Toluu

ouroboros

dyspeptic rumblings from the guts of interactivity

Love + Sex with RobotsYesterday

David Levy uses Love and Sex with Robots: The Evolution of Human-Robot Relationships to ostensibly explore two primary themes:

• When will people have "sex" with robots/inorganic objects?
• When will people fall in love with robots/inorganic objects?

Since we've already crossed the first threshold, and men and women have been doing so for a while, Levy uses most of the book to argue that (a) our wetware is already wired to enable investiture of emotional significance to inorganic objects (Levy cites Mihaly Csilkszentmihalyi and Eugene Rochberg-Halton's research on the investiture of personal meaning through repeated use, which they refer to as "psychic energy"), and that (b) Artificial Intelligence will soon have progressed to the extent that we will have emotionally and physically satisfying relationships with high-tech fabrications.  Yes, "fall in love" with them.

In other words, Kokoro-built Actroid Fembots (Kokoro is owned by Sanrio group, owners of Hello Kitty) will probably be used for more than expo booths soon (nudge nudge wink wink).

Google Earth and MumbaiDecember 1

[from PC World] 

"The terrorists...used digital maps from Google Earth to learn their way around, according to officials investigating the attacks...Google Earth has previously come in for criticism in India, including from the country's former President, A.P.J. Abdul Kalam.  Kalam warned in a 2005 lecture that the easy availability online ofdetailed maps of countries from services such as Google Earth could be misused by terrorists."

but before you shut down Google Earth,

"The information available to the terrorists on Google Earth about the locations they attacked is also available on printed tourism maps of Mumbai."

Credo Quia AbsurdumDecember 1

I love my fellow Buckeye, George Van Tassel.  I couldn't put down his "Council of the Seven Lights".  And the Integratron?   Poetry.  My visit there was actually pretty heavy.  What caught my eye was the E Clampus Vitus plaque.

Yes we can, America.

Everything Wrong with Digital Marketing in One Convenient ArticleDecember 1

Thank you, Jack Hitt.  Until reading your digital marketing foursome in the NYT's 11/21 Sunday mag, I'd forgotten what a mouthful of my own vomit tasted like.  

• Taste the irony of three digital "gurus" using the printed word to pontificate on the digi-future.
• Read heaps of "tech-for-tech's-sake" solutions to nonexistent problems
• Asked to provide concrete examples of brands that "get" the interactive space to which these agencies purport to hold the keys, AKQA's Bastholm cites only W+K's recent work for EA's Tiger Woods PGA Tour '09.  Look - it's an example I love - but is that really the ONLY thing three digital agency people could come up with?

These are smart guys.  So here's two questions I wish had been asked:

1. Mr Palmer - in your 'Superbowl ad' comments, you come the closest to mentioning a 'shared experience'.  Mass media used to afford a shared experience for brand messaging, but with the rapid advent of personalized, digitally-enabled cocoons (FB, Google, GoW2, MySpace, Orkut WoW, twitter, flickr, ning, SL, etc.), how has the 'shared experience' evolved and what lessons are there

Thirteen less oneNovember 14

Looking for your name?  gotta go to the SOURCE.  And if your name ain't there, you didn't find me.