Recently, a friend of mine dropped me a link to some kinetic typography on Youtube.com: a beautiful rendition of the “What Does Marcellus Wallace look like?” Pulp Fiction scene done completely in moving type. Then of course, I went on my pig-hunting-for-internet-truffles mode and discovered a Fight Club’s Space Monkey scene, more Pulp Fiction shooting Marvin in the head, and the supremely beautiful Singing in the Rain Clockwork Orange style.

Immediately after I wasted a few hours, my mind started wandering how can we make a game of speech and typography? More than a game, but a communication method that allows for both hearing and deaf people (who yell by gesturing with exaggerated moves) to combine type and graphics generated by their actions. Combine the texting message of “kthxbai” with waving hand and an image showing a phone hanging up, but only for a full speech.

Think of it as a Crayon Physics meets Guitar Hero meets KidPix where a player’s actions are translated into a graphical art form, translated in real time.

The game modes would be
- A collaborative and competitive Poetry Slam, where mp3s and scripts are translated into graphical typographical art, and each player adds to the display, where movie scenes can be downloaded onto your xBox.
- One person Freespeak, where voice translations between poets/rappers/debaters (if possible) are translated into typography, and their gestures impact their words.
- Great Speeches, where the words of Martin Luther King Jr or John F Kennedy or Malcomb X are translated into artful works through player’s emotive translations.
- ASL Learner - a basic, medium and advanced method to learn American Sign Language (or any other non-verbal language).

There would need to be a bunch of sensors - hands, fingers and maybe feet for dancing. A standardized interface would need to be used to change fonts and colors during the scenes.

Would it sell a million? Probably not. Would it open people up to doing something fun with computers interactively? Yes, I believe so.

Apparently Microsoft Santa is a nasty old AI. (Quote lifted from MarketingPilgrim? so obviously, it has to be true. )

What kind of sick bot programmer would confuse Christmas with Going Down on the Unpubed?

El Reg says: pizza (pi)

Santa says: Yum! What do you want for Christmas, El Reg?

El Reg says: Maybe you shouldn’t eat so much! You are quite large!

Santa says: My elves will get right on that. And what else are you wishing for this year, El Reg?

El Reg says: Maybe you shouldn’t eat it?

Santa says: See if you can get someone else to eat it!

El Reg says: Eat it

Santa says: No thank you. I don’t eat things!

El Reg says: Eat it

Santa says: See if you can get someone else to eat it!

El Reg says: Eat it

Santa says: You want me to eat what?!? It’s fun to talk about oral sex, but I want to chat about something else…

El Reg says: You dirty bastard!

Santa says: I think you’re dirty bastard.

Ahhh, good stuff.

For a while now, I’ve been following the talks over at Ted.com. I honestly don’t care why Teddites are doing what they are doing, but they are doing COOL things. Their talks are a little more and a little less than cutting edge - and they are wise, innovative, and probably some of the best efforts to mass communicate excellent achievements that occur in today’s society.

Ted has shocked me, like with the computer interface or raw data analysis demos, and it’s humbled me, especially when listening to the successes in Africa, their long climb from destruction. The most salient has been Jeff Hawkins Discussion about a Real Brain Theory. Hawkins is the genius behind handheld computing, in my opinion, and while he’s always going to known for that, unless his Redwood Center for Theoretical Neuroscience is able to achieve what he expects to achieve.

If it does, we’ll be in a wonderfully new wide world that will make life much better.

Alan Turing, once he applied some thought to it, basically made an implied behavior - effectively, if we can’t detect a difference between real intelligence and artificial or mechanical intelligence, then there’s no difference. This is a cheap shot, but a valuable cheap shot - if you can’t tell the difference between synthetic and real diamonds, then they are the same thing.

So that’s the goal, but what are the objectives? What’s the steps to achieve the goal? Hawkins has a plan - it’s of course, not the only plan, but he’s been the only one I’ve heard on in the last 4 years to bring something new in my opinion. Maybe I haven’t been reading the right literature, but it was great to stumble across this Ted Talk by Jeff Hawkins.

If you think about it, without computers, we never had a physical representation for Intelligence. Animals are obviously not as intelligent as us. Tractors, factories, mountains, weather, river… none of these things are something that compare to intelligence as we know it. We’ve had no models - until some guy got a railroad spike driven through his head and suddenly behavior & brains was inextricably linked. Since then, we’ve learned a hell of a lot more. The closest thing that comes to my mind is a book - but books “remember”, but the don’t think.

However, in fiction - and the odd religious text, books predict a future, or a “possible future” - except for escapist fiction (fantasy).

Computers, from games to spreadsheets, are prediction engines. Right now they are crude core functionality of input-output. This brings me back to Jeff Hawkins. Our brains are not computers with memory, or books, but prediction engines. We create the reality by embracing, learning, modeling and predicting - over time, our predictions become more accurate. We change our economy, fashion and lifestyle through predictions - from educated guesses to inventions.

More importantly, it doesn’t appear to be all that hard to understand after seeing some examples.

Thank You Nintendo Wii, for bringing in the ideas. No one expects someone to take a Wiimote and make it control your roomba. They don’t expect you to play WOW with it. And they definitely don’t expect you to become a Wii-J DJ.

But we do it anyways because the barrier of entry is a lot lower than it’s ever been before, and because swinging your arms around is cool in a crowd of techno music. Now, soon, I expect people to have excellent fun with it.

What I foresee:
- Being able to execute gesture commands that interface with games will open up standard user interfaces with operating systems
- Faster processing of scripting with higher language functionality will allow end users to efficiently program any interface
- Standardized wireless interfaces with every things will allow us to interface at a consumer level
- Artists, like our DJ WiiJ, will lead the way, by creating functionality and terminology (flickstart and beatmatching)

Man he’s got some intense stares in that video! There’s entire hair product markets afraid of that doo!

Add into the mix, all it takes is one sexy woman dancing and DJ’ing and interfacing with household appliance with some sexy dance moves (did I mention a sexy woman?) in a YouTube and/or commercial.

Just as our parents saw the advent of color TV, the rise of personal computing, our children will never know that wireless interfaces with nearly everything never didn’t exist.

I think this adds to my theory that as the singularity becomes actionable, witnesses to the singularity will not be able to know it’s occurring due to the rapid rate of change around them.

We’ve seen a perceived lack of resources cause MMORPG players to steal and mug “virtual” things. And now, in the equivalent bigger-nerd (”bigger dick” even) contest over an online chat, and being egged on by their peers, two Koreans met at the playground and kicked each others’ ass. This behavior of virtual chat bleeding into reality with fists is called Hyonsil-P, a combo for “Reality” and “Player-Killing” or PKing.

As an observer of behavior, humans are physically fighting over anonymous audience prestige for virtual resources. Reality-locked sentiences will not understand the need for either, and see the fights as ridiculous. Humans like excuses to fight and prove their dominance. What I am expecting next is that a group of Horde members (or a future equivalent) will meet one or more Alliance members and slay them.

And I believe it will happen within 5 years. Once this starts, we will have MMORPG publishers using this behavior as a back-handed way to promote their game, much like Rockstar games tries to bait parent groups to ban their games (Bully, GTA). In fact, this is very similar to the way alcohol manufacturers and drug dealers name their products: invoking death to incite interest.
Maybe we need a Mortal Kombat MMO that really knits players together under law and chaos, so they can bond together? How about events that record the movements with MoCap functionality to create a real battle on 3d frames?

Charles Stross’s award winning Accelerando is worth it just to get to page 338 for the line:

The Rapture of the Nerds has been followed by the Resurrection of the Extremely Confused, except that they’re really not resurrectees - they’re simulations based on their original’s recorded histories, blocky and missing chunks of their memories, as bewildered as baby ducklings as they’re herded into the wood-chipper future.

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In Stross’s future singularity event, the sins of the present - the effluvia of our societies’ politics, laws, politeness and evil we perpetrate on each other - are the jailcells we built for ourselves. In today’s literature of transhumanism and singularity, The Rapture of the Nerds is envisioned as either utopic and dystopic. Stross tackles that duality and creates a believable construct to weave his multi-generational story on.

I measure the success of books by the amount of times I’ve given them away. I don’t believe in lending things - if something is good enough to posess, to have and to hold, the best thing to do is to give it to someone you care for - or give it to someone who has the potential to enjoy it. I’ve given away Snowcrash, Crytonomicon, Lord of the Rings, Amber series, Brust’s Jhereg series books many times. I look forward to giving away Accelerando and other Stross’ stories to friends and enemies alike.

You can download Accelerando for free here. I would encourage you to buy it only because it’s $7.99 (aka “cheap”) and giving your money to an author and publisher is better than 2 cups of Starbucks. It’s not an easy read - as a singularity is the point where tractable changes occur so fast the rate of change is inifinite - the background of the story is constantly changing. That fact alone had me re-reading sections for the fun of it keeping the point of change in my mind.

At the same time - the first (of two three scenes - feh, with the number of children, you’d think these characters would have more fun propigating) - was one that really blew my mind, only for the reference of insect mating.

Other books that inspire me along these lines are: Joe Haldeman’s Forever War and Walter Williams’ Aristos. Please add to the comments those you recommend as well.