"Thanks," replied the old man flatly as he slowly strode down the hallway, his eyes fixed on the large metal door at the end.
The nervous technician walking next to him grew increasingly somber. "Y-you should know, sir... we haven't recorded any organic expression from him since you left. He may not-" she stopped as abruptly as Dr. Olson's gait. The old man wearily glanced at the technician with no discernable change in expression or tone. "May not what?" he asked.
"H-he may not... be there."
"What do you mean? Has his brain stopped?"
"Well, no..." the technician looked away, searching for the right euphemisms. "But every neural pattern we've seen for the last six years has been, well... algorithmic."
"You've stopped drugging him?" the old man squinted a bit, his face showing a hint of amusement.
"Artificial methods of inducing variation are now completely ineffective. If you recall on your last visit-"
"I remember," interrupted Dr. Olson cheerfully. "He told me they were working less and less. Even then, you guys were practical bathing his whole brain with those super-entheogens, ha!" the old man gave a wry chuckle before resuming his walk.
"Right... " the technician approached the large console beside the door and rested the back of her hand in a small round hole. The top of the hole descended onto his hand and softly pressed around it for several seconds while she stared into a retinal scanner. A short beep signaled the loud CLANG before the large metal door slowly swung away from the pair. Upon entering, the technician quickly turned left and walked through another door, while the old man slowly approached his friend, and sat down in a chair a few feet away.
He faced the general figure of a person lying in a bed but appeared to be built into the bed more than lying in it. The figure's arms were both covered by a smooth plastic structure. Where the left hand should be was a jarringly different dark metal box with many wires and small hoses running from it, and around the right hand was an amalgam of wires, pipes, and subtly moving mechanical parts. The top of the bed seems like it has swollen upwards and swallowed the legs. The torso seemed to sprout abruptly from the bed, which itself showed only patches of skin among a patchwork of metal and plastic of different types and colors, with a few wires running from the front neatly around the sides and up behind the shoulders to join with the thick bundle of wires and hoses that were fixed to the large structure around the figure's head.
An expressionless dark-skinned old man's face stared back at Dr. Olson from a mostly synthetic head and neck, whirring and clicking with steadily increasing intensity upon matching eyes with the visitor.
Dr. Olson broke eyes with his friend and slowly looked at the equipment around him. His eyes rested on a shiny new part of the chest piece. "So," he smirked, "your lungs FINALLY gave out did they? Must've been all that smoking!" he laughed a dry, raspy laugh.
The whirring peaked and abruptly stopped, as the face surrounded by metal blinked and abruptly broke out into a smile. "Just solved another problem with my existence, is all" said a low, tinny voice that carried far more inflection than seemed consistent with a completely still head and shoulders. There was no expression of movement at all besides the very lively facial muscles.
"Oh... and you're head is now totally fixed too, huh? And your voice... is your face the only part left of your body with active skeletal muscles? And what's that new sound?" Dr. Olson leaned forward, tilting his ear toward the face.
The tinny voice chuckled. "My new left eye, can you tell? Can't really stop the clicking yet without sacrificing acuity. The sucker's gotta be making tiny movements all the time to satisfy my occipital lobe." The face made a frowning expression that looked it would accompany a shrug. "I've still got plenty most of the way down my arms and, part of my legs. Don't really remember what it's like to articulate limbs, though. And I do miss moving my head, but I finally cracked the neural feedback for the lungs and diaphragm! I thought the cortex would be tough to crack, but the medulla and pons are finicky litte shits, ha ha ha!" the tinny voice's laughter widened Dr. Olson's smile. "Glad to see you're still around, Roh."
"Why wouldn't I be?" asked Roh, still chortling. "You think I'd bother making all this if I was just gonna go quietly? Ha!" he laughed louder.
Dr. Olson's simle faded slowly as his expression grew somber. "Annie said that you might not be anymore... that the variation in your neural patterns have flatlined."
"ha... what... flatlined?" the jovial mood slowly left Roh's voice. "For how long?"
"Well... since my last visit, six years ago..." said Dr. Olson, looking intensely at his old friend's face.
"Six years, huh?" the tinny voice went quiet for several moments. A nearby room that was already filled with commotion suddenly erupted with excitement that was undetectable from this chamber. The whirring sound coming from the giant mass of machinery around Roh's slowly faded below Dr. Olson's perception.
"You know..." finally said Roh, glancing sadly around at nothing particular, "I don't mean to disregard Annie or any of the others... but it's all always so routine and mundane... there's never anything new, so I just use my digital parts. I'm still here, can't you tell?" The question didn't sound rhetorical.
Dr. Olson nodded. "Yeah, yeah, you're clearly here RIGHT NOW, but... when I leave? I suspect that whatever of your brain that I'm stimulating with my presence-"
"Not your presence" Roh cut him off. "At least not anymore. They tried convincing me you were here and even made a pretty good voice synthesizer, but I saw through them faster and faster until they stopped trying."
"Okay, my interaction then. I must say I'm a little flattered, but still... think about what they're seeing. Biologically, it's like you just rose from the dead to talk to me."
Roh's lips curled into a wry smile. "I mean, my brain never stopped firing, did it?"
"Hey, you made the rules yourself. If your brain patterns become totally deterministic, then call your Time of Death."
"And yet here we are," Roh replied slowly, as though to feel the weight of each word.
"Really, though, Roh... are you gonna be here the next time I come by?"
Roh gave a tinny scoff, then frowned at the sound of it before replying "I already answered that question, but..." his voice trailed off, the playfulness aprubtly ending. "...to be honest, I think I feel it coming. Sure, I could probably work out a way to detect whatever chaotic patterns are left in me but... I feel it. The gap between 'me' and 'not me' in my own head is widening. Maybe that's why I've apparently been away for so long. Most of the cortex of my brain is now directly affected by or outputting to a digital interface. I can feel the line in my thoughts, where the computer picks the thought up and it becomes clear, vivid, strong, like ultraviolet-bright neon lights. Rigid, explicit ideas with no... substance. No meaning. There's nothing inside any of it, nothing to FEEL when an idea is delivered to me from the computer. The gap is so wide now... I program more and more thought processes into the digital interface so there's less and less for me to do, but... I guess that's it, isn't it? Just slowly fading away..." Roh's voice trailed off into sadness as he closed his eyes.
After a long pause, Dr. Olson asked "What do humans look like, for a machine?"
"What?" the tinny voice sounded confused.
"I remember you once said the best use of plugging a computer into your brain was to try and describe things from a computer's perspective. How you could now see the 'shape of data'. If you can see it even more clearly now, maybe you can answer it this time around: what do humans look like, as data?"
"As data? Humans..." the whirring returned as Roh closed his eyes with a look of deep concentration. The face slowly went completely as blank as before Dr. Olson entered the room before the eyes snapped back open and a slow smile crept across Roh's face. "to the digital part of my mind, Humans look... like fire."
"Fire?" asked Dr. Olson, smiling. "How?"
"Well, fire is just thermal energy that radiates in frequencies that the human eye can detect. It's an arbitrary term for data, but a very specific one for organic experience. Fire is just thermal energy that can be seen, heard, and felt... and it changes chemical properties. Fire provided all light in the world until we found a way to apply fire to create light with electricity, only after forging materials with fire. From the perspective of data... humans are like fire. There is nothing in the entire data universe that did not start from human intention. Whenever there's a collection of data that can't be interpreted as any known type of structure, apply humans like heat and either some method of interpretation will emerge or the data will burn away into entropy, or rather... I think the concept of entropy is kind of inverted in this metaphor." Roh laughed before continuing. "Data without any kind of structure will very likely become permanently un-interpretable if human attention is not applied often enough, or after too long. Data that grows cold becomes meaningless. Systems can come back to it and draw patterns that weren't seen before, but without human interpretation at some level, it will always be rendered obsolete in favor of whatever has human attention."
"Fascinating," replied Dr. Olson, enraptured. "Why?"
"Because while machines can interpret visual data, they cannot see." Dr. Olson widened his eyes as he could've sworn he saw Roh's left eye literally flash from the inside. "They can parse audio information or acoustic pulses, but cannot hear. Excellent questions, though. Thank you.""
Dr. Olson nodded thoughtfully. "Okay then, wise guy," he smiled. "How about this one?" He cleared his throat.
"What do YOU look like?"
Roh closed his eyes, and the whirring sound rose again.
Tavaly (előtt) irgalmatlanul szerettük A VIDEÓ-t, töménytelen padka és slappy deszkázással, három percben, ismeretlen arcokkal és ismert pro-kkal. Szerencsére megérkezett a második rész, ami négyszeresére duzzadt és az előző cikkben bemutatott Abe Bethel is nagyobb szerepet kapott benne. Mi több, az ő skateshop-ja támogatta be Tim Olson kisfilmjét, ami folyamatos lejátszáson megy nálunk, mert annyira jó.
Az átlag életkor állítom negyven körül van, de ettől csak még fűszeresebb lesz az egész. Jó látni a 90-es évek profi deszkásait most padkákon trükközni. Ronnie Creager-t, Ryan Gallant-ot vagy Kenny Anderson-t, de sosrolhatnánk még a jobbnál jobb arcokat.
Ez a videó (is) annyira jó, hogy simán meghozza a kedvet úgy általánosságban is a deszkázáshoz! Nézzétek és menjetek!
Timothy Olson on the trails. Pic by Jaybird. It’d be easy to look at Timothy Olson’s career and focus on the past. He’s got some big wins (current course record at Western States Endurance Run, anyone?), plenty of highlights, and has run at the top of the field for years, but I wanted to have Tim on to talk about what’s going on now and what sort of plans he has for the future. What I found is…
Timothy Olson Interview - Overtraining, Reality Shows, Run Mindfull Retreats, and Family Balance Episode
Timothy Olson Interview – Overtraining, Reality Shows, Run Mindfull Retreats, and Family Balance Episode
Timothy Olson Interview After setting the Western States course record, Timothy Olson has had mixed success in competition. Along with some more monster wins, Timothy has also struggled with symptoms that resemble Over Training Syndrome. His physical mojo was gone, he was tired, sore, and struggled to race past 30 miles until just recently. In this interview, we talk the past few years. His…
