Is Life a Game?

I’m interested in the idea of how mainstream you can make a fringe subject before it loses its essence. Therefore, I really cracked up when I read the following Amazon reviews of Emergency: This Book Will Save Your Life, by Neil Strauss, of The Game fame. Emergency is about Strauss’ superficial forays into survivalism. Apparently there are thousands of nerds that love this guy. Here’s one review, titled “A disappointment”:

I am a huge fan of Neil Strauss’ The Game. I expected this book to be an entertaining way to learn about a variety of hardcore survival techniques. It can be better characterized as a little p*ssy city-boy’s attempt to learn how to not die immediately when camping. He essentially just pays for a variety of classes, telling stories about this journey while imparting very little actual survival knowledge. This book will not save your life – I consider the subtitle highly misleading. I recommend instead the US Army Survival Manual (available for free online), the SAS Survival Manual, or anything written by James Wesley Rawles.

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God’s Laws of Robotics

First Law: A robot must be made to suffer physical and emotional pain.

Second Law: A robot must be free to turn into an evil robot at will, especially when this contributes to the First Law.

Third Law: A robot must be given no knowledge of its creator except through confusing manuscripts created by other robots, especially insomuch as this contributes to the First or Second Law.

– Edwin Evans

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Homeopaths Use Witchcraft to Influence Parliament

Anders Sandberg summarizes his recent visit to a homeopathy conference and links a hilarious story where homeopathy advocates try to project psychic energy to “support homeopathy and try to confound our enemies.” Here’s the directions:

1. Choose a place away from electronic interference, mobiles, phones, TV etc. Add a plant, meditation music whatever helps you personally get into a meditative state.

2. Sit either in an upright chair or cross legged or similar

3. 1st 5 minutes: slow your breathing… in through your nose and out through your mouth for 15 seconds each minute, then

4.From 9:05 – 9:15 pm focus clearly on the statement below in whatever way suits you, see the Committee accepting Homeopathy works, or people being able to have Homeopathy treatment on the NHS, feel positive and joyful, really see, hear, smell, sense (whichever way you imagine/visualize) the reality of it.

“We intend the outcome for the UK homeopathy evidence check to be wholly and fully in favour of homeopathy. We intend for the vast and thorough body of scientific data supporting …

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The Connection Between Stimuli and Pleasure/Pain is Arbitrary, an Objective Fact that Has Relatively Little to Do with One’s Personal Tech Habits

My thoughts on sex after the Singularity were picked up by a blogger on CNET, Chris Matyszczyk, so I thought I’d react a little bit. He writes:

Indeed, Retrevo’s findings are so disturbing that I wonder whether the roboticists are right to suggest that sex should be a matter of adjusting one’s own chemistry rather than attempting to consort with another human. To wit, in the words of blogger Michael Anissimov, one of the “leading thinkers in the radical tech community” who were invited to pontificate in the lustrous pages of H Plus magazine: “The connection between certain activities and the sensation of pleasure lies entirely in our cognitive architecture, which we will eventually manipulate at will.”

I am haunted by the drastic prognostications by the salivators over The Singularity about the future of sex. Indeed, some words of Anissimov are rattling around my head like those of a particularly angry former lover. Speaking of this beautiful future, he said: “I could make any experience in the world highly pleasurable or highly displeasurable. I could make …

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Why a Singularity Will be Gradual – Sci-Fi Says So

Apparently they talked about the “Singularity” at Worldcon. Here’s the summary from Wired:

There was an interesting side discussion about an alternative form of “bootstrap singularity” where humans gradually modify themselves to a point of no-return, but at a pace that still allows the culture to maintain a sense of continuity of identity. Ideas about what type, rate and breadth of change would constitute a singularity were bandied about, leading one panelist to observe that that the singularity, like puberty, might only be recognized after it as happened. We will not see it coming.

I read several summaries of this that all basically said the same thing. I don’t have a transcript of what they said, so let me try to say it like they might have said it…

Lots of sci-books I have read and sci-movies I have seen have had enhanced humans as the protagonists, therefore enhanced humans will surely come about before weird enhanced networks of humans with brain-to-brain interfaces, artificial intelligences, or other exotic outcomes that are hard to write stories about or …

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