Frontline: Digital Nation

Sick today… in between naps i happened to catch this episode of Frontline that very closely mirrors my hopes and concerns over the effect that the digital age is having on us. Like many of us, i find myself straddling both sides of the issues i choose to be passionate about. While I worry about how the multitasking generation’s minds are being affected for the worse, i have also helped companies push their 21st-century learning agendas… While condemning the internet for completely overhauling my memory and the ways i process information, I celebrate it’s existence every day with my complete admitted addiction to being plugged in. Are we doing ourselves a disservice? or merely evolving?

It covers everything from the education system to video games to virtual operations in the military. If you are in the mood for something ominous, hopeful and thought-provoking this evening, i highly recommend giving this one a shot.

(6 parts… total running time 1h 26m 13s)

Link to Frontline Website

Tags: frontline, internet, multitasking, virtual reality, VR

Botnet = Skynet?

So this morning i get to work and open my email to find yet another message from my deceased friend… or so the bot would like me to believe. Last summer my friend passed away and his facebook page was left online as a memorial to him. Yet in a sad and strangely foreboding way, his profile was hacked and this bot has been sending spam to everyone on his friend list. This time the bot scanned his profile and used the name of a friend or relative in the text of the message, in an ironic attempt to be more convincing…

Subject: Hi
“Abigail mentioned you might be interested in this BINSSERVICESSITE .INFO”

The first time this happened i was pretty disgusted and i made a big stink about it. This time i happened to be listening to a podcast about bots when it happened, and it struck me in a more profound way…

Today it dawned on me that an artificial intelligence has assimilated my friend like some kind of techno-doppelganger and is using his image/identity to fulfill it’s own agenda. If Skynet (in the terminator-sense) was really coming, why wouldn’t it use the face/identity of our friends/family like the aliens from Contact? Or could this be more like the biblical end-of-times in which the dead appear to rise from the grave as we get ever-closer to the next cosmic singularity-event?

I think if my friend were still here, he would be amused and fascinated at the ramifications… if not greatly annoyed.

That podcast:

Daniel Suarez (aka author Leinad Zeraus)
Daemon: Bot-mediated Reality
http://download.fora.tv/rss/Long_Now_Podcasts/podcast-2008-08-08-suarez.mp3
Friday, August 08, 2008 4:00 PM

Tags: 2012, AI, Botnet, Bots, singularity, Skynet, virtual reality, VR