How did porn shape the digital space?

16

October

2019

No ratings yet.

Welcome to the weird side of the internet again! That’s what you get for enabling auto-play…

In this piece I’d like to highlight just how much of our modern digital world owes its existence to porn. Why? Because it’s both funny and true. So to really figure out what porn has done for digital progress, we need to start at the beginning:

What have they done so far?

Long ago, in a little unknown country called the United States of America, the internet was born. This internet was unwieldy, slow, confusing and in desperate need of life support. The adult industry is one of the biggest reasons why the early internet retained enough users for its continued development by keeping people hooked and coming back for obvious reasons. They were the ones to pioneer streaming, pop-up ads, online transactions, tracking devices and are one of the reasons e-commerce is so large in the current day. They even were the driver for increasing the bandwidth of the internet to facilitate more porn, and all the other services benefited (Benes, 2013: https://www.businessinsider.com/how-porn-drives-innovation-in-tech-2013-7?international=true&r=US&IR=T).

What are they doing now?

The adult industry’s influence on innovation is less prominent nowadays due to its nature as the first to capitalize on technologies and trends. They do, however still contribute (Gross, 2010:http://edition.cnn.com/2010/TECH/04/23/porn.technology/index.html)! Deep fakes, AI and haptic feedback aren’t innovations made by the porn industry specifically, but industry is the one driving their practical application far earlier than others.

  • Deep fakes are already being used to fake celebreties for porn but the industry is advancing the tech regardless, and getting better all the time.
  • AI is being tested to create an interactive porn experience which will likely be translated to other applications if succesful.
  • Haptic feedback is being used to create sex toys that can accurately simulate sex between long distance partners or a porn video, but has multiple applications in interface and product design.

If someday Siri and Alexa become sentient, you can thank porn for that!

Please rate this

How will web decentralization shape revolution and terrorism?

16

October

2019

No ratings yet.

Hello and welcome to my corner of the centralized internet where I get to tell you all about the newest, hippest technologies! Meanwhile, advertisers keep bombarding me with useless ads, companies keep tracking all my data to use for their own profit-seeking purposes or to resell for a quick buck, and China knows when I badmouth them (I’m sorry China, don’t do it, NOO-).

How do I escape this nightmare? Let me introduce you to the Decentralized Web

The regular internet was built with centralized points of control due to technological limitations as well as the need to keep some control over the internet. The purpose of the Decentralized Web is to reduce or eliminate such centralized points of control to have a system that can function when parts are missing, provides better privacy protection, provide more reliable access and make direct buying and selling possible without data collecting middlemen. It works thanks to a combination of peer-to-peer networks under a far faster internet than back in 1980 and block-chain inspired encryption that stores information in multiple anonymous locations (Decentralized web summit, 2019: https://www.decentralizedweb.net/about/).

This system is built to be resistant to meddling by central authority for better and for worse. It keeps your, and more importantly my, data safe. However, this system also keeps the data of terrorists, hate groups and revolutionaries safe.

  • Terrorists already use the dark web as a relatively safe way to communicate (Weimann, 2016: https://www.jstor.org/stable/26297596?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents), and having access to decentralized web technology makes organizing and recruitment that much easier. This is not a good thing…
  • Hate groups will become more able to close off their echo-chambers from outside voices of reason to more easily indoctrinate and radicalize their members. Be prepared for increased domestic terrorism folks…
  • Revolutions happen for various reasons on which anyone can disagree on whether the reasons are morally just or unjust, but it stands to reason that totalitarian regimes will not like the step to web decentralization as they lose control over their citizens, citizens which can now organize in a way they couldn’t before and start to challenge these regi- NO WAIT CHINA, I’M NOT TALKING ABOU-

So yeah, this article’s a bit of a bummer.

What do you think?

Please rate this

Shovelware 2.0: a cautionary tale for Steam

21

October

2018

5/5 (1)

In 1983, the home video game console market crashed, dropping from 3.2 billion US$ in revenue in 1982 to 100 million US$ in 1985.

The cause?

Due to the rising popularity of gaming and a lack of publisher control, the market became oversaturated with Shovelware: competing home consoles, video games, blatant low quality cash grabs and knock-offs of both. Customers could no longer find good games, and developers struggled to provide those good games when competing with the flood of shovelware. Now, slowly but surely, Steam is poised to undergo the same as the gaming industry in 1983, if only to a lesser degree.

The Steam platform is the current industry leader in providing video game digital distribution, with many pundits, critics and Valve, the developer of Steam, calling it a monopoly (Lockley, 2013). It boasts the biggest user-base and selection of games. However, the most important thing to note is that of Steam’s 19,000 available games in 2017 about 40% of them were released in 2017 (McAloon, 2018). Steam Greenlight, and its successor Steam Direct were designed by Valve to allow small developers to sell their games on the platform with little interference from their part, as they do not wish to be the gatekeepers of PC gaming due to their monopoly (Grubb, 2017). The result, however, is a flood of low-effort and sometimes fraudulent games: shovelware 2.0

These games are often barely functional, illegally resell pre-purchased assets and/or meet requirements for entry by bribing users to rate them favourably. The Steam storefront is a mess when not looking specifically at top sellers or most popular categories, leading many smaller independent developers to move over to other platforms or even other markets. The game Blossom Tales moved away from Steam to the Nintendo Switch which led to a twenty fold increase of lifetime sales for the game (Khan, 2018).

While Valve has taken some steps to remedy this, such as leveraging Steam’s more active community members to curate these games, the problem still remains and threatens to pull Steam into its own video game crisis in the future.

I’m just glad that I have a GOG.com and Green Man Gaming account waiting in the wings…

 

Please rate this

Can Ethics Catch Up To The Onward March Of Artificial Intelligence?

11

September

2018

5/5 (3)

Artificial intelligence is currently experiencing great technological advancements, but can the field of ethics keep up with it before it’s too late? Can we prevent disaster and enter a new golden age?

 

Dear god I desperately hope so!

 

Isaac Asimov devised the Three Laws of Robotics in his 1942 short story The Runaround; laws which governed robot behavior as a safety feature for mankind. Much of his following work on the subject of robots was about testing the boundaries of his three laws to see where they would break down, or create unanticipated behavior. His work implies that there are no set of rules that can account for every possible circumstance.1

1942 was a long time ago, when artificial intelligence was but a twinkle in the eyes of computer scientists, programmers and nerds. While we still have a ways to go before we achieve singularity,2 the point where AI achieves greater general intelligence than humans, we can’t deny that AI research and application have come a long way. Programs like IBM Watson, a healthcare AI that successfully diagnosed leukemia in a patient when doctors couldn’t3 and beat opponents on the game show Jeopardy!,4 and the onset of self-driving cars reinforce that fact.

However, Nick Bostrom argues in his paper “Ethical Issues in Advanced Artificial Intelligence” that artificial intelligence has the capability to bring about human extinction. He claims that a general super-intelligence would be capable of independent initiative as an autonomous agent. It would be up to the designers of the super-intelligence to code for ethical and moral motivations to prevent unintended consequences.5 Sadly, the sheer complexity and variety of human beliefs and values makes it very difficult to make AI’s motivations human-friendly.6

Unless we can come up with a near-perfect ethical theory before AI’s reach singularity, an AI’s decisions could allow for many potentially harmful scenarios that technically adhere to the given ethical framework but disregard common sense.

Many of the large tech companies have teamed up to address the issue by working together with academia to do research and organize discussions, but it is still uncertain whether they’ll achieve their goals before somebody lets the genie out of the bottle. I remain hopeful, but just in case:

 

I, for one, welcome our new robot overlords.

 

 

 

1 Asimov, Isaac (2008). I, Robot. New York: Bantam. ISBN 0-553-38256-X.

2 Scientists Worry Machines May Outsmart Man By JOHN MARKOFF, NY Times, July 26, 2009.

3 Ng, Alfred (7 August 2016). “IBM’s Watson gives proper diagnosis after doctors were stumped”. NY Daily News. Archived from the original on 22 September 2017.

4 Markoff, John (16 February 2011). “On ‘Jeopardy!’ Watson Win Is All but Trivial”. The New York Times. Archived from the original on 22 September 2017.

5 Bostrom, Nick. 2003. “Ethical Issues in Advanced Artificial Intelligence”. In Cognitive, Emotive and Ethical Aspects of Decision Making in Humans and in Artificial Intelligence, edited by Iva Smit and George E. Lasker, 12–17. Vol. 2. Windsor, ON: International Institute for Advanced Studies in Systems Research / Cybernetics.

6 Muehlhauser, Luke, and Louie Helm. 2012. “Intelligence Explosion and Machine Ethics”. In Singularity Hypotheses: A Scientific and Philosophical Assessment, edited by Amnon Eden, Johnny Søraker, James H. Moor, and Eric Steinhart. Berlin: Springer.

 

Please rate this