The Filter Podcast with Matt Asher

This episode focuses on the our coming Augmented Reality dystopia.

Image from HYPER-REALITY (2016), by Keiichi Matsuda.

Audio production by Steven Toepell of Bohemian Passport Inc.

TRANSCRIPT (Not exact)

This episode is a followup to a previous episode, on the Simulation Hypothesis. You don’t need to listen to that episode first, but I’d recommend it. It’s a good episode. Among other ideas, I present a way that, even if the world outside us right now is 100% real, even if we don’t live inside anything like a computer simulation, there are forces that will push us to build an all encompassing simulated world, or some kind of virtual overlay to our existing world, and it will almost certainly be driven forward by a desire to control and manipulate.

This episode is a continuation of that idea, and so far as I can tell this potential future is nearly inevitable and almost certainly nightmarish, at least from the perspective of the individual autonomy.

In short, we are headed to an AR dystopia, and there’s no getting around that.

AR stands for Augmented Reality. VR blocks 100% of your view and replaces it with a screen. AR is the much more transformative, and challenging, technology. With AR, you are still looking at the world in front of you, but there’s another layer of information that’s digitally overlayed on top of it. So for example, you may be playing Pokémon, and you see little creatures when you look at your phone’s screen, and those creatures appear to be part of the actual world. They are digitally embedded in it.

Ideally, from a tech standpoint, AR isn’t done with your phone, it’s done with glasses or a beam that shoots pixels right into your eye or even a neurological implant. It’s done is a way that you don’t have to think about it, your vision has been enhanced, and you rarely have to spend time fiddling with the settings or device.

Because AR doesn’t completely cover up your view of the world, it can be an always-on solution. The idea is not to completely surround you in the way that VR does and create a completely synthetic world, the idea is to integrate the real world with this other virtual information.

Imagine for a moment some of the possibilities that open up with AR. A construction worker walking through a building might see every pipe labeled with its function and if it’s been hooked up. They might see walls project in front of them exactly were they need to be built. A company might use it along with face recognition so that you see the name and job title of everyone who passes you in the hallway. It might be vital in emergency medical situations, for example if a lady with a dangerous boyfriend has just overdosed on your narcotics and you need precise instructions on how to plunge a syringe full of adrenaline right into her heart. AR could project a circular bull-eye to just the right location and show you an animation of how to drive in the needle.

So clearly there are some beautiful applications here, and I’ll talk more about those application, but for now let's take a look at what might go wrong with AR, and in particular how this beautiful technology is almost certain to lead us down a wildly dystopian path. I could speculate endlessly about the exact shape this dystopia will take, but instead let's start with what is going to happen for sure, based on what we already know about the world and human beings.

If you think about the wold’s most expensive ad spaces, you might think about a commercial during the super bowl or a billboard in Times square. Those are indeed valuable places to show an ad, but in the end the answer to the question, where is the best place to show an ad is, in people’s field of vision. And when is the best time to show someone an ad? When they are mostly likely to act on it.

Discussion with guest Jesse Walker about paranoia and panic in the age of the pandemic.

Audio production by Steven Toepell of Bohemian Passport Inc.

Related links:

Jesse Walker on Twitter

Jesse Walker Official Website

Jesse Walker - The United States of Paranoia (Aug 2013)

Jesse Walker - Trumpland (Jul 2016)

Jesse Walker - Trump-Russia Story (Mar 2017)

Stanley Cohen - Folk Devils and Moral Panics (Dec 2002)

Nathaniel Hawthorne - Young Goodman Brown (1992)

 

This episode focuses on the simulation hypothesis, with a novel approach to how simulated worlds might arise and what might be their true purpose.

Transcript (not exact):

In this episode of The Filter I’m going to discuss the simulation hypothesis, the idea that the reality we perceive is actually something akin to a computer simulation. Along the way I’ll present ideas about how such a simulation might have come to exist, and about what our purpose in it might be Some of these ideas are, so far as I can tell, completely novel and, in some sense, much darker than than any other theory of why such a simulation might exist.

A quick note before beginning. I first presented many of these ideas on ykyz in the form of microcast episodes, recorded under the username Mattasher about five months ago. I’ll link to those on the show notes page at thefilter.org

Before I dive in the simulation hypothesis, assume for a moment that we inhabited a completely real, tangible, meat space. Then consider how much, nonetheless, we act like we are characters in a video game. We have our scripts, we have the things we do on a regular basis. When we interact with people, it’s often with a limited set of phrases. If you go into a store or Starbucks, when you order you probably use almost the exact same phrase each time. And the person behind the counter, in turn, responds with something close to a precise script. We drive around, we follow familiar routes, often without paying much attention to them. We know that we’re following a script because sometimes we’ll get in our cars and execute the wrong script. We start heading to a place that’s Not where we wanted to go because we’re following some script that’s already in our head. Like, OK, It’s the morning, so we drive to work. Then, all of the sudden, we’re driving to work on a Sunday.

To continue with this idea that we are like characters in a video game, I think we all, sometimes, in effect, resemble NPCs, those Non-player-characters who are limited to following a small set of predefined scripts. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing. We actually rely to a large extent on these scripts to get through the day and make things work. So we have our routines that help us keep track of things, like when you come in the door you always put your keys in the same place, and if you don’t, you’re probably going to run into trouble sooner or later.

We setup these routines for ourselves, sometimes very deliberately. We rely on them. You could argue that to some extent mastery of anything depends on finding a set of things that you do which can be turned into scripts, or perhaps another way to put it would be to say you ritualize them. You have some kind of check list that you are going to pursue every time in exactly the same order and way, to make sure you achieve your goal.

Before I beat to death this idea of making ourselves into video game characters, I want to back out and recognize that with every technological advance, we reframe our model of the universe and how human beings operate. With the invention of the clock, came the model of the clockwork universe, and the idea that human beings were deterministic machines, predestined to act exactly as they do, just like the gears of a clock completely determine where each hand will be and when. With the rise of the computer, the universe itself became a calculating machine, perhaps a quantum one, computing at plank-length intervals where everything should be and what it will be doing.

Early pioneers in the field of computing argued that the human brain was our PC, taking in input and directing our actions based on internal algorithms. Now that we have sophisticated virtual worlds, it only makes sense that we should re-imagine our world itself as a simulation. In this context, are we just projecting one more tech advancement...

Vin Armani talks about the matriarchy, memes, and the devouring mother.

Related links:

Vin Armani on Twitter

Counter Markets Newsletter

Vin Armani - Self Ownership (2017)

Kali: The Dark Mother

Jordan Peterson Interview: The Devouring Mother Archetype

Joseph Campbell - The Hero With a Thousand Faces (1972)

V.C. Andrews - Flowers in the Attic (1979)

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn - The Gulag Archipelago (1973)

Cotton Mather The Wonders of the Invisible World (2009)

Audio production by Steven Toepell of Bohemian Passport Inc.

Vin Armani talks about the matriarchy, memes, and the devouring mother.

Related links:

Vin Armani on Twitter

Counter Markets Newsletter

Vin Armani - Self Ownership (2017)

Kali: The Dark Mother

Jordan Peterson Interview: The Devouring Mother Archetype

Joseph Campbell - The Hero With a Thousand Faces (1972)

V.C. Andrews - Flowers in the Attic (1979)

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn - The Gulag Archipelago (1973)

Cotton Mather The Wonders of the Invisible World (2009)

Audio production by Steven Toepell of Bohemian Passport Inc.

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Audio production by Steven Toepell of Bohemian Passport Inc.

Latency and retardation.

Audio production by Steven Toepell of Bohemian Passport Inc.

Why we are all Cargo Cultists now, and why that might not be such a bad thing.

Audio production by Steven Toepell of Bohemian Passport Inc.

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Audio production by Steven Toepell of Bohemian Passport Inc.

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Audio production by Steven Toepell of Bohemian Passport Inc.