GENOMICON

B-Reel Performs Mind Tricks from B-Reel & B-Reel Films on Vimeo.

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I quite like the idea of mind-controlled things because it’d mean you don’t have to wave your arms around like that Tom Cruise in bloody Minority Report with the see-through screens, which are also a stupid idea. We could become completely vegetative like those wan looking white people in the pond downstairs. I’m almost like that now as it happens.

etc.

So obviously I was totally wrong about how popular I thought these things would be. I still think they’re a daft idea – and if you buy from Apple, you don’t own it, you’re just renting it from Skynet.

Still… mind-controlled games.

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Reminds me of this company I used to work for that did stuff for severely disabled people – who were capable of hitting one big red button at a time – that was their entire interface… but it’s enough to communicate and play games with.

Maybe it’s not a matter of making a machine that can read thoughts… maybe it’s a matter of making an interface that a brain can grow into… learn to use, just like it learns to use the rest of us.

God I miss German Hipsters

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You don’t really get hipsters around here. You get the opposite of whatever a hipster is – which is bad.

Anyway, these ones are driving a car with their minds, which is cool. Seems kindof limited though – as an interface. Like talking a dog. Up. Down. Roll-over. Fetch etc. Who’d have thought brains would be so primitive. There’s got to be a better way. I think the problem is that conciously, we think in language and language is kindof waffly. It’s main purpose is talking to other humans and dogs. There isn’t a single thought that can say “make a 23 degree left curve, accelerating so the centrifugal pull gently increases to about .5 of a g, then gently declines to zero again as we pull out of the curve after about 30 metres.

But you can with direct brain-motor-coordination.

I kindof get a feeling that this stuff won’t really take off until nanotech gets underway, which allow us to make distributed neural laces composed of loads of tiny mesh-networked sensors like the one I was on about a couple of days ago.

Because I’m danged if I’m going to have a jack plugged into my spinal column.

A sub $100 (ok, only by $.01, but still sub) EEG machine that you can connect to your iPhone and your um… brain.

Accompanied by some of the worst promotional drek that I’ve ever seen…

As soon as you see the words “only limited by your imagination”, you know you’re talking to some mindless marketing-droid… only this is a cheap marketing droid because it’s trying to push the “intelligence” buttons (like BMW do so well) at the same time as having blonde birds in short skirts forced to act like side-show magician’s assistants, or shopping-mall cigarette promotion standabouts.

As far as I can tell it has 3 sensors – one over each ear, and one over your pineal eye. Maybe that’s enough… I’d be surprised though. There seem to be a whole mass of similarly simple ones in google-images, but dotted among them are these frightening looking things

Which tend to make me suspect that there might be a whole lot more to this than a simple 3-sensor (or even one sensor) device is capable of. Still, early beginnings, and at least they’ve got an API, even if they don’t know how to talk to their audience. Reminds me of those recent AR.Drone adverts…

Sorry? Who the fuck do you think you’re talking to? I mean who the fuck even LOOKS at advertising when making a buying decision? You know you’re being lied to. These people are fucking idiots.

I mean check this out:

Even if you don’t speak Italian, it tells you far more than any of the “advertising” videos for these things.

Advertising is absolutely and completely irrelevant to the buying decision, and I know, because I buy stuff. A recommendation from someone you trust is the only thing that matters. Everything else is guesswork or an annoying distraction.

Two things today… which I know are connected, but I don’t know how.

1) Tank Hat

2) Emotional Recorder

Both of these are early steps towards things that are absolutely inevitable… I think what links them is that they’re movements towards remote exoskeletons. Like Sleep Dealer… or (taking it further) that one where Bruce Willis is all shiney… Surrogates. A brain in a jar controlling a landscape littered with toys.

The inevitability is enhanced (and made evident) by the fact that both of these are DIY projects – based on the new availability of EEG headsets, and whatever it is that has gone into that tank to get it to go – wifi (or whatever), sensors, motors etc etc. We’re not waiting for corporations to make these things for us – we want them so bad we’re making them ourselves.

I tell yer – there’s a relationship-made-in-heaven between hackers everywhere and the Chinese Shanzai geniuses. There’s a very distinct possibility of getting things to market before Western corporations have cottoned on – because the innovation doesn’t happen in corporations, it happens at the edges… the market-research isn’t done by corporations, it’s done by the blogosphere, and the Chinese can turn out copies of things at prices that are a tiny fraction of what are possible in the west. (eg: the other day my dad bought a fibre-optic lamp… it had 4 colours that you could switch between, and had it’s own rotating colour-change program. Retailing for $2(NZ). How the fuck do you make that for $2?)

Mind you – how the does the west make enough money to buy anything, if everything can be done cheaper elsewhere?

And the answer to that one I think… comes down to a serious re-think about what we actually need money for. Because we do need it – but… for all sorts of things now, we don’t… and maybe (just maybe) the primacy that we’ve given to fiat-currency, is a mistake. Maybe the whole model is a mistake. Maybe the way we’re managing scarce-resources is wrong. Well, it’s definitely wrong isn’t it? Half of us are fucking dying. That can’t be right.

There’s an interesting concept here – Basic Life Package (blip). If we can make multi-colour fibre-optic lamps for $2, we should be able to make BLiPs (covering the first level of Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs)

at a price that doesn’t… well, kill us.

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By the way, the reason the old order is being kicked on its side, is that people are fulfilling the higher levels of that pyramid by creating things themselves. There’s a lot of fuss about people distributing other people’s stuff for free… but actually people will more than happily create for free as well… only it’s not really “for free”… it’s just free of money. They’re paid in benefits described in the top 2 levels of that pyramid.

Calling it an “attention” economy, is kindof missing what it’s about – the “attention economy” is an attempt to turn “abundance economy” stuff into fiat currency… into an economy controlled by scarcity. It doesn’t really work – although I think the illusion of it working is what’s funding a lot of progress at the moment. But I think it’s a bubble. I think advertising is a bubble.