Electronic Drugs and Addiction by Design

I ran an image search for the word "panopticon", looking for a good thumbnail for this post. This picture looks great, but I have no idea what it is, and it's not sourced. Is it an artificially intelligent big data brain? A neutrino chamber? Does it have anything to do with panopticon design (think Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia)? No.

It's a building, called L’Hemisfèric, in the City of Arts and Sciences in Valencia, Spain, designed by architect Santiago Calatrava circa 2015. The reflection in the water makes it look like one big eye, and it does. So maybe it's partially related here.

Back on track -- Commercials for online gambling end with a disclaimer about where to call if you have a gambling problem.

I always thought it was strange that you could have a commercial for addictive things. If they're already addictive, why do we need to advertise them? Or better yet, if something is addictive, shouldn't we not be allowed to advertise for them? Especially in today's world of targeted advertising; we're literally using the word "targeted". 

In China, they call video games "electronic drugs", and they have new regulations against private companies targeting their citizens with addictive algorithms (governments not so much). 

Ten years ago, this book was written about slot machines, and today it will blow your mind. That is, if you can handle some basic ideas of statistics, probability, and randomness:

• Machine gambling as an example of flipping the workplace organizational psychology of the 1900's factory back on the "new product" (you) -- the user, and analysing them, the new worker, to get them to "work" longer, better, faster (by getting sucked-in to the machine and controlled by it), for you! (the employer or the owner). (p57, Foucault, Marx)
• "The gambler not only can't win but isn't playing to win, while the gambling industry is playing to win all along." (p75)
• Random number generators (RNGs) are at the heart of every slot machine.
• From hardware to software - Between the actual reel that you see spinning and stopping in front of you, and the automated RNG that actually decides your fate, there is now a virtual reel, which weights the outcome by mapping a pre-planned algorithm ahead of your actual reels, so that it's no longer about the machine, the reels, the lever, the hardware. It's about crafting a perfect probability for both the industry and for the gambler. 

The Virtual Reel Map - Figure 3.2a - Educational illustration of virtual reel mapping for a machine containing 32 virtual stops and 22 actual stops. The first 11 positions on the 32-stop virtual reel are mapped to the 11 symbols on the actual reel, but the rest are mapped to blanks, such that the odds of hitting a winning symbol are less than they appear to be. In addition, via a disproportionate number of virtual stops are mapped to blank spaces just above or below the jackpot symbols. This ensures that they will appear more often above or below the payline than they would by chance alone, enhancing the "near miss" sensation among players. Courtesy of Game Planit, Inc. (p88)

• Note that in the image above, which represents an actual reel map, positions 1,3,5,7 are "real", whereas 2,4,6 are not; they're blanks. Yet they're doubled by the map loading, so you "almost" get it more often than chance (out of the actual 11 symbols). AKA Phantom Symbols, AKA Loading the Dice (p92)
• On the new machines (which are designed to hack your nervous system to bits and then feed it back to you as a dopamine drip) - "They love them; They can literally play all day." (p126) -IGT Game Developer
• "Tracked gamblers are treated less as individual subjects than as "dividuals" in the Deleuzian sense -- bundles of traits and habits (associated with pin numbers, codes, passwords and personal algorithms) that can be systematically compared with those of others, allowing casinos to more precisely identify and market to distinct customer niches (ft 15). Casinos also can triangulate any given gambler's player data with her demographic data, piecing together a profile that can be used to customize game offerings and marketing appeals specifically for her; although she has been broken down into discrete data points in the process of tracking in the moment of marketing she is reassembled as a distinct individual who can be examined form every angle." -The Rise of Player Tracking, Chapter 5 Matching the Market

From the book, Addicted by Design

"I am watching everything. I see it all."

-Executive at Harrah's

This quote feels like it could be the introduction to this book on marketing and advertising:

The Panoptic Sort: A Political Economy of Personal Information

Oscar H. Gandy Jr., 1993

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/979404.The_Panoptic_Sort

Hype Things

Deep Thoughts

Smart home device manufacturers are competing to see which is more well-aligned with the scifi surveillance state dystopian future - a home studded with fisheye security cams, or a home punctuated with a thousand ears.

Most of us have been hearing about the Internet of Things (IoT) for quite sometime now. It had a modest peak in its hype cycle less than ten years ago. In fact, IoT was one of the less-hyped segments of the digital revolution, which is unfortunate because it is so related to security concerns. Had we seen this coming we could have been more vigilant about certain aspects of our digital vulnerabilities.

Now it's here. Actually, I'll say that it was here last year just about this time - when every home I visited after the holidays had a new "digital home assistant." It was a very popular gift.

Take this to the next level and you can imagine a not too distant future that combines the sensory system provided by an IoT, and the artificially-intelligent ability to integrate these disparate data channels into a coherent entity and a self like none other.

All these ears and eyes, as well as all the other sensors that we don't even notice so readily, such as temperature or footstep pressure or even our electrical field, will combine into one thing. A planet, a body, hard to categorize, it will see, hear, and feel everything - our entire anthroposphere will be aware. 

Meanwhile, the thought of a building listening to me is way creepier than the thought of it looking at me. And I'm less creeped out about a building that can tell if I'm angry by measuring my body temperature and pulserate, because I just have nothing to compare that to. It's not as invasive only because I have nothing to associate it with.


Notes:
What's next for smart homes: An 'Internet of Ears?'
Nov 2018, phys.org

FBI tells router users to reboot now to kill malware infecting 500k devices
May 2018, Ars Technica

Biohacking
anything that gets implanted into our bodies now has an RFID chip in it, which means it's part of the IoT, which means we're part of the IoT.

Where's My Thought Translator

Psychedelic Artist Here

Text rules the internet. We know that. (It's why you can't google smells.)

But humans aren't born to read, and if we had the choice, we would much rather talk to things than write to them. This is why speech recognition has become such a big deal.

For a while there, voice rec was in trouble. Kind of like how autocorrect was in trouble, maybe you remember that more.

Then came all these neural nets and backward propagation, and now we have mindbots playing video games better than humans. Machine learning artificial intelligence is on a winning streak these days. But it's funny that with all this talk about biased algorithms, we often fail to recognize one group of people that are consistently being left out, even from the most basic of services offered by our digitally-assisted exocortices.

The people left out are those who are hard of hearing, who cannot see well, or who speak with impediments. Your phone may be great at deciphering your drunk-ass request for a cab at 9 p.m. on a Tuesday, but that's because it's been trained on a few happy hour voices just to deal with that particular instance.*

Your phone has not been trained to talk to you after your face underwent reconstructive surgery, messing with your speech. Or when you can't speak at all because you can't hear. The problem is that speech recognition technology hasn't been trained on sign language.

Deep Forest Deep Dream Mandala by Nora Berg

Along comes this gentleman, who basically mixes a Nintendo Wii with an Amazon Alexa to allow anyone using sign language to communicate with their omniscient overlords.

The way he does it is really clever though, as he uses a publicly available neural net to (literally?) teach the network sign language, whereupon he further develops that recognized sign language into text, and then ties it all to a text-to-speech program, which can then finally talk to Alexa.

What I want to know is, how long do I have to get this thing to watch me before it can recognize my thoughts and turn them into words so that I can finally be one with the internet??

Sign-language hack lets Amazon Alexa respond to gestures
July 2018, BBC News

Post Script
The Alcohol Language Corpus (of drunk speech)

Between 2007 and 2009, linguistic researchers from the Bavarian Archive for Speech Signals at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and the Institute of Legal Medicine in Munich in Germany convinced 162 men and women to get drunk [and talk Drunken John into a voice recorder].
-Fast Company

Post Post Script
I'm sure I concur with everyone else who is saying that Alex Grey is the only artist where Deep Dream makes his work look worse! Still, how is it that I can't find more of it online? Also, can't someone train a network on his paintings instead of the corpus they used for Deep Dream?

Alex Grey Meets Deep Dream

Alex Grey As Himself

Post Post Post
Accidental robot-hole. I should know way more about neural style transfers, which came out last year and as an extension of the Deep Dream project.

Style transfer is where you anti(?)train a neural net to overfit for a particular style, and then fit that style onto a new image. It makes way more sense when you see it.

Here, a painting of Napoleon, trained on Raphael's School of Athens:

Meta Napoleon Bonapart, unknown origin

Here, a famous Escher painting trained also on the School of Athens:

Deep Escher in Athens, unknown origin

Neil Degrasse Tyson x Kandinsky

Brad Pitt x Duchamp(?)

Abstract Cat

Here's a place that will do it for you, but they have their own pre-designed style templates (called pastiches) - Deep Art

There's also a few apps that do it, Prisma is one.

And finally, don't forget who started this all:

Abstraction of a Cow, Theo van Doesburg, circa 1900

Abstraction of a Tree, curated from Piet Mondrian, circa 1900

Eyes on the Street

Computer 'anthropologists' study global fashion
Aug 2017, phys.org

What is the world wearing?

These scientists are using a deep learning object recognition program to discover visual patterns in clothing and fashion across millions of images of people worldwide and over a period of many years. They detected attributes like color, sleeve length, presence of glasses or hats, etc. (They end up filtering for only waist up photos). They ask questions such as, "How is the frequency of scarf use in the US changing over time?" or "For a given city, such as Los Angeles, what styles are most characteristic of that city."

The objective of this research is ultimately to "provide a look into cultural, social and economic factors that shape societies and provides insights into civilization."

Dashed lines mark Labor Day. Who said Americans don't like conformity?

via Cornell University: StreetStyle: Exploring world-wide clothing styles from millions of photos. arXiv. arxiv.org/abs/1706.01869

I imagined that stuff like this is already happening all over the place, in all kinds of other fields, and being integrated into global policy decisions and bottom-line business calls alike. But, this is not the case; this is still just the beginning. One thing I caught from this, some digital era common sense - Google Trends results for "scarves" peak right before they do on Instagram, because, presumably, people are searching for the thing, then they buy it, then they take pictures of themselves wearing it.

Post Script
These are the real people, not the algorithms, that analyze and predict the world of fashion:
Color Conspirators, Network Address