The psychological tricks to extract the wallet were creepy enough - but this is an order of magnitude or two beyond. Tailor-made virtual crack? It’s one thing when it’s an impersonal algorithm, but when you get your own recon and psyops team… well, I suppose Vegas has been doing it for decades.
This is just the beginning. What’s manual state-of-the-art today will be the omnipresent automated substandard of tomorrow.
Edit: With the computers using our datamined profiles from Facebook and from web and mobile phone use, bought from the data aggregation and mining middlemen.
Not directy related to the free-to-play article but yesterday I read about a new web advertising product: While the video ad is displayed the viewer is filmed and the reaction evaluated.
They* claim it’s opt-in and I hope no OS/browser/plug-in is nowadays able to activate the camera without user input - but the idea is creepy as hell and inspired directly by the Lovecraft/Orwell-verse
*) no link here, the company is called Virool and the product eIQ Emotional Insights
I can see the use as gauging the viewer’s attention, and requiring two minutes attention to an ad for exchange for some virtual in-game tchotchkes.
Especially creepy if the product advertised is porn.
Ding! eIQ has finished evaluating your advertising! Your video ads primarily produced REVULSION AND DISGUST in 75% of the audience. In the remaining 25%, they were COMPLETELY IGNORED.
I read about the product on a IT news site, one of the first comments was (roughly translated)
[code]Dear advertisement industry, I’m happy to oblige.
How can I activate this feature?
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. . . . . . . . . .,/ÂŻ ./
. . . . . . . . . /. . /
. . . . . /´¯/'. .'/´¯¯·¸
. . . . ./’/. . /. . /. . /¨. /¯
. . . . (’(. . ´. . ´. .¯´/’. .’)
. . . . .. . . . . . . . .’. ./
. . . . .’’. .. . . . . ._.·´
. . . . . . . . . . . . . (
. . . . . . . . . . . . . [/code]
Do you ever feel like the same people that run F2P games are also the ones managing the political emails sent out to get donations for ___________________?
Or at least it feels like a Skinner experiment.
I’d read an Eldritch Big Brother.
Next in the Turing Test arms race: Ad blocking software that creates virtual video people to “watch” the ads and “react” to them for you.
Well according to Cory the first self-aware sapient AI is going to be a foulmouth.
I don’t think it was used as a “real” concept so far, but I would love to see/read something in this vein.
Is there a particular Lovecraft story it reminds you of?
Mostly the atmosphere - dark, oppressive, forbidding. Not like 1984 were the citizens could still believe that the upper echelons tried to do the right thing, but everyone is aware about the own status: Not a human being anymore, but a product.
I guess this kind of thing reminds me a little of H. G. Wells …
Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us.
… except instead of Martians it’s artificial intelligence trying to trick us into making bad shopping decisions.
Yes, more or less similar to my feeling - though in War of Worlds the earthlings try to get rid of the invaders all the time, Lovecraft’s works includes more protagonists simply collapsing in front of the unfathomable unknown (i.e. users and big data web companies).
outline of joke: something something, John Carpenter’s The Thing, shoggoth = Facebook
Definitely that. It will be fun to watch the development. Makes me regret that I am rather inexperienced in the field of machine vision and 3d graphics… maybe there will be some movie-making simulation software available by then, able to run scenes in realtime?
