Misc Radar Blips

Bunch of things, more or less at random:

1) Yet another 3D Printer absolutely fucking aces it on kickstarter

Except this one actually looks like a device designed by designers who don’t do anything except design things… or more to the point, it looks like a mainstream, commercial appliance.

Works quite well too. Costs about $2.5k… which reminds me of all the camera gear you can get that’s “affordable”… which is to say it isn’t as hilariously extortionate as everyone else’s offering, but it’s still not an impulse-buy decision… unless you’re the sort of person who randomly spends the rent money on 3D printers, in which case it probably is.

The development of 3D printers is (from here on in) 80% about materials… and I suspect that this sort of printer has fewer options on that front than the extrusion variety.

2) The Kickstarter Model has well and truly escaped…

Into the imaginations and expectations of “investors/consumers” (insumers? convestors?) and creators/gob-shites alike. They look as though they’re using Amazon’s escrow system… and Twitter’s Bootstrap system. A strange side-effect of the proliferation of mobile devices is the proliferation of an HTML/CSS/JS framework that can handle them… enter Bootstrap. If you’re not a web dev, you won’t know what I’m talking about… nut you see that site? They all look a bit like that.

This lock thing is going off like a rocket. If it’s for real, every time I refresh the page it seems to go up by a couple of thousand.

3) Turing test still (apparently) not passable, but apparently in certain contexts, genetic algorithms are getting better results than humans.

In a game.

Speaking of which:

4) People keep going on about “Ethical Warbots”

Which bothers me, because it reminds me of that Isaac Asimov “laws of robotics” thing, WHICH WAS OBVIOUSLY, ALWAYS GOING TO BE BOLLOCKS”… even as a kid it seemed naff and polyanna-oid.

This is not how people work. As George Orwell pointed, the purpose of torture is torture. “Organisations” that rule by violence actually rule by the fear of violence, and that hinges on their ability to horrify. If you’ve got a liberal democracy back home, then you obviously need to be telling a different story to them than to “the enemy”… but the enemy needs to be horrified by your violence.

And if it’s possible to make a moral war-bot, then it’s possible to make an immoral one… and that’s the one that’s going to get made.