On the fly image transformation by using AI, turning winter in to summer! here
Check this out : Any voice can be imitated based on one minute of sample info..
Human beings are individuals, but in the eyes of some they are tools. Tools to destory products, tools that need to be swayed and conditioned to the task, but tools none the less. What us humans have to remain free individuals is our effort to remain able to escape artificial reality if we would choose to do so. We could visit nature instead of watching disney or going to the zoo. We could find out ourselves what mechanical or electronics one can develop or what chemistry has to offer, with only some reference books. Science is something anyone can do, it only requires focus and self control (which are equivalent). But it becomes more and more difficult for humans to escape becoming used.
Virtual beings are edging closer to reality
One can basically imagine a study that will classify humans in different ability vocabularies that will be assigned a certain safe identity. You have all kinds, to start the job descriptions, then you can be singer songwriter or rapper or sculptor or yoga teacher, even homeless person can be seen as more or less standardized for which there can be a standard approach, with instructions for exploitation. These range from legal to illegal. We see a war on drugs, but we don’t see that the cash flows through big american banks and Wallstreet. These big banks have small subsidiaries with a different name that loanshark in the poor neigborhoods f.i. Industry does not care about human lives, only lifestyle of the owners.
So what does a western human see :
- Celebrity culture
- All kinds of irrelevant accidents
- The scare of terrorism
- People living the dream
- Their mobile and gaming experience
Reality is already shifting, because while one can see IS crimes on TV, IS also pops up in crime series, where a plausible scenario is spun out. IS being used as entertainment. Reality creeps into the fantasy we watch on TV, and soon who knows what is real.
Kremlin duped by state media fake images
Simulation and graphical rendering software is creeping into the media streams, so that before long we can not tell what is real and what not. Augmented reality means that you insert images into a video or field of view of a person in such a way that it seems part of the reality people see. It can be totally seamless, 3d and still not really there.
Adding stuff that isn’t really there
Simulation of facial expression and 3d modelling has also passed the treshold of realism. One can take the face of a well known presenter and use it to say anything we want. It can be a lions head, just some person with locator buttons on his/her face to feed the rendering of the face. That is to say, with AI even this changes, and it doesn’t have to be deep AI whatever that means.
So on a standard night you could be emersed in a 3d VR experience in which actors have the faces of your friends and real life events and threats are used to keep you focussed without actually teaching you how to deal with these threats.
If people constantly wear a visual augmentation device it will be used to inject reality also when they don’t notice it. It will allow personalization of the experience of reality.
But wait! The threat may also be a fabrication. Any US or European citizen watchin IS crimes is almost equivalent to the event that some brazilian favela guy you never seen knocks on your door one night, stumbles in and starts elaborating about how the drug gang members killed another gang member, blood everywhere. It doesn’t really matter to our lives.Why do we know about it? Because it gives us something to think about, but really most people are not involved in the reality of IS nor will they have any use for the knowledge of its existence. Next : The defincit, oil prices..
What does it mean to grow up with video and not being able to tell what is real or not?
But what about the real threats? Water shortages, food shortages, oil shortages, climate change. Of course those are not things that will bring profit to anyone, war really is one of the few catastrophies that can make people rich. Real threats don’t sell, although climate change has been selling a lot of solar panels, which is the right response. The threat of our planet warming much more is not communicated in any significant way though. We are cruising for a 6 degree temp increase that will be irreversible, 50% of the people (4 Billion) not having enough water, toxic oceans that breath death over the land..
By now the scenario we will actually see unfold is that problems around the globe will grow due to the continued use of fossil fuels, kept in power by fossil fuel lakeys in western governments, until the window of opportunity has passed. The public will be entertained by all kinds of fantasies in the mean time. Climate politicians will announce victories, but none will be able to do anything significant, because the public is lost, lazy, detached, undereducated etc. etc.
4 Billion face severe water shortages
We like reality tv because it teaches us something we can’t learn in our rented appartments or mortgaged houses. If it is a survival show then you can see some just won’t make it. Even if there is fish to catch and fruit to eat or wood to build a shelter. In a group you always have the ones that start organizing and the ones that lay back. In shows with two participants this doesn’t end well on ocassion. Survival requires fitness and focus.
Climate change will make a lot of victims, as is already doing amongst animal species, as the fossil fuel sector is already doing through air pollution. Most of these will fall in the poor countries, as the World Bank predicted a 50% reduction in rainfall in Africa by 2020, and we have already seen war and migration because of changing weather patterns in the Middle East (Syria). In the ‘rich’ (well oiled) economies the risk is that when a calamity strikes (like all out cyber warfare or a fossil fuel obstructing conflict) the people it affects will have very little skills to deal with it, maybe even be totally unrealistic about what to do. Just a bunch of confused tools in a system that ran out of gas.
The capture of facial expressions and transfer to an avatar. Better examples exist.
Perhaps it should be a test that people spend a limited amount of time exposed to virtual reality, soaps, sitcoms, simply because it will become so immersive that there is almost no reason to come out of it. We are entering a new phase in AI research with new devices like glass based massive permanent -no energy- data storage and memristors making the CPU/RAM design obsolete, allowing computers that need no power retain state.
The design of virtual beings will not remain confined to virtual reality, and 3d printing introduces fast and super precise avenues of replicating individual features.
How will people discern super realistic avatars that are inserted in their visual field having all kinds of tailorable properties who’s behaviour is linked to a vast cloud based behavioural control algorithm. Who is to say people won’t fight to keep their avatars alive once they have become emotionally attached to them. What if you switch off and you trigger a revolution for the release of the avatars by confused and emotionally addicted consumers?
Realism is a source of economic loss
Economic forces will push people into their tool mode, where most of their behaviour is economically usefull, which is completely different from either ‘fun’ or ‘benificial’. A sense of reality is increasingly undesirable, like a sense of time is undesirable in casino gamblers. You don’t want people to understand what fossil fuel is doing if you want them to function well in a fossil fuel powered system. The lure of pushing people out of reality into a gamified matrix is real, and at least a large part of westen societies will fall victim to it if we don’t require people to stay at least 60% real.