill that takes effort. We discover that it’s essentially the scientific method applied to discourse, and that it’s necessary for meaning to progress. So what can you do at personal level?

Shownotes:

The previous episode about Sarazanmai: http://163.172.97.59/ndp/ndp8-sarazanmai.mp3

An introduction to Slavoj Zizek: https://archive.org/details/2013ThePervertsGuideToIdeology

Exit through the gift shop: http://www.banksyfilm.com/

How to Become TripAdvisor’s #1 Fake Restaurant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bqPARIKHbN8

I faked an Art Gallery in London and sold my paintings

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yHS2DUBP_W8

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