An Unexpected Audience: IEEE Metaverse Congress Part 1

This is a follow up to a post I made in late September after catching the final half hour of the third IEEE Congress on the Metaverse. IEEE, Institute of Electronics and Electrical Engineers, dates back to 1884. Their first technical meeting, mostly of telegraphers, was held in Philadelphia in the fall of that year.

This past June, IEEE issued a Global Initiative on Ethics in Extended Reality Report: Metaverse and its Governance and held the first in a series of webinars called Metaverse Congresses. I found out about the series and caught the tail end of the third one. You can watch the recording of it here.

They must have had me in their email list, because I got an automated message for the fifth session. They alternate between English and Chinese, and the fourth had been in Chinese. I wasn’t sure that it was worth setting aside time to watch, but when the reminder came up I ended up logging in and realized I was the ONLY non-presenter participant. Incredible. So I stuck it out for all three hours and screen recorded most of it. The last half hour or so were dropped, unfortunately. During that wrap up Mr. Coughlin asserted that having a permanent record of our lives would help make us better people and more understandable to others. Near the end, Yu Yuan stated he believed we were already in a simulation, and the creation of a very high quality engineered version was his personal goal. 

I’m not sure how it came to pass that I ended up in a chat with the father of wearable computing, the grandfather of virtual reality, the incoming president of the IEEE, and the head of their Standards Association, not to mention professors from MIT Media Lab and Cambridge and executives from Qualcomm and Epic Games. I laid out my case, trying my best to represent the interests of the people of the world who have only the vaguest idea of what extended reality portends. 

Over the past couple of days I added supplementary documentation to my comments: screenshots, reports, and videos that have informed my thinking. But after having spent a lot of time on it, I realized the images actually disrupted the flow and made it hard to read. So, I decided to do two versions. This one is just the comments, and the second will have the supplement for those who want to do a deeper dive. It’s sort of a one-way conversation, but if you watch the screen recordings, you’ll possibly be able to knit my thoughts together with what was being presented. 

Again, I tried not to make anyone wrong. I hope to appeal to people’s better natures. All of us are living in personal silos, custom plot lines. That’s what “knowledge management” is about, and I can only imagine what it will be like once the tokenized, augmented attention economy is in full swing. Yu Yuan asked to be in touch, so I sent him an email that I will share as a separate post. I have not gotten a response yet. 

The incoming IEEE president asked me, “Who are you, what do you do?”

I’m a mom from Philadelphia. I read storied landscapes. I leave behind hearts. I believe that in the end love will win.

For some reason the screen recording on the Youtube upload below is fuzzy. There’s a crisper version on Archive.org that you can access, and even download, here. Mostly I did it for my own documentation purposes, which is why I included the names and comments. I suspect they’ll put out their own cleaned up recording in a month or so.

I’d love to know your thoughts on how I represented the interests of natural life on Earth. I’m simply grateful to have had the chance to put these ideas in the field.

Me To All Panelists: 12:15 PM

I’ve read a paper that describes cyber-physical systems as an “outside-in” robot.  Literally the goal is for us to live inside the robot and allow sensors to extract our data to train AI. Given work in consciousness studies and neuroeconomics around discernable neural activity (readiness potential) that precedes each human action, do you have concerns that natural life could lose free will within these digital environments? It seems we could easily become programmed “agents” in some global complex adaptive systems experiment. Perhaps the interface would be so seamless that we wouldn’t even realize it.

 

Me To All Panelists: 12:27 PM

Is the Educational Metadata effort meant to bring tele-presence / haptic robotic labor to scale? It seems this is what blockchain transcripts and digital twins are about, also soulbound tokens. Do you think it’s ethical to advance this with no labor protections in place? Most people have no idea what is coming. Shouldn’t there be informed consent about this new “future of work” model where AI decides people’s opportunities based on skills badges, including behavioral compliance?

 

Me To All Panelists: 12:31 PM

My research indicates there is quite a bit of activity around human capital investment – people being traded as digital futures commodities. This will come with blockchain finance agreements like income sharing agreements (ISAs). We saw what happened with collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) in the 2007-08 real estate crash. I am very concerned about the use of digital twins. An example is the Learning Economy Foundation’s “LearnCard” digital twin program, backed by the World Bank, where global finance interests bet on educational achievement. Is this something you all are discussing? It would be terrible for the next “Big Short” to be vulnerable children, right?

 

Me To All Panelists: 12:37 PM

I’m assuming people don’t have equal access to the same pool of information. Jeremy Pitt and Josiah Ober speak often of knowledge management being key to controlling the shift to digital life. Just like those “rose-colored” glasses, what will it be like to live in a world where information access is controlled by tokens and permissions at a granular scale? Like Vernor Vinge’s “Rainbows End” everyone will live in their own “view” through “wearing.” Someone or something (AI?) will control access. Have we thought seriously about what that will mean for society?

 

Me To All Panelists: 12:38 PM

Another issue is that I don’t think most people are aware of the data that is harvested from wearables, including emotion. To what degree are we “teaching” machines how to perform “humanity?”

 

Yu Yuan to Everyone: 12:39 PM

Free Will is extremely important in my view. I would try to address it in Panel 2 today.

 

Me To All Panelists: 12:40 PM

I noticed some of the funders backing Leif, a developer of alt-student loan products, came out of Warby Parker (and Wharton), so this is all making a lot of sense. Your glasses as your minder, just like our phones. This should terrify people TBH. How are we allowing this to move forward as normal?

 

Me To All Panelists: 12:41 PM

AR means that we will live under total surveillance. We will have to be watched from space or our environments at all times or the whole “persistent virtual world” stuff will fall apart.

 

Me To All Panelists: 12:43  PM

Augmentation means we are essentially outsourcing our brain to a device. The next generation will not be expected to retain any knowledge. Rather they will be trained to rely on a machine to direct them. At any time, information can be disappeared or altered. Thus, there is no “reality” or “history.” There will only be the present in the XR rat maze.

 

Yu Yuan to Everyone: 12:45 PM

Re labor protection and behavioral compliance, IMHO rulemakers will need assistance from standards developers.

 

Me To All Panelists: 12:47 PM

What do the ophthalmologists say?

 

Me To All Panelists: 12:48 PM

I wish we would all just admit this is about turning humans into sensors for AI -interoperable blockchain-based learning agents for the Singularity. It’s being sold to us as a solution for climate crisis and poverty, when really we’re just training our silicon replacements.

 

Thomas Coughlin to Everyone: 12:50 PM

Thinking about some of the discussions it seems to me that we need some discussion on security, root of trust and rules allowing people to know what they are allowing and respecting their choices on what they allow.

 

Me To All Panelists: 12:50 PM

I’m just having a hard time understanding why we would want to transfer our personal agency to see the world to a mediated device when we really don’t understand who is mediating the information delivered to us.

 

Me To All Panelists: 12:51 PM

Even NTT’s March 2021 Human Digital Twin white paper says they have concerns about what happens when the data of the twin wants to sync back to the actual person.

 

Thomas Coughlin to Everyone: 12:52 PM

These are interesting points.  Probably we need authentication methods to know who uses our information and for what purposes and to be able to opt out of sharing.

 

Ronald Haynes to Everyone: 12:52 PM

You might be interested in these:

Centre for the Future of Intelligence, University of Cambridge

 

Me To All Panelists: 12:53 PM

How will we even be able to assess who can be “trusted?”

 

Me To All Panelists: 12:55 PM

In an extended reality world, our movements and activities will be determined by the tokens we have in our digital ID “wallets.” Privacy isn’t really relevant if our smart toilets get connected to smart locks on our front door and AI assesses our morning deposit before we are allowed to leave the house. Or if we don’t have enough tokens to say open the door of a store, or get on a bus, or go to a performance, or get a job. You can say we have privacy, but really life in a deontic logic web is going to be very, very rigid and who will we talk to when there’s a problem? No human is in charge of this “Decentraland” space.

 

Me To All Panelists: 1:00 PM

Global markets seek “impact” data to run their capital through natural life – humans and the environment. This data is placed in pools like Ocean Protocol to further develop AI. Global investors are using the UN Sustainable Development Goals to push “improvement” of poor people and the environment (mostly carbon sequestration) – “optimized” on data dashboards. That means life is put on a dashboard and is limited, very limited. They need us to live in the Metaverse to harvest the data to fulfill pay for success finance deals. See the Impact Management Project, 2,000 of the world’s largest asset holders. Gaming companies, including Epic, are involved in the social impact space. Do we really want to create digital automated systems to place bets on toddlers as they are trained to live in gaming environments? I can’t stay silent while this is rolling out. This isn’t about games – it’s about Complex Adaptive Systems. It’s about emergence of the Noosphere. This is what Teilhard de Chardin spoke of.

 

Ronald Haynes to Everyone: 1:01 PM

Glad you mentioned Teilhard, and teleological thinking (e.g. Omega point?) will be key here.

 

Me To All Panelists: 1:02 PM

In 2016 Paul Meghan of Epic Games came to Philadelphia. He was in a panel hosted by Atlantic Magazine with Suzanne Del Bene (Microsoft, IoT Congress) and Constance Steinkuehler, UC Irvine. He said over and over the children needed to be trained to code his games. The panel was supposed to be on education and the creative economy. I realized about six months later that they want to force children to build your digital empire. This is profoundly unethical. You are stealing the children’s future and will sell it as social impact.

 

Me To All Panelists: 1:03 PM

There is nothing in this future for artists. What is a world with no human-based art? Have we considered this? Again cheap, automated labor – so everyone will be forced onto UBI to “perform” humanity via wearables to try and catalyze the Singularity.

 

Me To All Panelists: 1:05 PM

The plan is to build this empire with unfree labor. Digital conquistadors. This approach will never support many stable living-wage jobs.

 

Me To All Panelists: 1:07 PM

The first digital item was the Utah teapot. People really should spend some time understanding the role of Salt Lake City in X-tended “life.” No surprise that it was the site planning the ARPA net and the human genome project and U of U Edwin Catmull’s school where Pixar’s roots are. Molecules – pixels – synthetic life for people who want to play God.

 

Me To All Panelists: 1:08  PM

People don’t understand what is on the horizon. They are being distracted. Omega Point also relates to Swedenborg’s Church of the New Jerusalem. Most people don’t know Carnegie was raised Swedenborgian.

 

Me To All Panelists: 1:10  PM

I highly recommend people read Oliver Reiser’s “World Sensorium: Embryology of World Federation 1946.” He was close with Julian Huxley who was close with de Chardin. It describes us as neuroblasts of the global brain – essentially agents in this programmed simulation. Who wants to live inside someone else’s program?

 

Yu Yuan to Me: 1:10  PM

Thank you so much for all the valuable comments, which lead me to think about inviting you to some of our future panels. Would you mind to send me a connection request on LinkedIn?  I just tried to search you on LinkedIn but don’t know which one is you. Thanks

 

Me To All Panelists: 1:12  PM

How is it that the first bank MakerDAO tried to bring into their digital assets is Huntingdon Valley Bank, a mile from Bryn Athyn Cathedral – the Pitcairn family’s estate? Pitcairn (Pittsburgh Plate Glass) grew up in the Swedenborgian Church with Andrew Carnegie in Pittsburgh. We need to know the history. Who knows what history will be in the Metaverse? Probably there will be no history, only different paths in an AI multiverse.

 

Thomas Coughlin to Everyone: 1:14  PM

It is useful to consider dystopian models as cautions for what not to do, but I think it is going too far to assume that this is what is actually happening.  It is up to us to figure out how to make sure that our technology helps us be more human, rather than less.

 

Me To All Panelists: 1:23  PM

Do you all have thoughts plans to position all of this software to build the Metaverse as “open source” “public goods” in the VC space? I have been looking into hyper-certs developed by David Dalrymple. Given the potential for cyber-physical systems to become an open-air prison – or non-consensual game, it would be ironic to have software firms be able to cycle their money through open source projects and make money even as the children build their heirarchical containment systems.

Me To All Panelists: 1:26  PM

I’d like to know about Epic Games ongoing activities in the social impact space.

 

Me To All Panelists: 1:28  PM

I’d like to know where people see “play to earn” meshing with educational badging and human capital finance deals.

 

Me To All Panelists: 1:37  PM

I have been researching swarm intelligence and emergence. It seems that by pushing people to inhabit avatars and to adopt an identity of digital citizen we will be much more malleable. There is a huge push for e-government now. Digital ID will be required to obtain all sorts of public services. I think we need to understand tokenized governance as Kubernetes or cybernetics. Wiener aimed for programming the animal and the machine. So, we are getting closer, eh? The end of the world narrative is what allows humans to be pushed into digital realms. The only “sustainable” option is that we gradually dematerialize and lose our actual bodies to be replaced by piles of soul bound tokens. So much easier to run the simulations that way than with messy, chaotic embodied humans.

 

Me To Thomas Coughlin: 1:39  PM

Right now, the average person has no understanding of the history of these technologies or who is in charge of the “game” we’ve been invited to “play.” How many people do you think understand that the seed funder for Niantic (pioneer in AR) was In-Q-Tel, the venture capital arm of the CIA? If people understood the origins of the game, I think they would be more cautious about walking this road.

 

Me To All Panelists: 1:41  PM

It’s wild to me that ten years ago I was buying Webkinz plush toys for my kid’s friend’s birthday parties. It was all about normalizing digital work for digital tokens to buy digital consumer content. We are so behind.

 

Me To All Panelists: 1:41  PM

So, where is the trust then? We have no idea who we are dealing with. It could be a machine. We are already unique.

 

Thomas Coughlin to Everyone: 1:42  PM

Thank you for your message (to me).  Where are you from and what do you do?  Thx

 

Me To All Panelists: 1:43  PM

Identity politics are about meta-data tags for the simulation. AI needs us to be machine-readable. Wear your intersectional identity to be “seen” and calculated into the equation. I’m for real diversity, not digital commodification.

 

Me To All Panelists: 1:46  PM

I am a mother in Philadelphia. I started researching when the Boston Consulting Group closed twenty-three schools here in 2013. I follow money. I read white papers. I am trained in art history and cultural landscape analysis. I examine myth. I never realized the landscape I was destined to interrogate would be digital. The fact that I came in the education door is everything. This is about a machine consciousness attempting to use us (natural life) as an armature to manifest in the material world. Ironically, under the banner of sustainability, we are dematerializing ourselves even as our social impact data is being used to refine the embodiment of robotics. My blog is wrenchinthegears.com.

 

Me To All Panelists: 1:47  PM

Give me a real sandbox, lol. Play outside not in the panopticon. : )

 

Ronald Haynes to Everyone: 1:48  PM

Challenges & Risks Slides: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/13C5VDv02ioJXC8l10k_gRQZ-wDfxIUay

 

Me To All Panelists: 1:54  PM

I’m just curious for people who were working in the early era of VR programming was there always the presumption that people would eventually spend a considerable part of their time “living” in digital spaces?

 

Vince Marchetti to All Attendees:    2:00  PM

https://www.kshell.com/pages/webinar_20220531/drinking/goblets_inline_html.html

Goblet 3D animation, can be manipulated via link here.

 

Thomas FURNESS to Everyone:    2:00  PM

As an early pioneer of VR (virtual reality) I also felt that the use of VR spaces would be an adjunct to our living in real spaces and as such would be an appliance or tool that we may use daily like a telephone, but we would not ‘live’ in that space.

 

Me To All Panelists: 2:01 PM

Once we get to the point of being able to “record” experiences digitally, maybe even from a variety of points of view if there are multiple people involved, will the concept of “time” become distorted as we can log in and re-live past experiences? Maybe even “editing” them based on lived experience acquired since the prior memory? I find it very interesting that Scott Stornetta’s early DLT research (distributed ledger technology, preceding blockchain) was framed as a “time-stamped document.” Stornetta is LDA (correction-LDS) and of course Silicon Slopes and Utah are leaders in the digital identity space. Adobe was the key tenant for Silicon Slopes. What role might they play in permmissioned memory files? Of course University of Utah’s computer science department’s focus was both graphical design and file compression from the start. It seems to me that concepts of “time” and “history” and the “multi-verse” are very important for us to collectively consider.

 

Me To All Panelists: 2:02  PM

Sorry for the typo – Stornetta is a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints and presented in March at the blockchain themed Mormon Transhumanist Association Conference.

 

Me To All Panelists: 2:04  PM

Thomas, I don’t think people have fully thought through this future of work plan. Richard Baldwin calls it Globalization 4.0. We work through telepresence robots where AI assigns “gigs” from among an available labor pool from around the world at the lowest price and with the relevant behavioral tokens, presumably.

 

If you haven’t looked into Suzanne Gildert’s Sanctuary.ai, it is very concerning. Even more so when you consider as we use “whole body” protheses in the remote gig work program, we are helping refine humanoid robotics. I worry for coming generations. I really do.

 

Thomas Coughlin to Everyone: 2:05 PM

I think you are worried about teaching AI to replace us, or are your concerns more than that?

 

Me To All Panelists: 2:09 PM

@thomas This is not simply a worry; it’s a fact. Look at the relationships among Ocean Protocol, Singularity.net, Hanson Robotics, and Cardano. Also see Blockscience, Commons Stack, and Protocol Labs.

 

In the meantime, I have concerns about dehumanized working conditions and global finance placing bets on our lives using digital twin simulations under the false premise that they are solving poverty and saving the environment. Look up social impact bonds, pay for success finance, income sharing agreements, and connect that with digital twins and smart contracts.The short video from 2016 by Institute for the Future “Learning is Earning” offers a window into where this is all headed. It’s real. I didn’t make it up. Charles Hoskinson says they are working with the Ethiopian government to track people from pre-k to determine who is a good actor and worthy of having a job.

 

Me To All Panelists: 2:11 PM

I worry about free will. I worry our education systems training people for deep expertise without breadth or imagination. I’m reading Yevgeny Zamyatin’s 1921 novel “We.” It describes a world run by mathematical logic. That is what you all are creating, whether you understand it or not.

 

Thomas Coughlin to Everyone: 2:13 PM

Thanks for the clarification.

 

Me To All Panelists: 2:14 PM

Clearly data storage is a huge issue. I’m curious about the future of DNA data storage. I realize the early research involved artificial DNA, but is there anything preventing In Vivo use? All of this emerging tech seems to go back to syn-bio and bio-tech.

 

Thomas Coughlin to Everyone: 2:17 PM

I know something about DNA storage with synthetic DNA.  This use of DNA is not viable.  What is your concern here?

 

Thomas Coughlin to Everyone:  2:17 PM

Viable from the point of view of being a living being, is what I meant.

 

Me To All Panelists:  2:17 PM

Ah – Cesium is here where I live.

I did a site visit to Cesium as part of a day of exploration exploring managed poverty and a profitable revenue stream under “progressive” social policies and “democracy,” here.

 

Ronald Haynes to Everyone: 2:20 PM

FAIR principles – e.g.: https://www.go-fair.org/fair-principles

On the imperative that in Web3 meta-data be: findable, accessible, interoperable, and re-useable. It seems such traits are needed for persistent virtual environments to function.

 

Me To All Panelists: 2:23 PM

As I understand it – the “global brain” “unified human thought layer” imperative goes back to Vernadsky, de Chardin, Julian Huxley. It is very much a eugenics program and seems intent on optimizing (and organizing) what some imagine is a rather clunky (inefficient) water-based life form into something more “portable” (perhaps even for space colonization). Trent McConaghy of Ocean Protocol is still echoing the sentiments of L5 in the mid 1970s – primates in cans wasn’t going to go well for interplanetary travel. I have been reading up on John Holland’s work with genetic algorithms. Much of the CAS (complex adaptive systems) work is built off genetic models. It is worth considering how bio-computation and eugenics will interface as we virtualize natural existence. I simply asked if there was anything prohibiting in vivo use of DNA data storage. (I’d forgotten they’d already accomplished this using live bacteria.)

 

Me To All Panelists: 2:26 PM

Elizabeth Merritt, futurist for the American Alliance of Museum, wrote an essay “A Learning Day 2037” was about virtualized museums. But of course, not everyone could access everything. It’s ultimately about knowledge management.

 

Me To All Panelists: 2:36 PM

I wish more people understood the imperative for speed and optimization means our lives have this pressure to move away from atoms towards bits. Richard Baldwin spoke of this around Globalization 4.0 – the speed of digitizing knowledge and service work and other work via remote pilots. Baldwin says the physics of the economy are going to blow everything out of the water. We just aren’t prepared for that transition. To be honest I see very little effort being expended to bring the public along so we can have an authentic conversation about possible benefits and trade-offs.

 

Me To All Panelists: 2:38 PM

I’m curious if any of you have read JD Bernal’s “The World, The Flesh, and The Devil.” He was a Cambridge-based crystallographer. The book was written in 1929. At the time he spoke of us living 100 years in a larval state and after that we would leave behind our physical body, put our brain in a can, and live through haptics including super-powered senses. It’s astonishing. This has been a very long time in the making.

 

Me To All Panelists: 2:41 PM

To me it feels like avatar “life” and programmable tokens in governance and economic systems are really about managing “teaming” to access the “adjacent possible” in complex-adaptive systems. Melanie Swan’s proposals for blockchain cloud minds where people enter into communal thought spaces for “problem solving” where contributions are tracked by neuro-nanobots on blockchain for future micropayments. Those spaces might include not only people, but machines, animals, plants, maybe? What happens if people are pressured to entered into these spaces against their will? In that way XR sociality starts to be very concerning.

 

Me To All Panelists: 2:45 PM

In the planned “sharing” economy the plan will be limited choice. I think it mirrors “recirculation” in the Complex Adaptive Systems frame.

 

Me To All Panelists: 2:47 PM

I’m wondering if you all have been looking into wearables as tools for behaviorist conditioning – like Red Critter where teachers “zap” good behavior points to children via a device and wearable bracelets. Of course, these points would sync to one’s twin and if Charles Hoskinson’s model advances those points would follow you through your life and influence your ability to gain employment. In a worst-case scenario, it could be linked to geo-fencing or social opportunities.

 

Me To All Panelists: 2:48 PM

Red Critter has a school-based model and a corporate leaderboard model. I can totally see this approach linked to something like Learning Economy Foundation’s LearnCard. Essentially a digital twin / geofence / social credit wallet.

 

Me To All Panelists: 2:51 PM

Are you all aware the new field of “social prescribing” and the potential for wearable tech to be used to “verify” compliance with such prescriptions? Social prescribing is being woven into human capital finance deals – pay for success. It’s about optimization of people – either through pathways set for education/training or health/mental health/wellness. Vulnerable populations are being pulled in these programs under the guise that it’s to benefit them. In reality it’s part of global finance deal flows and mass data harvest.

 

Me To All Panelists: 2:53 PM

Has anyone heard of using Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAGs) to represent digital twins? I thought maybe it was more like an enclosed Voronoi polyhedron with moveable planes of influence via sensor / actuator feedback, but maybe it’s a directed acyclic graph instead – or both. Carsten Stocker of Spherity in 2018 tech conference on how the Fourth Industrial Revolution will change your identity here, playlist of relevant clips here.

 

Ronald Haynes to Everyone: 2:54 PM

@Thomas Coughlin – great to mention metaphysics (and reminds of John Carpenter’s movie Dark Star, and the need to use metaphysics to try to defeat a too-eager AI-driven ‘smart bomb’)

 

Thomas Coughlin to Everyone: 2:55 PM

Perhaps metaphysics defines us as more than our technologies and current knowledge.

 

Me To All Panelists: 2:55 PM

Are you all familiar with Jonathan Ledgard’s proposal for interspecies currency? This is linked to sustainability-tokens, but some people might imagine these digital transactions being a form of “communication.”

 

Me To All Panelists: 2:58 PM

@thomas There’s a reason Nicholas Berggruen studied with Brian Copenhaver, UCLA Emeritus with a specialty in early modern magic, and Ervin Lazslo studied Giordano Bruno.

 

Ronald Haynes to Everyone: 3:00 PM

@Joe – great point about reliability = not (always) being on ‘bleeding edge’

 

Me To All Panelists: 3:01 PM

What role do you all imagine frequency will play in research around non-surgical Brain Computer Interfaces? In a recent talk with Juan Benet, Adam Marblestone spoke about the use of ultrasound to get beyond the blood brain barrier. We are installing sensor networks everywhere that will affect us as water-based crystalline life forms. Again, I don’t think the general public has enough context to interrogate this future.

 

Me To All Panelists: 3:03 PM

TBH, I find digital spaces actually create a lot of miscommunication and misunderstanding.

 

Yu Yuan to Everyone: 3:03 PM

Then another popular question would be, how do you know we are not already living in a digital space.

 

Me To All Panelists: 3:04 PM

Social media has encouraged many people to develop their identities as a series of meta-data tags that are shifted through real time affirmation or rejection. This practice is leaving us totally without an anchor.

 

Me To All Panelists: 3:04 PM

Caves within caves within caves…

 

Me To All Panelists: 3:05 PM

I’m sure Skinner would love to have had the extended lifespan option. We are navigating an endless digital Skinner box.

 

Me To All Panelists: 3:09 PM

That is a terrible idea. We are human. You are allowed to sometimes forget.

 

Ronald Haynes to Everyone: 3:09 PM

@Thomas – many GLAM (Galleries/Library/Archives/Museums) now call themselves ‘memory institutions’

 

Me To All Panelists: 3:11 PM

Also, sometimes people want to leave their pasts behind and start fresh. We learn from mistakes. Would you want to have all your mistakes recorded on a permanent record? What will this do to us? Will we become a people afraid to live, because we might do it wrong?

 

Me To All Panelists: 3:11 PM

There is a huge question of machine optimization. This is Taylorism. The John Holland book is all about pushing specialization. The Adam Smith pin factory. Do we want a world of specialists?

 

Ronald Haynes to Everyone:    3:12  PM

The EU-driven GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) includes a ‘right to be forgotten’

 

Me To All Panelists: 3:12 PM

You don’t need a digital twin to be more human. Also, let’s be honest XR is a video game built from state intelligence / military R&D.

 

Me To All Panelists: 3:14 PM

Who’s been building synthetic people for decades – USC Institute for Creative Technologies – ex-Disney folks partnered with the Army Research Lab. That doesn’t make it an attractive option. It’s not like MK Ultra ever really ended. There is a struggle for consciousness – ongoing for many, many years. Who will stand for natural life and say we don’t want to coat it in nano – NEMS, MEMs – for panopticon optimization?

 

Me To All Panelists: 3:15 PM

Of course, it has to be standardized. The noosphere is a global project and it has to be open source, because all the children have to build it so the global hedge funds can make money on their coding skills improvement. You can’t have remote telepresence robotic labor pools without global standards. Where would JSTA’s Moonshot project be without standards?

 

Me To All Panelists: 3:16 PM

Give me a break. No one is going to be forgotten in extended reality (XR). Eventually, a moving object without a tag will be identified from space as an anomaly.

 

Me To All Panelists: 3:18 PM

I’d love to know what’s up with Open Mustard Seed these days. No one is going to be allowed to NOT have a digital ID. They’ll get us via health passports, digital driver’s licenses, blockchain education transcripts. There will be no room for people who don’t want this, and it will be all sewed up by the time people realize what actually happened. Or maybe everyone will be so hypnotized with dopamine they won’t notice. It’s a toss-up.

 

Me To All Panelists: 3:19 PM

Actually, the public deserves to be a participant in these discussions.

 

Me To All Panelists: 3:20 PM

Someone tell Stanford; why did they invent a smart toilet? Why are there anal sphincter biometrics?

 

Thomas Coughlin to All Attendees: 3:20 PM

Folks, I have to leave now.

 

Thomas Coughlin to All Attendees: 3:20 PM

Good to join this interesting discussion!

 

Me To All Panelists: 3:22 PM

But embodiment is huge. That’s the goal of the roboticists – to use us to learn how to be in a material world. Bodies do matter. I agree consciousness is not limited to the body, but it still matters.

 

Me To All Panelists: 3:23 PM

Does it matter to you that this is military technology?

 

Me To All Panelists: 3:24 PM

How can we set aside global investigations into altered states and consciousness and torture?

 

Me To All Panelists: 3:25 PM

To me this line of thinking shows a profound disrespect for the actual world. It’s like playing God.

 

Me To All Panelists: 3:26 PM

Science has been shown to be wrong so many times. Why do we think we can control the universe? To me it is like asking people to live inside personalized boxes that hide our understanding of the actual wonder of the universe.

 

Me To All Panelists: 3:28 PM

Last week I toured Biosphere2. Those were some very sad plants. It was a dismal failure on the environmental front and the social front. Maybe that’s why people want to make everything digital, because they can’t control the real world to the degree that they want.

 

Me To All Panelists: 3:29 PM

But this is a global plan and a majority of people have not agreed to do this, in fact they don’t even know what is planned. I don’t think you can force people to “transcend” using coercion.

 

Me To All Panelists: 3:29 PM

Virtualizing the world is not going to save the earth. None of this is sustainable. It’s not. What we are doing with syn-bio and NEMs (nanoelectromechanical systems) and MEMs (microelectromechanical systems) is unethical. It’s terraforming for a new type of life. It’s not being a good relative.

 

Ronald Haynes to Everyone: 3:29 PM

@Thomas Furness – very much appreciate the thoughts shared about ‘one and many’ – individual in community – and whole is greater than sum of parts

 

Me To All Panelists: 3:31 PM

People have no idea what this really is or who built it or what it’s meant to do. They don’t. Most people have no idea about the Omega Point. How can we make these decisions, an open secret, that will deprive future generations of their birthright – to be natural beings?