My random thoughts

Anything that doesn't quite fit in elsewhere...
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funkervogt
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Re: My random thoughts

Post by funkervogt »

I saw part of a film yesterday, where a car runs off the road, and sinks into a river with a female passenger trapped inside because the impact somehow jammed her arm or leg between her seat and her door. Though rare, scenarios like this unfold in real life, though in the future, I doubt they will at all. A posthuman or cyborg would be strong enough to bend dented-in door enough to free their limb. Failing that, they could detach their trapped limb (come to think of it, this would be a very useful general ability, like how some lizards can detach their tails). Being trapped underwater would be a less urgent problem as well, given that they might not need to breathe oxygen.
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funkervogt
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Re: My random thoughts

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funkervogt wrote: Tue Jun 29, 2021 11:05 pm Once machines have mastered the ability to mimic human speech, it will revolutionize the audiobook industry. Any amateur could feed the text of a book into a computer program that would spit out an audiobook version, complete with different voices for different characters and the narrator, that matched their age, sex, race, and other characteristics. It would also be easy to add sound effects.

The age of "radio plays" would return, but with higher production standards and for a much greater variety of stories.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_drama
It's occurred to me that the technology needed for this will inevitably improve so as to make it possible to generate high-quality cartoons and films, based only on the text of a book. The neural network "DALL-E," which is based on GPT-3 technology, can already reliably generate images of things based on text descriptions of what they are. Within the next five years, I predict it will be able to make short video clips that accurately depict people, events, and environments described in a written paragraph.

Machines could find and recognize physical descriptions of characters in a book, make accurate CGI representations of them, and use those representations as actors in the resulting auto-generated films. Inferences about what their mannerisms and voices should be like could be made based on in-book descriptions and data on their age, sex, race, and other demographics.

Conservatively, I predict that within 20 years, machines will be able to produce full-length films of "acceptable" quality--complete with lifelike CGI, accurate sound effects, and natural-sounding voices--merely by scanning text. I suspect many aspects of those films will still be inaccurate in some way, and that humans will be needed to find and fix them. Nevertheless, this will be an enormous boon to the movie industry, as it will dramatically lower the costs of making films, and to consumers, who will have access to much more new content. In literally one afternoon, a PDF of a book could be uploaded to a neural network, and it could generate a two-hour long film that would serve as a solid "framework" that a team of humans could tweak into a final cut over the course of a few weeks.

This technology will empower amateur and independent filmmakers, hobbyists, and enthusiast groups who are interested in obscure works of fiction just as much as it will empower Hollywood. Imagine a team of 20 people, based in different locations across the world, collaborating for free over the internet to make a movie version of a long-forgotten play or novella whose copyright had expired. Through a labor of love, they could transform it into a film with high production standards, and share it with the world at low or no cost.

I also predict that this level of technology will let different groups of people release different versions of the same movie, in the same way that hobbyists with moderate computer skills can make "mods" for their favorite video games, and then share the mods over the internet. Returning to the example in the previous paragraph, let's say the group releases their movie version of the old novella. It's such a niche subject that only a few thousand people ever watch it, but one enthusiast of the novella thinks they got something wrong. Maybe he interpreted some part of the text differently, and as a result, he believes one of the characters should look slightly different, or that one scene in the film should have been lit differently to evoke a different emotion from the viewer. This dissenting person could edit their film using powerful, AI-augmented technology, and re-release his own cut.

Just as there are online forums where video game enthusiasts talk about their favorite games, share mods with each other, and debate the mods' merits and weaknesses, there will be forums where amateurs share and discuss their different movie versions.

And thanks to accurate DeepFake mimicry of voices and faces, it will be possible insert actors of choice into these CGI films. The recent deepfake of Tom Cruise shows what is possible.



In 20 years, I foresee amateur filmmakers sharing different versions of the same movie, replete with different casts of actors (alive and dead) playing the same characters. Just as today, some people will say they prefer the "Director's Cut" of a film while others prefer the "Theater Cut," in 20 years some will prefer the "Tom Cruise Cut" while others prefer the "Christian Bale Cut."
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funkervogt
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Re: My random thoughts

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I'd like to see humans who have been genetically engineered to somehow benefit from mild electric currents. The humans I'm envisioning would be 100% biological, but would have some faculty for using electrical currents to help their cells. It seems like a waste to not be able to make use of such a common force.
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funkervogt
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Re: My random thoughts

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Here's a plot for a sci-fi book: Fifty years from now, astronomers discover an asteroid in the Kuiper Belt that is made of antimatter. It's not on a collision course with anything, so it poses no direct threat, but tensions among different humans reach the boiling point as governments and companies race to lay claim to it. Whoever gains control of it will effectively have a nuclear weapons arsenal and 1,000 years worth of clean energy for the whole planet.
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funkervogt
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Re: My random thoughts

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I wonder if it would be possible to create a human that bore no genetic relationship to any other. In a test tube, geneticists would assemble a complete human DNA strand from inorganic components, meaning all the carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and other elements in the DNA would come directly from inorganic molecules, and not from complex organic molecules.

Additionally, the DNA sequence itself would have such an arrangement that the person's parents could not have been any other human. This is the hard thing to describe and possibly the part where I am fundamentally wrong, but the synthetic person's alleles would, in aggregate, be in such combinations that they could not have been the result of natural evolution.

The resulting person might not look different from other humans and would be able to breed with the rest of us, but he or she would be genetically "disconnected" from the rest of our species.
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funkervogt
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Re: My random thoughts

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Once lab-grown foods become cheap and the technology gets very advanced, we will develop a truly scientific understanding of the sense of taste. This will lead to experimentation in which wholly new types of chemical compounds are synthesized, which taste different from anything humans have ever eaten before.

Imagine a gigantic "possibilities space" of all taste signatures a human can detect, and food labs synthesizing fruits, vegetables, herbs, and meats containing every combination of them and letting people try them. Who knows what kinds of new, delicious tastes we will discover?

If we found new chemicals that were particularly tasty, we could genetically engineer existing plants to produce them, and grow strains of those plants in gardens and greenhouses. The revolution in gastronomy will be comparable to tomatoes and potatoes being introduced to Europe thanks to the Columbian Exchange.

What happens when posthumans with better senses--including taste and smell--are created? Being able to detect chemical flavors that we cannot, their possibilities space of taste signatures would be larger than ours, and the whole project would start anew. I can't imagine what simply biting into an apple would taste like to them.
TrueAnimationFan
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Re: My random thoughts

Post by TrueAnimationFan »

funkervogt wrote: Tue Aug 31, 2021 2:28 pm Once lab-grown foods become cheap and the technology gets very advanced, we will develop a truly scientific understanding of the sense of taste. This will lead to experimentation in which wholly new types of chemical compounds are synthesized, which taste different from anything humans have ever eaten before.

Imagine a gigantic "possibilities space" of all taste signatures a human can detect, and food labs synthesizing fruits, vegetables, herbs, and meats containing every combination of them and letting people try them. Who knows what kinds of new, delicious tastes we will discover?

If we found new chemicals that were particularly tasty, we could genetically engineer existing plants to produce them, and grow strains of those plants in gardens and greenhouses. The revolution in gastronomy will be comparable to tomatoes and potatoes being introduced to Europe thanks to the Columbian Exchange.

What happens when posthumans with better senses--including taste and smell--are created? Being able to detect chemical flavors that we cannot, their possibilities space of taste signatures would be larger than ours, and the whole project would start anew. I can't imagine what simply biting into an apple would taste like to them.
If imagining the taste of an apple to a posthuman is an insane thought, then I assume a posthuman eating an oreo would be completely and utterly impossible for someone with a biological brain to understand.
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funkervogt
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Re: My random thoughts

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Some androids' heads will be made of segments and metamaterials, allow them to change their appearances at will. Imagine one of their facial proportions slowly changing, and once everything was in the right place, the synthetic skin would tighten up.

Eye color could also change quickly, and probably skin tone as well.

Androids might even have telescoping limbs and backs, allowing them to change heights and bodily proportions.
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funkervogt
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Re: My random thoughts

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With radical genetic engineering, we might be able to shrink humans to half our current sizes, without any loss of intelligence in spite of our brains being correspondingly smaller. Consider that bird neurons are smaller than mammalian ones, allowing birds to pack twice as many nerve cells into the same unit of mass as mammals can. That means a human brain made of bird neurons could, in theory, be half the size of one of our brains, but just as smart.

Additional genetic tweaks on top of that could shrink the brains and also bodies even farther. Consider that Einstein's brain was not larger than average, yet he was vastly smarter than the typical person, showing that human intelligence is affected by factors other than the size of the organ. If we created an abnormally small brain that only had 75% the mass of an average human brain, but we also engineered the small brain to possess all the other attributes necessary for genius level intelligence, then the two modifications (lower quantity but higher quality) would cancel each other out, resulting in a brain that worked just as well as a normal human brain while being 25% smaller.

Let's say the result of all this modification is a human brain that is 50% smaller than one of our brains, but capable of the same level of thought. A smaller brain means a smaller skull is needed, and in turn, that all other body parts can be smaller. We end up with a new species of child-sized humans.
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BaobabScion
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Re: My random thoughts

Post by BaobabScion »

funkervogt wrote: Tue Sep 07, 2021 2:54 am With radical genetic engineering, we might be able to shrink humans to half our current sizes, without any loss of intelligence in spite of our brains being correspondingly smaller. Consider that bird neurons are smaller than mammalian ones, allowing birds to pack twice as many nerve cells into the same unit of mass as mammals can. That means a human brain made of bird neurons could, in theory, be half the size of one of our brains, but just as smart.

Additional genetic tweaks on top of that could shrink the brains and also bodies even farther. Consider that Einstein's brain was not larger than average, yet he was vastly smarter than the typical person, showing that human intelligence is affected by factors other than the size of the organ. If we created an abnormally small brain that only had 75% the mass of an average human brain, but we also engineered the small brain to possess all the other attributes necessary for genius level intelligence, then the two modifications (lower quantity but higher quality) would cancel each other out, resulting in a brain that worked just as well as a normal human brain while being 25% smaller.

Let's say the result of all this modification is a human brain that is 50% smaller than one of our brains, but capable of the same level of thought. A smaller brain means a smaller skull is needed, and in turn, that all other body parts can be smaller. We end up with a new species of child-sized humans.
We'd have gnomes and halflings, or maybe even fully conscious and sentient homunculi, with oversized hands, ridiculously proportioned features and all. Wonderful!
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