NAUGHTY, NAUGHTY AVATAR!
In October Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder and CEO, renamed his company Meta. He also announced that he believed so much in the metaverse that he would invest billions in this Next Big Thing.
Red alert, red alert! Tech billionaire out to add even more bucks to his obscene wealth. Other tech tycoons are also feeding with the frenzy of a Zuma supporter at a beggar’s banquet.
The metaverse is a virtual reality world that flesh-and-blood people enter through augmented reality headsets. Their avatars do everything from attending gym classes and shopping to participating in meetings.
Avatars will be able to wear designer clothes (paid for in real money) and live on expensive real estate (also paid for in real money).
The term metaverse was first coined in US author Neal Stephenson’s 1992 cyberpunk novel, Snow Crash. The protagonist is a hacker who is able to jump between a dystopian Los Angeles and the “Metaverse” — a virtual world where avatars interact.
Commentators are already flagging metaverse ethics. Seriously.
If your avatar punches my avatar, can I take you to court in the metaverse? Rich people’s problems …
HOOVERING UP THE ART WORLD
British artist Barney McCann is an activist at the forefront of the artificial intelligence (AI) movement, pushing electronic boundaries in pursuit of creative expression. He created the world’s first AI-generated typeface, named “Obsolete”, but is lately best known for his series “Computer Generated Organism”.
In an Instagram interview with the Sunday Times, McCann said his work could be thought of as “augmented rather than virtual — as in it’s to support the physical experience and expand our understanding of it rather than replace it”.
In an early foray into AI, McCann programmed an old vacuum cleaner with software able to generate an infinity of biological forms and patterns. Then he gave it a paintbrush. But this is not just a gimmick, nor an attempt to bamboozle art lovers.
“My theory is that in artwork, the viewer can immediately see the strengths and weaknesses and nuances that have come from using AI processes,” said McCann.
“Lots of my AI artworks are supposed to represent the composite idea or feel or emotion of the subject rather than a visual re-rendering, and by taking a huge data set of ‘plant’ you really can create a feel of generic ‘plant’, which I think is incredibly interesting.”
So interesting that McCann’s moving works have been displayed on giant outdoor screens from London to Paris to Tokyo to Times Square in New York, stopping viewers in their tracks wherever they appear.
SOME ROBOTS ARE NOT ROLLING OFF THE SHELF
Pepper the humanoid robot was unveiled to great fanfare by Japanese company SoftBank Group in 2014 and has seen many improvements and much interest since. Touted as the first AI device “with emotion”, Pepper is cute, friendly, clever and polite. S/he was even tested on customers in SA by Nedbank.
Pepper is supposed to be “sophisticated enough” to handle tasks performed by clerks, tellers, receptionists and translators in the public and private sectors.
But, as Bloomberg put it: “While the robot was capable of expressing human-like body language, maintaining eye contact and engaging in limited small talk, it never caught on. Now, it looks like Pepper — assembled by Taiwanese iPhone-maker Hon Hai Precision Industry — is destined to join Honda Motor’s soccer-playing Asimo and Sony Group’s QRIO humanoids as the latest cool-but-impractical robot to come out of Japan.”
With unsold Peppers cluttering up the factory spice racks, SoftBank has ceased production of its handy little helper.
Should sales improve, more robots may start to roll off the production line, but it seems the world is not quite ready for robotic assistance, even at the reasonable price of $1,790 (about R28,000) per unit. Perhaps we should take future predictions of a robot-run world with a pinch of salt.
PRETTIER THAN PEPPER, AS GIFTED AS A HOOVER
Anyone who has heard of Robot Ai-Da will understand why Japan’s commercial humanoid robotic helper has not thrilled the world as much as its creators hoped.
The brainchild of British scientist Aidan Meller, Ai-Da is a hyperrealistic robot with cameras in her “eyes”, a robotic arm and algorithms programmed into her “brain” to interpret works of classical literature and come up with similar stuff herself.
In November, Ai-Da’s public poetry performance — she composed stanzas in homage to Dante Alighieri after swallowing all his works like a snack packet of microchips — had the Oxford audience cheering.
Ai-Da also painted an artwork that was included in an exhibition dedicated to Dante at the Pyramids of Giza in Egypt.
She almost didn’t make it to her own show — concerned about the cameras in her eyes, customs authorities arrested and detained the pretty machine until it could be proved she was not a spy.
Having access to our own personal Ai-Das one day is not hugely likely. Her “dad”, Meller, also downplayed her gifts, telling CNN that developing her had not made him and his team see her as “human”, rather, “it’s shown us how robotic we are as humans”.
WHAT’S DOWN WITH THE WORLD?
There might a lot of fun forecast in our future but we can’t ignore the gloom. A commentator with much to say about the future of politics, democracy and common life is philosopher Michael J Sandel, whose latest book, The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good?, has caused many minds to question the dubious concept of meritocracy.
Sandel writes: “We do not have much equality of condition today. Public spaces that gather people together across class, race, ethnicity, and faith are few and far between. Four decades of market-driven globalisation has brought inequalities of income and wealth so pronounced that they lead us into separate ways of life.
“Those who are affluent and those of modest means rarely encounter one another in the course of the day. We live and work and shop and play in different places; our children go to different schools.
"And when the meritocratic sorting machine has done its work, those on top find it hard to resist the thought that they deserve their success and that those on the bottom deserve their place as well. This feeds a politics so poisonous and a partisanship so intense that many now regard marriage across party lines as more troubling than marrying outside the faith.”
This feeds a politics so poisonous and a partisanship so intense that many now regard marriage across party lines as more troubling than marrying outside the faith
— Michael Sandel
The point of pointing out the bad is to initiate a search for the good, and while there’s no Pollyanna panacea, Sandel also writes: “The meritocratic conviction that people deserve whatever riches the market bestows on their talents makes solidarity an almost impossible project.
"For why do the successful owe anything to the less-advantaged members of society?
“The answer to this question depends on recognising that, for all our striving, we are not self-made and self-sufficient; finding ourselves in a society that prizes our talents is our good fortune, not our due. A lively sense of the contingency of our lot can inspire a certain humility: ‘There, but for the grace of God, or the accident of birth, or the mystery of fate, go I.’
“Such humility is the beginning of the way back from the harsh ethic of success that drives us apart. It points beyond the tyranny of merit toward a less rancorous, more generous public life.”
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