Machine Control Now

Some BRC person e-mailed today with approval for our Burning Man theme camp, Machine Control Compound.  Brittany and I had worked on the application like it was for getting into Harvard.  We even got advice on filling out the form from these guys that run the Suspended Animation camp.  And then we didn’t hear anything from Burning Man people, yet everyone else but us was posting announcements about getting their theme camps placed.  So it made me a little anxious, but now we have 50 x 100 foot parcel of land to build a temporary compound on with help from friends.  It will be like the Branch Davidian compound in Waco–but sexier, with robots, and hypnosis.  Okay, it will be nothing like the Branch Davidian compound.

Have you ever seriously considered giving up on human nature?

In a way, it’s something more terrible than suicide.  It’s the idea that your entire species is not worth having around.  Imagine George Bailey was shown a glimpse of Bedford Falls without any humans in it.  Maybe the whole town was run by a bunch of otters or robots or snails.  No Uncle Billys or Mr. Potters.  And then picture our man George, in one of his tired and angry moments, saying, “Well, phooey on you all!  I say phooey on the whole screwed-up mess.  Why… we’d all be better off if the human race never showed up in the first place!”

I won’t trot out all the reasons why people lose faith in human nature, but at the root of most of them is the idea that we are self-doomed.  Maybe we create societies where a large number of people are unhappy and uncared for.  Maybe we will blow ourselves up with a nuclear bomb.  Maybe the world will heat up from all the particles we’ve spewed in the air and slowcook us.  It seems to a lot of people, me included, that we’re not the best stewards of our own futures.

Self-doomed.  It can make you weep.  ”Why do you keep hitting yourself?”  There is no other army to claim victory over.  No opposing team to beat in a glorious stadium.  No external threat to rally heroically against.  You can split up the humans into different groups so you’re on the good side and others on the bad.  But if you pay attention, you’ll notice people in your group, maybe even you, doing the same stupid shit you hate.   A thoughtful person is going to smack hard against this idea sooner or later: “them” and “us” divisions are artificial.  It’s really just “us”, the humans, and the humans aren’t doing so great.

What I’m noticing lately is a lot of people that are particularly distrustful of their fellow humans.  And interestingly, the more radical that conviction is, the more likely they are to be in one of two camps:

* Luddite – Do things simply, slowly, without the aid of technology.  Farm your own veggies, hang your clothes out to dry, turn off the TV, fuck Facebook.  Tech solutions waste more resources and put power in the hands of corporations and institutions already to blame for our problems.  Reliance on those neatly-packaged products has lost us an important connection to nature and how the world works.

* Technologist – The big, threatening problems will be solved by resourceful people wearing coveralls and lab coats.  And the root problem of humans making messes in the first place will be fixed by transcending human nature.  For some, this salvation comes from equipping humans with powerful tools that change how they interact with the world.   For others,  a literal transformation is wanted: pump us full of nanites, hack our genes, plug our brains directly into the internet.

The first camp says we’ve gone too far.  The second camp says we haven’t gone far enough.  Neither one is happy with the current definition of what it means to be a human.

I met a lady on the internet recently that prefers the world be run by artificially intelligent machines, with humankind losing its place as the dominant species.  In fact, she claims to be working on early steps of this solution now.  She’s a successful entrepreneur, owns data centers, and plans to throw a lot of time and money at this work.  Maybe she will.

Personally, I feel like some confused combination of luddite and technologist–ready to be amazed and delighted by wonders of man, yet watching that my soul isn’t stolen and replaced with something cheap–polyvinyl chloride, maybe.  I love humans, but I don’t trust the things they do.

-Erik

My friend, Touch, has started working on the choreography for the next Machine Control event. And “choreography” is the right word. So far, the programs have moved subjects along independent paths, but for our next event, the subjects will be touching each other sensually as part of their instructions. To write this kind of script, you have to model in advance the positions of subjects at each moment in the program. I.e. where each subject is, which direction he is facing, if he is sitting/standing, etc. I imagine it will be a fairly challenging task, even for Touch.

Somewhere down the line, maybe this year, I’d like to have software making decisions and issuing instructions like this in real-time. So far, we have been simulating a machine intelligence controlling people. But I’ve got plans to do it for real.

I often use hypnosis in the Machine Control projects. It’s a useful tool to put people in a state where they follow instructions without worry or self-analysis. Hypnosis is also good hook to get people to participate. Everybody has some kind of idea about what hypnosis is. So if I say that the weird thing I do has got hypnosis in it, then I can spend less time convincing and explaining.

Still, there is an uncomfortable amount of baggage that comes with it. I’m a skeptic with a scientific mindset. I spent a lot of my youth around religious authorities that were fakes and liars. I’ve seen these swindlers work crowds and perform “miracles”. It took the first 20 years of my life to get my head clean of that crap, and I now have a quick-rising hatred of anyone that sets out to fool others.

Which means I would hate myself if I fooled people too.

Hypnosis works best when the subject believes it will work. If the subject perceives the hypnotist as being masterful, then the subject is much more likely to go under and get the full effect. There is a dirty secret here too: Sometimes, the subject will even cover for the hypnotist, thinking things like “I want to be part of a successful hypnosis with this guy, and bringing up my doubts about what just happened will undermine that.” It generally helps the hypnotist to assert his prowess and always be optimistic about what he is undertaking.

But it isn’t hard to cross over to dishonesty, I.e. “I can hypnotize anyone,” or “There is no possible way you can resist.” And the false idea of the hypnotist having this kind of power can in itself be appealing and sexy to both subject and hypnotist.

So I’m trying not to be one of those douchey hypnotists that makes claims beyond actual capabilities. You may not go into a proper trance during one of the machine control experiments. But that’s okay–the programs are designed to be enjoyable even if you aren’t fully under. And Google this common statement to understand what is really going on: “all hypnosis is self-hypnosis”.

Touch says to me, “we should do something with people groping each other.” Or it was something close to that. And I agreed with him, because I like groping, and my thoughts were already heading that way for “what’s next”.

The machine voice says “Command: put your hands on subject A’s breasts. BEEP.” And someone else, under similar machine direction, simultaneously starts rubbing your ass, at the precise time you touch subject A. Possibly even individual strokes could be orchestrated to make some unnatural clockwork orgy of erotic massage.

That could not fail to be fascinating. Touch and I are going to talk soon and do some planning.

For the uninitiated, (which means practically everybody on the planet) Machine Control is the idea of a human giving up control to a machine, computer, prerecorded program, or other set of non-human-initiated instructions.  A popular example of this is the GPS navigation systems people have in their cars…  “Turn left on Pine Street”  …and you just do it without thinking much about it.  I’m curious about what is possible here, particularly from an artistic and entertainment perspective.  The act of doing what a machine requests implies an odd sort of subservience.  Myself and others have run a number of interesting experiments, and more are planned.  I will certainly post more about them here.

I’ve been posting about Machine Control stuff in some other places to get the word out, but I wanted to have my own site that isn’t tied to any particular online community.  I.e. I can refer somebody over to here to look at photos or something without making him sign up for an account.