An NPC is a non-player character in videogames. They are used to invite the real players in the game into adventures. Even though videogames capture and contain every player, NPCs are the most reduced entities resembling humans.
The rational killer app for the Apple Vision Pro is AR training for astronauts and oilfield roughnecks. I learned this several years ago at the Caltech Entrepreneurs Forum here in SoCal. I met some pretty brilliant people there - folks for whom having a couple post-graduate degrees from elite universities is a commonplace. A stunning young gentleman who appeared as if he were from a 1000 year old dynasty of Brahmins described the scenarios of working on the external bits of the International Space Shuttle. I recall memories of the rigors involved in astronaut training. I recall the foibles of remote medicine in diagnosing my mother’s stroke. More recently, I recall the footage I got from trench & drone warfare in Ukraine. If I were an infantry grunt, I sure as hell would want to extend my vision like a pro.
None of us Apple fanboys and other bourgeois twits care about that. We’re just trying to be cool, and think of cool reasons to buy one. The root of much of this cool hangs on the fictional peg of the character ‘Hero Protagonist’ in Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, a cyberpunk novel from 1992. You can be sure some entry level software engineers were pumped by that story when they joined Apple around the turn of the century. Now that product is real. Swords anyone?
What few of us forget is the extent to which digital publication has turned our attention away from radio, magazines, newspapers and books and towards computer screens and mobile devices. What most of us don’t know is the relatively small fraction of content that gets delivered to streaming services and how little of that you can actually own. In that way, we’ve gone backwards to the days before VHS, sorta. Not that the Millennials, GenZ and Alphas remember or care. They have other concerns.
As I’ve said, my hedge is to deal with reference material that predates the politically correct era. The state of the art of 1985 when it comes to European Art History, for example, is probably not better done today. What has been done since then is what? Banksy? I don’t know. And I have other concerns, mostly having to do with the baselines from which revisionists and postmodernists wish to start scratching and scribbling. I don’t have a coherent rebuttal the theories of ‘settler colonialism’ but I know better than to trust today’s Atlantic magazine for one. Still, considering the editorial probity of TikTok, I know I’m a bit more sane. I don’t believe the younglings have such confidence; I think their mental health is at risk from the deprivations of the short attention span theater that is the product of the algorithmic overlords.
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If your life is out of kilter
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The Virtual Prison
I’ll not burden the point of what may or may not be wrong with people who want to present themselves to the world as animated avatars. After all, my kids were raised on The Sims. I used to be Sixo Yellowknife in Linden Lab’s Second Life which still exists. What is an avatar but your fractional self plus makeup? Still I am concerned with the restrained degrees of freedom that humans will have in these virtual worlds, and the fraction of themselves they invest into them. These worlds will be virtual Disneylands with their Disney NSFW Police. Virtual cultures already exist that are detached from reality - some by design, some by coincidence, some by enemy action. This is to be expected of any and all mass gatherings. This is the business model of Business to Consumer (B2C) software design, with gaming, e-commerce and social media being the prime examples. This model is also something directly inherited from the original mass media. Radio, television and to a somewhat lesser degree film.
So we should be acutely aware, lest we fall into those uncanny valleys and box canyons of the new media. There’s not so much difference between a tv talk show and a mass market paperback novel. But there is a stark difference between such a book published by Penguin and one from Cambridge University Press. In the virual world it’s the difference between learning to fix parts of radio antennas in zero gravity, and pretending to be riding a dragon on a planet where trees talk to people. If we get to the point at which the two are equally monetizeable, we will have turned our a large economy into an amusement park. How can we know if we are getting Business to Business (B2B) quality software? Where is the Springer Verlag of online, especially in these new AI days? How can we avoid eviscerating the skillbase of our middle class and abandon more of our autonomy to the elites whose virtual playgrounds get greenlit?
Virtual Courage
The difference between a gamer and a skateboarder has something to do with physical courage. Transgression in virtual worlds is like cursing at demons in your dreams. On the other hand, concrete stairs and aluminum rails are more consequential when defied. While glitching through the buggy holes game developers leave unattended may have its appeal, rarely is getting booted from a game platform as significant as catching a case for hacking in real life. But we should know that postmodernists want to exploit the limitless horizons of virtual worlds. So it takes virtual courage to find out if an online resource is useful and determine by sampling how much you want to be exposed to it.
So where should we be going to workout our liberty muscles? How can we avoid becoming just another coordinate in virtual reality? Well it turns out that one of the skills of discretion we have is embedded in drinking games. Check out the following video narration. If you can come up with three words for a drinking game, you’re on your way to developing the skill of AI evasion. But it does require virtual courage. You have to go to venture into these virtual worlds and be ready to bail. You have to know what’s at stake if you pay too much attention and the algorithms think they know you.
The Watch Trick
Did you ever used to be on MySpace? I was too. Orkut as well. Over time, they were destroyed by Facebook. I used to use these phrases to distinguish those protean social media.
Facebook is for meeting people you used to know.
LinkedIn is for meeting people you need to know.
Twitter is for meeting people you’d like to know.
When I abandoned politics in 2008, I realized how much I was discussing politics on that Facebook and how little regard I had for Twitter. Now I only write the most trite banalities at Facebook and keep up with people I used to know. But if you were there as long as I was, you might remember with its attractions were the games Farmville and Mafia Wars. When pundits saw presidential elections determined by their candidates ‘social media literacy’ I knew that Disneyland was taking itself too seriously, but also that democracy had lost the real world town halls.
I bought a watch from a Facebook ad. Now I click on every one whether or not I like the watch on offer. Facebook believes it has me pegged. The number of watch ads I now get on Facebook, through email and on Instagram is rather staggering. But I know what’s going on. Facebook and its properties are clueless about my politics, just the way I like it.
So the watch trick is about picking something tangential to your interest and keeping the man behind the curtain guessing whether you really need a heart, a brain, courage or a home.
Multiple Personalities
The second variation takes a bit more patience and skill. This is to set yourself up to have multiple email addresses, some of them serious and some of them frivolous, and a few that are almost never used. I have several gmail accounts. One is anonymous, one is very obviously me and one is somewhere in between. But I also have email accounts in other domains including one from Apple.
Apple has a very nice service that generates a new email address for each website you register an ID and password. You use that anonymized email address so that the marketing people on the other side of things never know your real name. Sort of what you actually want - to be just a number lest they figure you out by matching your email to the huge subscriber lists available to marketers.
The Girl You Want
All the time I have been using the term ‘interwebz’ I have understood it for the term author Neal Stephenson calls ‘the miasma’. In his world from the novel Fall; Or Dodge In Hell he describes a future in which human minds can be embedded in silicon and they can ostensibly live forever in a virtual world. Only the rich can afford this world, of course. These are the same rich people who have personal staffs to fact check and vet news from the miasma of this future dystopian mediascape where insufferable attention economies rule. On the other side of reality there are the unbearably crude and brainwashed yokels who know nothing about the world beyond their lines of sight. They trust nary one computer.
Sooner or later, you will actually want an AI that actually knows all your preferences and does searching and other online stuff for you. The Genius classes will use them the same way they use the Ivy Leagues. Without the right personal AI, you will have slimmer chances to engage the future knowledge oriented meritocracies of our society, just like today where very few managers ride the bus to work. It will be possible, but it will be a huge waste of time, relatively speaking.
So you’re going to have to shop your AIs well. You’re going to have to develop the courage to trust but verify. You are going to have to distinguish the industrially capable products from those sold at the future equivalents of Walmart. And you’re probably going to have to engage in a bit of identity deception along the way. These are necessary conditions for you to get the goods of the future’s information economy. At all times bear in mind your Stoic capacities and defenses from mass hysteria.