Because virtual reality is so emotionally powerful, it can be used to influence our behaviour as well as our perceptions, our empathy and our confidence. 

(19 mins)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gpOZIdqYMlU&feature=share

Magic Leap is creating a platform for “mixed reality”: it places virtual objects into your view of the real world, and enables them to interact with the room that you’re actually in.

This is an interview with one of their designers about what they plan to use the technology for; how it can enhance our lives to “have software living with us”; and how this is a new and different medium from anything we’ve seen before. 

If this isn’t vaporware (and there are some impressive people, and large amounts of money, involved), it will transport us into an interesting future. 

(30 minutes)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jW15fQLJjfg&feature=share

In order for implanted biosensors (like glucose monitors) to work really well, we need to move beyond batteries and power them from the body itself. 

It’s not hard for an SFF writer to link this up with current advances in integrating nerve signals with electronics and to imagine an internal sensor net that monitors your body and mind and ties you into wider information networks.

(10 mins)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6o-FyMZwkv0&feature=share

How do you warn potential future civilizations not to open your nuclear waste storage facility?

http://www.damninteresting.com/this-place-is-not-a-place-of-honor/

The things we call “phones” are advanced sensing platforms with location awareness that we carry around with us in large numbers. 

This – and other massive data, such as tweets or Google searches – can, in aggregate, reveal surprising things about the world, without building any new infrastructure, deploying any additional devices, or asking people to provide any extra data. We can just mine the data that people are already creating by going about their daily lives. 

There are obvious privacy and data ownership issues from this. 

(28 minutes.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N3tV_YAB_iU&feature=share

Good news, everybody!

Having exceeded at least some of the Millennium Development Goals, can we achieve the Global Development Goals by 2030? It’s not impossible. 

And there are some good ones – ambitious and complicated. Economic growth by itself won’t get us there – it helped with the Millennium Development Goal to halve poverty, obviously, but it isn’t enough to achieve the GDGs. However, some countries (New Zealand is one) manage social progress that’s above what you’d predict just from the trendline based on GDP.

“Business as usual” won’t get us there. Every country in the world needs to prioritize social progress and equality if we’re going to make it. So that’s what we, as citizens, need to demand.  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o08ykAqLOxk&feature=share

It might just be crazy enough to work…

A dolphin researcher, a musician, an Internet of Things visionary, and Vint Cerf walk into a bar give a TED talk on the idea of opening up the internet to nonhuman intelligent Earth species. 

Very relevant to my interests (among my projects in development is a setting in which living things are all linked into the net with “soft radios”), and also reminiscent of David Brin and his Uplift universe. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wGMLhaa98GI&feature=share

Evgeny Morozov argues that we are now well equipped to use “big data” and technology to manage the effects of the problems that we have, as they manifest in the lives of people who are embedded in sociopolitical systems – but, in doing so, to ignore the causes of those problems in the way the systems are set up. For example, “quantified self” apps prompt us about exercise and nutrition, as if our weight is entirely our responsibility, but don’t address the issues of towns designed only for cars, or the pervasiveness and cultural power of junk food.

Technology companies and governments, he says, try to gamify behaviours that in previous eras would have been driven by laws or by a belief in particular values instead. Here I think he’s being naive; usually, people’s behaviour was and is not driven by abstract values as much as by social expectations, and I don’t see being caught up in a mesh of powerful social expectations as necessarily a good thing. I take his point, though, that this is an individualist, market-oriented model of behaviour modification which doesn’t emphasize taking responsibility for a shared social situation. (He speculates that if the reward was removed, the behaviour might also cease, but that’s not what behaviourist psychology has found.)

He has a rant against Google Now and how it removes causality and narrativity from life (by presenting us with a series of reminders of what we are doing next, or could do next) – I didn’t quite agree with that bit, since to me a system like Google Now seems to be drawing out connections rather than suppressing them. It did give me a story idea, though: a character who doesn’t remember who she is, but is coached through her day by a more advanced version of Google Now, which tells her where to go and when, shows her the speech she is to give, feeds her the names of people who talk to her afterwards, and so forth. She doesn’t need to know anything about her life, because her virtual assistant knows everything about it. 

He envisions a future, based on the arguments of some current startups, where we sell the data about our daily lives – and therefore start to try to “optimize” the value of our life data in the market. I don’t know that anonymised data (which is what is usually talked about in this context) would really be open to such manipulation, though. 

He’s also concerned that the introduction of sensors and connectivity into every domain heralds the introduction of the logic of the market into those same domains, which previously operated by a different set of values. This ignores the many “open data” initiatives being run by cities, governments and citizens worldwide.

In the second half, another speaker (unfortunately not clearly identified other than as “an AI researcher”) joins him to discuss the issues. He draws attention to what Morozov hasn’t talked about, and how framing the problems differently makes them at least partially soluble.

Questions follow. They’re good questions; Morozov uses them as a jumping-off point to circle round to reiterating his points. He does, at one point, admit that “big data” can be joined to a different kind of political project (as in South America); it’s not so much technology itself as neoliberal capitalism that he has a problem with.

Nevertheless, Morozov is (to oversimplify) a technopessimist, which is a viewpoint I don’t share. It’s important to listen to people who have different viewpoints, to provoke ourselves to thought and check our own tendency to ignore the other side. He isn’t offering much in the way of solutions, however, despite several times speaking as if he’s about to do so.

(1 hour 53 minutes.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ba0rIaEftKU&feature=share

Now this is off the wall. This ecological scientist believed the orthodoxy that the way to save grasslands and prevent them turning to desert was to reduce livestock numbers. He eventually realized he was wrong, and that using larger herds (as in nature) would revitalize the land and reverse its trend towards desert – which is significant in climate change. 

It’s one of those counter-intuitive things that’s reasonable when you think about it – but does anyone know if it’s widely supported, or if he’s regarded as something of a crank in the field?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpTHi7O66pI&feature=share

Bringing back extinct species – and their ecosystems – is now becoming possible.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XKc9MJDeqj0&feature=share