The Melting World

As part of the Cultural and New Media Studies Class, I am to keep a journal of things I discover as I go through the week’s readings, providing links to anything that sparked my interest or sparked some sort of reaction in me.

This week the topic is Science Fictions and AI (artificial intelligence), something I have never been very interested in, as it reminds me of greasy-faced teenaged boys with short-sleeved plaid shirts and junkfood diets. Maybe this is because I used to be a waitress on the night shift in high school, and the place from midnight to 4AM was frequented by Dungeons and Dragons fans (bad tippers, always too immersed to think about reality).

Some short links to some bizarre stuff. To show my lack of awareness of how far computer animation has gone (although I was amazed by the Matrix Animation film released, was it 1 or 2 years ago?): There is actually a trend of people building virtual humans to suit their fantasies. There is book by Peter Plantec (his name seems virtual to me as well) to teach you how to build your very own virtual person, with software included. For info click here

The same website, http://www.kurzweilai.net/, provides many links to people deeply involved in the building artificial humans and they argue about what consciousness is and what thinking is and what it means to be ‘alive’…things that frankly seem quite scary (because I know so little about it and because I don’t like to think of a machine as human–I have enough guilt about stepping on ants and dandelions, sigh). Lastly, there is a virtual woman there, with whom you can have live chats (Internet Explorer only), called Ramona, who is the alter-ego of the web site’s creator, Ray Kurzweil. As I personally hate using IE (long live Mozilla!), I only bothered thus far to look at the videos of her performing at a Tech conference, under the Learn about Ramona section.

Here I want to rant a bit about Ramona: first, she looks like a transvestite trying to impersonate Monica Lewinsky, and the creators dress her in tight red pirate laced t-tops and fishnets: very ugly and unattractive (but obviously someone thinks she’s sexy…sigh). Also, she is given that stereotypical (can a virtual human be stereotyped, hmmm…) enormous, disproportionate upper half. I think these creators need to take a walk outside and think outside the box more in their aesthetic choices. But, of course, she may be the perfect virtual dream of someone (of many?)!