Lifeboat reports:
“There’s a billion to one chance we’re living in base reality,” Elon Musk said tonight on stage at Recode’s Code Conference, meaning that one of the most influential and powerful figures in tech thinks that it’s overwhelmingly likely we’re just characters living inside a simulation.
“Just”?
Expect more of this:
The man police say shot and killed six people in Kalamazoo, Mich., last month told officers that he was being controlled by the Uber app on his phone at the time of the rampage, according to authorities. […] … Dalton told detectives that he believed the Uber app controlled him, and said he invoked his Fifth Amendment right to avoid self-incrimination earlier in the interview to avoid coming across as a crazy person, Moorian wrote. The accused gunman went on to tell police that a symbol appeared — a devil-like image with horns — and said it would give him an assignment that he would follow while seeing himself from outside of his body, Moorian wrote. […] He went on to tell detectives “about the Masons and the Eastern Star symbol” that he said popped up on the phone, but what he said “didn’t make any sense,” Moorian added. In an interview with another detective, Dalton said when he saw the Uber app shift from a red color to black, that is when he would get taken over “like a puppet.”
This near-future sleep addiction tale has been getting around:
The technique that instantly dumped the brain into REM sleep was developed with an eye to military application. … […] It saved the nascent lucid-dreaming device business, then suffering slews of returns and one-star reviews from people who spent real money on headbands that they had to wear all night in the hope of reaching REM sleep. A class spread across generations that didn’t get enough sleep anyway, whose brains were blitzed by blue light and believed eight uninterrupted hours in bed was either a historical artifact or the first sign of a brain tumour.
Some background speculative socio-political concern. (The capitalist war on sleep is advancing into a frontier zone where all manner of strange thing can be expected to turn up.)
A sonification of the electrosphere:
The result of [Sam Conran’s] research is the Kabbalistic Synthesizer, a fully functioning prototype that uses the combination of electric signals in order to simultaneously synthesises variations in the Earth’s magnetic field with cosmic rays and Jupiter’s magnetic storms.
Whatever one makes of the claim, the naked artificialization impulse is notable:
If all the desktop computers with broadband access in the world today were linked together to create a single Virtual World, that place would be already be the size of earth, able to provide concurrent access to every living internet user, and doubling in size every two years.
… that’s the name of a company, now owned by Oculus, and this is how they describe what they’re doing:
We’re developing breakthrough techniques to capture, interpret, manage, analyze, and finally re-project in real-time a model of reality back to the user in a way that feels real, creating a new, mixed reality that brings together the virtual and real worlds.
Ultimately, these technologies will lead to VR and AR systems that can be used in any condition, day or night, indoors or outdoors. They will open the door to true telepresence, where people can visit anyone, anywhere.
(Via.)
Time Spiral Press 