This is difficult to write. Lil’ Wookie Katz is dying of lung cancer. It is not going well, he’s a sweetheart but he’s gone from 15 pounds to 7.
He’s such a good boy that it’s hard to think about taking him to be put down. But that is coming soon. We didn’t do the right thing by Magic, and he died in pain. We aren’t going to leave Wooks to that.
He’s going to go soon. One of the special things about him is that he’s a charmer. Everyone who meets him falls for him.
The vets have been writing notes to each other about him in their medical reports about how sweet and handsome he is. They gather to watch him eat. I get it. This is a very good boy.
If you’ve been charmed by him and want to see him before he goes, please come by soon and bring your best cuddles. He loves you back, unconditionally.
I’m going to send this out to people and put him where he belongs.
My buddy N is dating one of the owner’s of Noorman’s Kil in Williamsburg, right in my old neighborhood.
Billy, there in the middle, he’s the one.
Ugh, this man hurt my head.
Can I just say how exciting it is to go down in the basement, past the keg fridge and into the room where they keep the secret treasures of old and rare whiskey? I settled in for some Noah’s Mill, but Jason on the right ended up drinking a Vintage 17 Bourbon that was the best thing we found that night. So damn sweet and smooth, like a preacher looking for a donation. There was also a really good peat smoked stout but by that point I couldn’t be bothered to remember things like names or my tab.
I expect N to shortly die of whisky poisoning. Her boy has around 300 kinds. That can’t end well.
Last night I went down to the art and security meetup at NYU’s ITP.
We saw three rad projects.
1. Heather Dewey-Hagborg collects hair and cigarette butts from subway, streets in Williamsburg. She goes to Genspace, a bio hacking space in downtown Brooklyn to perform PCR and gel electrophoresis, etc. Sends off to get these DNA sets sequenced for specific phenotypic traits. Stuff like mitochondrial maternal region indicators ( ethnicity), eye color, hair color, freckles, etc.
Then she runs code against these to generate 3D models of how they might look. Prints those out using a full color 3d printer.
Great discussion about implications and the private or public nature of DNA vs its uses. We compared to browser DNA identified by EFF, ways government should regulate both. Also, how little we generally know about our own DNA.
2. Glenn Wester is trying to create true heads up display for augmented reality. He points out that all current AR hardware uses screens that block your vision. You don’t look at really augmented, you look at a picture of reality that is augmented.
He wants something more like a fighter jet heads up display. This involves having a tiny oled project onto a 45 deg angled beam splitter mirror. Sort of like your basic haunted house ghost room effect, but mounted to your head.
Here is me wearing it.
It works and is really cool. We tried to figure out ways to hack it, like getting light off of your clothes or trying to read reflections on your eyes, but nothing so far. Very cool if still unfashionable. I wondered if you could combine a dimmed laser picoprojector and fiber to get a low res display with less bulk up top. Â Amazingly, all of this costs around a hundred bucks.
3. Jordan Seiler presented his work removing outdoor advertising from towns. Some of this is physical work, and some is using AR.
An augmented view of a How & Nosm mural
He was VERY excited about the presentation from 2. We talked about analogues between his work and Add-Art. We got into who has the right to determine what you look at ( this is part of what underlies the justification for some graffiti). That led into wondering how folks might use AR for nefarious purposes. I brought up the possibility of racists editing out the looks of other people in the same way that buildings are treated. Jeff Crouse’s underdeveloped Unlogo Project came up as well, but we had a devil of a time remembering the name of the project.
Appropriation and remix is how we make new things. Chap hop is hip hop plus anachronistic victoriana. I first heard Professor Elemental’s “A Cup of Brown Joy” and it blew me away. Great rhymes, great subject, great presentation.
White rappers always face the history of rap music. It started as black music, just like rock. And just like early rockers, most white rappers adopt the poses and styles of black rappers that came before them. I like that chap hop borrows from hip-hop, a black music tradition, and adapts it in a fresh way. They take the structure and the mechanics, but substitute an entirely different culture and origin myth.
Good appropriation and remix cites sources, calls back to the places it came from. I like Mr B the Gentleman Rhymber’s “Straight Out of Surrey”. Totally it’s own thing, but totally tipping a bowler to the origin.
Like most rappers and rockers, these guys are presenting a facade, they are concerned with keeping it straight. But these guys aren’t trying to maintain “authenticity”. They aren’t trying to make their image fool you.
Hey, did you catch that cameo by Mr B? His rough treatment by Professor Elemental is another part of the callback. Rap battles and diss songs aren’t going to be the same in chap hop, but here is the Professor calling out Mr. B for biting his style.
Yeah – the whole battle is a great way for them to generate interest and sell albums… But isn’t that what most of the great rap rivalries turn into?
The thing that irks me about this fun and silly genre is that it takes rap completely from black people. Just like white people who loved black rock eventually turned it into a white only club, these guys have made chap hop representative of the ethnic monoculture of the victorians – white white white. If the whole thing is a laugh and no one is pretending this is really the 1800s, can we welcome in some color? Hopefully its a matter of time till we get some more chap hop performers – and some of them might bring in a different culture.
I’ll leave you with a great rap battle mixdown between the two:
Within two or three decades the difference between automated driving and human driving will be so great you may not be legally allowed to drive your own car, and even if you are allowed, it would be immoral of you to drive, because the risk of you hurting yourself or another person will be far greater than if you allowed a machine to do the work.
That moment will be significant not just because it will signal the end of one more human niche, but because it will signal the beginning of another: the era in which it will no longer be optional for machines to have ethical systems. Your car is speeding along a bridge at fifty miles per hour when errant school bus carrying forty innocent children crosses its path. Should your car swerve, possibly risking the life of its owner (you), in order to save the children, or keep going, putting all forty kids at risk? If the decision must be made in milliseconds, the computer will have to make the call.
Heady stuff, right?! We must not be allowed to drive our cars because machines can drive them better. We’ll get standards for car ethics from a government agency.
I’m reading Bruce Schneier’s excellent “Liars and Outliers” so let’s look at this from a security perspective. If you have mandated ethics for machines, I understand that as a single set of rules that cars have to obey. We would have to decide, as a society, if it is better to save ourselves or kill the 40 kids. We have to come up with an algorithm that a machine could use that we could agree with.
The trouble is, this isn’t how ethics work in our brains. Our minds aren’t algorithms. They are a quorum. We make decisions by having different parts of our brain shout their opinion. Self preservation shouts. Pity shouts. One of them shouts louder and that’s how we decide to swerve off the bridge. Or that’s how we end up living with our decision.
So this isn’t how you’d get a machine to make a decision. You need a replicable algorithm, something that you can hold up in court to avoid liability. The problem here is you have a system – and those are hackable. Hackable systems get hacked.
What happens when the choices your car will make are all predictable? People don’t have a regular response to situations, they are very variable. Your ethical car will be making predictable responses to situations. Predictable responses are easy to manipulate. So you can expect hacking of those situations. You can expect people to manipulate the ethical responses of your car to their own ends – and you won’t have an input because you aren’t as trustworthy as a car.
But this is kind of a smokescreen, isn’t it. The article isn’t really about the idea of driverless cars having to make decisions. Driverless cars can’t make a decision between the bus full of kids and your own life. So what is this article really about?
