Daily Archives: May 4, 2021

Jordan Mangi, Development and Recruitment EditorApril 28, 2021

What is performance if youre only allowed to play yourself?

This is a question members of TBD, Northwesterns neo-futurism-inspired performance group, grapple with every time they create art together.

Following the tradition of the Neo-Futurists, an experimental performance group founded in Chicago in 1988, TBD shows consist of a series of short plays, performed in a random order, in which ensemble members play themselves in real-time. The plays are all written, produced and performed by the ensemble.

Over the past year, the group has adapted to Zoom through a virtual speed dating special event, online shows and inspiration from the original Neo-Futurist Theater itself.

Communication senior Taylor Feld, an ensemble member in TBD, said the three pillars of the groups form of neo-futurism are brevity, honesty and chance.

When playing themselves, TBD members never lie if someone gets slapped in a play, the person is actually slapped rather than staging a slap. But sometimes, the ensemble will bend the rules and exaggerate their personalities or circumstances.

When theres friction between what a play wants to be and what the form is, I think we tend to bend the form for the play, Feld said.

SESP sophomore Cormac Callanan is the producer for TBD, a role which entails organizing props for each play and coordinating marketing for the shows.

He explained that what TBD does isnt quite theatre because theres no fourth wall. But it is storytelling.

We create art about ourselves and tell it to people, Callanan said. It is extremely vulnerable. It can be really funny and it can be really painful, for audience members and for actors alike but it is the honest truth that no ones ever heard.

During Fall Quarter, the TBD ensemble saw a digital show by the Chicago Neo-Futurists. Instead of performing live, audience members chose the order in which they viewed pre-made plays, most of which were in video format.

Bienen senior and TBD stage manager Emma Breen said seeing the Neo-Futurists work in the digital space was inspiring for TBDs ensemble members.

It was so cool because they were still making art, they were still portraying a message, but still keeping it in the neo-futurist style, Breen said. And so we got absolutely inspired by that we came out of that meeting and we were all like, we have to do this next quarter!

And come Winter Quarter, they did produce an online show. Because it was over Zoom, Breen said the cast was able to expand beyond the limitations of in-person performances. Some of the plays featured ensemble members homes, or locations miles away from the Evanston campus, which is impossible when a show is in Fisk Hall. The group is planning on creating another show, potentially with an in-person element, this spring.

Besides making art about everything from baby formula to nicotine addiction TBD also spends time forming friendships and making community, which Feld said is one of their favorite parts of the group.

(TBD members) are my favorite people at Northwestern, maybe in the world, Feld said. I really dont know who I would be artistically if it wasnt for TBD. I see neo-futurism seeping into everything else I do as an artist.

Email: [emailprotected]Twitter: @jordanrose718

Related Stories: Student theater troupe explores neo-futurism grows presence on campus Chicago theaters continue to deliver art during stay-at-home orders

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TBD brings neo-futurism to the present through short plays - Daily Northwestern

The Army wants highly adaptable robots that merge biology with machinery.Flesh Bots

The Army Research Laboratory (ARL) is tired of old-school robots that use mechanical actuators and it wants to give military tech a biological upgrade.

Scientists at the ARL are diving into a new field of biohybrid robotics, in which they fuse robotic machinery with living muscle tissue, according to Nextgov. Its a futuristic and mildly unsettling proposal, but engineers say it could lead to a new class of fleshy robots that are more versatile, adaptable, and sophisticated than those that are only made of non-biological components like metal and plastic.

Part of the dream is to have robots that can actually respond to unexpected terrain or other surprises through what amount to artificial reflexes. ARL scientist Dean Culver gave Nextgov the example of walking through a field and inadvertently stepping one foot into a rabbit hole. A living thing is able to shift their balance and adjust on the fly so they dont fall or twist their ankle, but a conventional robot will plop right in and be forced to rely on shock absorbers to minimize damage.

Robots who are, obviously, in Army applications going to go into unknown and unpredictable environments they need to be able to adapt to things that they werent planning for, Culver said. So, thats a big part of this effort as well.

But a biohybrid robot capable of that kind of agility is still far in the future. Today, the ARL is still working on connecting muscles to machinery and getting them under control like a spring that you can tell when to shrink or stretch.

Were going to learn the principles that make biology great at what it does, Culver told Nextgov, and now were going to strip away all of the things that hold biology back.

READ MORE: A scientist from the Army Research Lab gave a glimpse into its early work with biohybrid robotics. [Nextgov]

More on biological robotics: Scientists Built Tiny Robots Powered by Muscles and Nerves

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The Military Is Working on Robots With Biological Muscles - Futurism

PHILADELPHIA In a section of North Philadelphia, near an underpass and up a soaring stoop painted sky blue, Ms. Nandis home is decorated with pictures of civil rights heroes and political icons Malcolm X, Queen Nefertiti, Lenin. Here, for some 20 years, Denise Muhammad, known by everyone as Ms. Nandi, and her husband, Khalid, ran an afternoon penny candy store for the neighborhoods children out of their front living room, but it did much more than sell Tootsie Rolls.

If the children couldnt count their change, the couple taught them. If they couldnt read a quotation from Marcus Garvey on the wall, they helped them learn to read. Ask any child in the neighborhood where Ms Nandis house is, she said on a recent afternoon. Theyll know.

Ms. Nandi is a pillar of the community many residents call Fairhill-Hartranft, and one of the inspirations behind a new exhibition there called Staying Power. The show, which opened May 1 across several green spaces, features a series of homegrown monuments by artists to the residents who have helped to lift citizens in these communities, where the life expectancy is low, incarceration levels are high, and gentrification is now displacing people.

Not granite or bronze, these new monuments by Deborah Willis, Sadie Barnette, Ebony G. Patterson, Courtney Bowles and Mark Strandquist, and Black Quantum Futurism, consist of outdoor sculptures and photography, storefront activations and performances. When I visited before the opening, banners were being unfurled, lights strung up, and the parks swept of debris.

This is a place to understand how residents over many generations sustained staying power despite systemic forces undermining them, says Paul Farber, director of Monument Lab, a Philadelphia-based public art and research studio dedicated to examining how history is told in the public landscape.

Monument Lab has conceived and organized the exhibition alongside residents and the Village of Arts and Humanities an arts nonprofit that runs cultural programs and stewards several parks in the area.

The story of Ms. Nandis candy store has informed at least three of the installations in Staying Power. Barnette has created a fantastical living room in a storefront along Germantown Avenue, the neighborhoods commercial corridor. It is a homage to the institution of family living rooms, as a place of solace and healing during times of crisis, Barnette said. Patterson has created a series of banners featuring headless women against richly patterned backgrounds, honoring those who nurtured community but who nonetheless suffered violence and trauma.

Willis, who grew up some 25 blocks from Fairhill-Hartranft, photographed female entrepreneurs and their homes, including a baker, Tamyra Tucker, an event organizer, Aisha Chambliss and Ms. Nandi.

When the artists Bowles and Strandquist began considering the idea of staying power, they took a different approach, asking, who is missing? The pair collaborated with five women four of them formerly incarcerated to create a sculpture that celebrates their ongoing crusade to end life sentences in Pennsylvania. The womens images appear in commanding portraits, displayed around a crownlike structure, while 200 lights hang above them a memorial to the women still serving life sentences, 54 of whom are from Philadelphia.

If Bowles and Strandquists work represents dozens of Philadelphia women, Black Quantum Futurism, the Afro-futurist collective created by the social practice artists Rasheedah Phillips and Camae Ayewa, is hoping their monument will capture voices from the neighborhood and beyond. Taking the form of a 7-foot grandmother clock, the towering form houses an oral history booth where residents can record their stories and share their desires for the future. It is, in effect, a monument that listens.

Staying Power is giving a platform to local voices in other ways: It includes a whole gamut of programs, performances and research initiatives including one led by Ms. Nandi, who as a paid curatorial fellow will be interviewing families about their experiences of home-schooling kids during the pandemic.

It is not unusual for community members to have this level of involvement in a project organized by the Village, which has its closest parallels in the nonprofits Project Row Houses in Houston, and the Heidelberg Project in Detroit. For Farber, of Monument Lab, that holistic approach to community development made the Village the ideal partner to think about what stories, and therefore which people, get a say in the evolution of a city.

A five-minute walk from Ms. Nandis home, a patchwork of green spaces with undulating, mosaic-encrusted walls and vivid murals across the walls Yoruba, Christian, Islamic, Chinese leads to the Village. It was here, more than 50 years ago, that Arthur Hall, a visionary teacher of West African dance and music, planted a seed with the Ile Ife Black Humanitarian Center, which became a hub for the Black Arts Movement in the late 60s and 70s.

Back then, the green spaces surrounding the building were vacant lots where houses had burned down. This was all dust, rubble, no trees, said the Villages executive director, Aviva Kapust, pointing to the park that abuts the organizations main building. In 1986, Hall invited the Chinese artist Lily Yeh to the neighborhood to work with his friend, the local mason JoJo Williams, to transform the vacant lots. She began by engaging children in the area to discuss what was missing. They said trees, Kapust recounted, so she drew a big circle in the dirt and they built the Tree of Life sculpture.

Real trees followed, as did homegrown monuments murals and sculptures made from pieces of furniture encased in concrete and decorated with mosaic patterns. When Hall left Ile Ife in 1988, he entrusted it to Yeh, who turned it into the Village of Arts and Humanities and expanded its mission to include the development of green spaces in the footprint of former homes.

Today, the legacy of Hall and what grew out of it is still a source of strength, pride, and identity in Philadelphia. A metal plaque bearing his name and story is planted in the sidewalk next to the Village. Every time I read it, I smile, said Ivy Johnson, a home health aide and prison reform advocate and one of the women who appears in (and collaborated on) Bowles and Strandquists monument.

Now Johnsons image will also appear in one of the Villages parks and include a recording of her voice, along with poetry written by incarcerated women. Johnson was imprisoned for 18 years, and writing poetry was her outlet in a particularly dark period. Making art from her experience is a form of healing, she said.

This is perhaps what undergirds Staying Power: the belief that giving people access to stories in the public landscape, to the legacies of those who have forged a path toward self-determination, can make a material difference in residents lives. As the exhibitions co-curator Arielle Julia Brown put it, a key part of what it means to have staying power is having what she calls choiceful histories at hand.

With this exhibition, and its work at large, the Village hopes to make concrete change. A series of free newspapers published in tandem with the show will spotlight local advocacy efforts, like the fight to reopen a recreation center that was closed in the 1980s. The organization funds community-led research into alternatives to policing and runs expungement clinics to help people purge their criminal records. The exhibition is not about profiting from peoples stories, Kapust said, but presenting a series of investments in people, in actual revitalization efforts.

Congressman Brendan Boyle, who represents Pennsylvanias Second District where the Village is located said in an email: I applaud those who are willing to dedicate their time to help reduce recidivism rates and provide support services that can help people turn their lives around. These organizations are a secondary safety net where, all too often, we find those falling through systemic tears in our existing social safety net. But he added, authentic reform can only be realized with the commitment and leadership of state and local governments, the federal government, and community organizations all working in tandem.

Marc Handelman, chair of the department of art and design at Rutgers University, agrees that art cant be as impactful as legislation. But on the other hand, Im convinced that society cant be challenged and changed without art, he said. What the Village of Arts and Humanities do shouldnt even be thought of as incremental. Its scale is local, and the intimacy through which its work is done is profound, direct and necessary.

For Rasheedah Phillips, who works as a full-time housing equity lawyer while moonlighting as one-half of Black Quantum Futurism, art and advocacy work can converge. Phillips has been working alongside the Peoples Paper Coop to get laws passed that would prevent criminal records being used in employment decisions, and eviction records being used by landlords to deny people housing.

Through their monument, Black Quantum Futurism hopes to give neighborhood visitors the opportunity to use their voices to share memories and dreams thereby honoring African diasporic oral traditions. Submissions to the oral history booth will ultimately live in an online archive.

In a city where murals have been destroyed by luxury housing, the Villages have remained. Over all the years that they have been there, Ms. Nandi said, they have never been graffitied. They have not been torn up. They have not been spray-painted. Children helped to put them together. So they can say this is ours, literally. I had my hands in it. I painted, I cleaned, I helped build the trees.

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They Are Their Own Monuments - The New York Times

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has taken to Twitter to come clean about self driving tech.

But instead of putting the spotlight on the techs immense engineering challenges, Musk is pointing the finger at, well, humanity as a whole.

A major part of real-world AI has to be solved to make unsupervised, generalized full self-driving work, as the entire road system is designed for biological neural nets with optical imagers, the mercurial CEO tweeted on Thursday.

Put in simple terms, hes saying, self-driving cars are hard because they share the road with unpredictable human brains and fallible human eyes.

In some ways, Gizmodo was quick to point out, thats an incredibly obvious conclusion. Sure, given the absence of us meat bags, self-driving cars would have an easy time staying in lines, making lane changes, and generally getting along with each other.

But the reality is that for the time being, the roadways are still going to be clogged up with flawed human motorists. In fact, as a fatal crash near Houston this month illustrated vividly, many of Teslas customers are already under the impression we are living inside of Musks futuristic vision.

First responders say thatthe crash, involving a 2019 Tesla Model S, occurred with neither of the two occupants sitting in the drivers seat.

But Teslas vice president of vehicle engineering Lars Moravys investigation ended with the opposite conclusion: a reportedly dented steering wheel was evidence somebody was in fact in the drivers seat.

While we may never get behind the truth of what exactly happened leading up to the crash, there have been several other instances in recent memory that demonstrate the terms Autopilot and particularly Full Self-Driving (FSD) an optional $10,000 add-on that enhances the self-driving experience, but doesnt actually allow the cars to drive themselves are giving drivers a dangerously false sense of security.

Several drivers have been caught sleeping at the wheel while the Autopilot system was engaged. One driver even tricked the car into registering somebody in the drivers seat something thats still trivially easy, as Consumer Reports confirmed last week and showboated on social media by making a bed in the rear seat to appear as if they were sleeping.

Granted, the number of crashes involving Autopilot are minimal compared to the millions of miles being driven on Autopilot. According to Teslas latest safety report, the company logged only a single crash for every 4.19 million miles driven with the feature turned on.

But that doesnt change the simple matter of fact: in 2021, Teslas cannot drive themselves. Its a message that hasnt quite hit home for many, as these collisions and stunts demonstrate.

Rather than owning up to Teslas freewheeling approach to advertising its self-driving tech, Musk is steadfast in his belief that Teslas are better drivers than their occupants.

Anyone paying attention to the rate of improvement will realize that Tesla Autopilot/FSD is already superhuman for highway driving, the billionaire tweeted, and swiftly getting there for city streets.

Musk is very aware of the difficulties involved. Getting self-driving cars to behave in predictable ways and co-exist with human drivers on the road, as he acknowledged this week. And while we have seen leaps in the development of self-driving technologies, were starting to see what happens when promises start to outpace reality.

As far as current roadways are concerned, there wont be a large reset overnightin which all human drivers are replaced with AIs even if thats an event we would all benefit from. That means immense care must be taken while we acclimatize to a future where cars do most, but not all, driving on our behalf.

While Tesla is arguably a pioneer in the field, its being led by a CEO who is dreaming of a distant future but not living in one.

READ MORE: Elon Musk Shares Painfully Obvious Idea About the Difficulty of Self-Driving Cars [Gizmodo]

More on Tesla: Senator Slams Musk for Talking About Deadly Tesla Crash

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Elon Musk: Self-Driving Cars Are Hard Because of Flawed Human Drivers - Futurism

Elizabeth Parrish, the CEO of a biotech startup called BioViva, announced last month that six dementia patients traveled to Mexico so that the company could inject them with an experimental anti-aging gene therapy beyond view of the FDAs watchful eye.

Parrish who told STAT News that she injected herself over 100 times with an experimental gene therapy of her own design said that the dementia patients were recruited and treated in 2019 with a similar experimental gene therapy vector meant to extend telomeres.

The power of the technology is there, were just not able to harness it because nobody is able to raise the money to get these disruptive regenerative medicines into clinical trials, Parrish told STAT.

In her view, aging is a disease that needs treatment like any other, so shes trying to jumpstart the anti-aging treatment field, which she feels is flagging and burdened by needless regulation.

Telomeres, genetic sequences at the ends of chromosomes, are often used as a proxy for aging and cellular health because they gradually decay as time goes on, at which point cells lose their ability to replicate. That makes them a common target for longevity treatments and in Parrishs view, a target for reversing or delaying dementia and Alzheimers.

But when STAT investigated this particular startup and its purported treatment, the outlet only came away with more alarming questions than when it started. For instance, BioViva worked with researchers to develop gene-editing vectors meant for animals, but it remains unclear where and how they secured human-focused ones. Further complicating the issue is the fact that BioViva says it experimented on dementia patients a particularly vulnerable group while deliberately dodging regulatory oversight.

Missing clinical data, sources talking in circles, and conflicting reports call into question the validity and even the reality of the treatments, according to STATs investigation, and that has experts in the field concerned.

Everything Im seeing indicates the involved parties are not conducting a credible clinical trial with appropriate safeguards, University of Minnesota bioethicist Leigh Turner told the site.

BioViva is propped up, in part, by having prominent scientists including the renowned Harvard geneticist and gene-editing pioneer George Church on its board. But while Church said that he provided scientific insight to BioViva and that he thinks telomere treatments are almost ready for humans he had no idea that the company was already experimenting on humans.

You dont want to have academics at reputable institutions offering a protective function for what appears in many ways to be pretty disturbing activities on the part of these companies, Turner told STAT. So if hes going to lend his name to businesses like this one, in a way, he becomes responsible for propping them up.

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Mysterious Biotech Startup Gave Anti-Aging Gene Therapy to Dementia Patients - Futurism

The move comes after protests from Blue Origin and Dynetics. Contract Suspension

NASA has told SpaceX to cease all work on their multi-billion dollar lunar lander contract after two other private aerospace companies protested the deal.

Blue Origin and Dynetics both protested the agencys decision to award a $2.9 billion contract to build the Artemis programs lunar landing system solely to SpaceX, according to The Verge.

The Government Accountability Office (GAO), which manages federal contract disputes, is now tasked with deciding whether or not their protests warrant a reversal of the contract.

Pursuant to the GAO protests, NASA instructed SpaceX that progress on the HLS contract has been suspended until GAO resolves all outstanding litigation related to this procurement, said NASA in a statement obtained by The Verge.

Both Blue Origin and Dynetics filed their protests with the GAO on Monday to challenge the contract. In their filing, Blue Origin warned that awarding the contract to just SpaceX jeopardizes the Artemis programs 2024 goal of returning to the moon.

NASA has executed a flawed acquisition for the Human Landing System (HLS) program and moved the goalposts at the last minute, Blue Origin said in a statement obtained by The Verge.

The agency initially chose SpaceX due to its reusable rocket system Starship, which boasts a large payload capacity as well as a relatively lower bid.

This all comes at the heels of a billionaire mud-slinging contest between SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk and Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos.

In fact, Musk took to Twitter to dunk on the Amazon founder after The New York Times reported Blue Origin would be protesting the contract.

Well, Elon. Life comes at you fast. Musk is the one with egg on his face now that his multi-billion dollar NASA contract is in jeopardy.

Regardless of the outcome, competition in the burgeoning 21st century space race is an awesome thing. For that to happen, though, we need it to be an actual competition and not just have a single company run by a living meme calling all the shots.

READ MORE: NASA suspends SpaceXs $2.9 billion moon lander contract after rivals protest [The Verge]

More on the HLS contract: Elon Musk Just Said That Jeff Bezos Cant Get It Up

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In Stunning Reversal, NASA Halts $2.9 Billion Contract with SpaceX - Futurism

That's one slick UI.Cybetruck UI

The head of user interface design at Tesla has left the company and on the way out the door, Electrek reports, leaked some spicy images and videos of the UI of the upcoming and much-hyped Cybertruck.

Pawel Pietryka has been with the electric car company since 2016 and has gone to found his own design firm called Moderne Grafik Anstalt. Now, the portfolio shown on the new firms website included some already known images of existing products like Teslas apps mixed in with some completely new glimpses of the Cybertruck UI.

One short video, for instance, shows a smooth user interface featuring slick 3D animations that transition to a map.

Moderne Grafik Anstalt has already removed the videos, Electrek reports, but not before the images were downloaded by some keen-eyed Tesla fans.

The long-awaited truck is slated to hit the market later this year, but production woes could easily push that date back for a year or more.

Its a modern UI for a truck thats arguably ahead of its time but the leak is far from a guarantee that the final UI rolling out with the actual vehicle will look anything like this.

Even with a scaled down and less flashy UI, the truck will represent a major shift in the pickup market, with practically nothing like it on the road today.

READ MORE: Teslas head of UI leaves and leaks unreleased Cybertruck and FSD images in the process [Electrek]

More on the Cybertruck: Elon Musk Takes Cybertruck for Off-Road Joyride

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New Leak Shows the User Interface of Tesla's Cybertruck - Futurism

Hello down there!Hello Down There

During its third heroic flight on the surface of Mars on April 25, NASAs Mars Ingenuity helicopter managed to catch its big brother, the agencys Perseverance rover, in the frame of a newly-released photo.

The tiny helicopter managed to take the shot from an altitude of 16 feet and a distance of 279 feet away from the rover.

Its a magnificent photo and the first time weve ever seen a Mars rover from this perspective.

In the image, NASAs car-sized rover can be seen in the far top left corner of the frame.

The image also shows the tracks left by Perseverances six wheels, as well as the Octavia E. Butler Landing site where the rover first touched down, as well as the Wright Brothers field, the airfield where Ingenuity first took flight on April 19.

The four pound rotorcraft managed to break its own speed record during its third flight on April 25. The team at NASAs Jet Propulsion Lab celebrated the flight as a major success, showing what it was truly capable of.

With this flight, we are demonstrating critical capabilities that will enable the addition of an aerial dimension to future Mars missions, Dave Lavery, the program executive for Ingenuity Mars Helicopter at NASA, said in a statement at the time.

A video captured by Perseverance also shows the third flight in almost in its entirety, demonstrating just how far the little helicopter managed to get.

READ MORE: Mars helicopter Ingenuity spots Perseverance rover from the air (photo) [Space.com]

More on Ingenuity: Amazing Video Shows Mars Helicopter Cruising Above Martian Surface

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Mars Helicopter Snaps Photo of Mars Rover, Way Down on the Surface - Futurism

Imagine that you make a new friend on Twitter. Their pithy statements stop you mid-scroll, and pretty soon you find yourself sliding into their DMs.

You exchange a few messages. You favorite each others tweets. If they need a hand on GoFundMe, you help out.

Now imagine how youd feel if you found out your friend didnt really exist. Their profile turns out to be a Frankensteinian mashup of verbiage dreamed up by the powerful language generator GPT-3 and a face born from a generative adversarial network, perhaps with a deepfaked video clip thrown in here and there. How would it affect you to learn that you had become emotionally attached to an algorithm? And what if that person was designed to manipulate you, influencing your personal, financial, or political decisions like a garden-variety scammer or grifter?

It might sound far-fetched, but people have been fooled by computers masquerading as human since as far back as 1966, when MIT computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum created the ELIZA program. ELIZA was built to simulate a psychotherapist by parroting peoples statements back to them in the form of questions. Weizenbaum was unsettled by how seriously users reacted to it famously, his secretary asked him to leave the room while she was talking to it and he ultimately became a critic of artificial intelligence.

Now, the tech is closer than ever to creating believable ersatz online people. Simon DeDeo, an assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon University and external faculty at the Santa Fe Institute, tweeted last summer that his current nightmare application is blending GPT-3, facial GANs, and voice synthesis to make synthetic ELIZAs that drive vulnerable people (literally) crazy.

I recently asked DeDeo how far he thought we were from his nightmare becoming a technological reality.

I think its already happened, he said.

We spoke shortly after the internet had gone into a frenzy over a series of viral TikTok videos that appeared to show Tom Cruise doing random activities like magic tricks and golfing, but were really deepfakes made by a VFX specialist and a Cruise impersonator. The videos are impressive. But, like their creator, DeDeo doesnt believe the Cruise fakes are a cause for alarm.

Preventing the next fake celebrity TikTok video, he said, is not the concern we should focus on. Rather, he said, the Cruise deepfake is revealing something thats been sitting there for a long time.

He likened the coverage of the TikTok fakes to the way the media reacts to a plane crash, when driving is statistically much more dangerous. In the case of artificial intelligence, like transportation, certain dramatic events draw our attention, but were actually surrounded by these much smaller scale, less salient events constantly.

In fact, hes not terribly worried about videos at all. In his nightmare scenario, hes much more concerned with how GPT-3 can be used to generate language that sounds realistic.

I can con you without needing to fake a video, he said. And the way I con you is not by tricking your visual system, which the video deepfakes do. I con you by tricking your rational system. I con you at a much higher level in your social cognition.

Social is the key word here, because the omnipresent, small-scale fakes DeDeo is talking about thrive on social media. In a way, thats all social media is; DeDeo frequently referred to the interactions we have on sites like Facebook as cyborgian.

Think about conspiracy theories like QAnon, which thrive on social media in a way they probably couldnt in person. People who get sucked into these kinds of communities are constantly bolstered by likes and comments on their social media posts, even as they alienate their real-life friends and family, as in the case of Valerie Gilbert, a self-described QAnon meme queen.

The internet users who form the QAnon community are, as far as we know, actual humans. But their actions are filtered through social medias algorithms to make a community that isnt quite organic, and which could allow dark new entities like DeDeos nightmare to thrive.

Its like soylent green QAnon is made of people, DeDeo said. But those bizarrely artificial societies are sustained by algorithms that fake sociality, that fake friendship, that fake prestige, that fake all of these things that are just kind of basic to our cognition.

And algorithms that reinforce potentially toxic or dangerous posts, like QAnon memes, arent likely to be changed by Facebook any time soon, because the increased engagement means people spend more time on the website.

This artificial interaction isnt limited to conspiracy theorists. Another example DeDeo pointed to is the odd behavior that can be observed among the users of small Twitter accounts when a tweet suddenly goes viral. You can watch a person be literally driven temporarily insane by whats happening to them, he said, comparing it to a deepfake experience of becoming emperor of the world.

These are some of the more visible examples, but the cyborgian nature of social media is something that affects every user. Scrolling through your timeline is engaging with an algorithm; the updates you see are a constructed reality. Sure, there are humans behind the accounts, but the nature of your interaction with them has been intrinsically changed by a computer. Its like everybodys voices coming out slightly distorted and at slightly the wrong volume, said DeDeo.

The Facebook account attached to your friend from high school? he asked. In one sense, your friend from high schools operating that account, but in another really important sense hes not. Because by what Facebook chooses to show you of him, the interactions it chooses to show you that it has, and the one that it chooses to magnify or diminish, create a totally different person.

This may sound relatively harmless. So what if Facebook is highlighting and promoting some detail of your friends life that you never have noticed or discussed in a personal interaction? But its the phenomenons very innocuousness, according to DeDeo, that makes it dangerous.

Marketers talk about the phenomenon of social proof, in which humans will be more likely to do something or buy a product if they see that their social circle also does that thing or uses that product. The curation of social media content, possibly with a few small tweaks or additions here and there, could enable organizations to easily prey on that part of our psychology and influence our behavior. A persons social media could be altered to cause them to think doing something is a normal thing, a good thing, or a smart thing.

The person whos trying to profit doesnt have to make this truly pure thing where Tom Cruise says something he would never possibly say, explained DeDeo. The profitable version is cyborgian in the sense that, huh, it kind of looks like what my friend would say. In fact, its pretty close. And in fact most of what that thing just fed me is what he said.

This kind of cyborgian deepfake isnt necessarily limited to text posts. What if Facebook, for example, put in fake likes or hearts?

Almost certainly theyve tried it, DeDeo said. Theres no guarantee that if somebody hits the like button theyll see it, and theres no guarantee that if the like button is activated by a person that that person really truly activated it.

In addition to enabling manipulation of social media users, its easy to see how these kinds of fakes could lead people to doubt reality in fact, this has already happened and has been a concern of people following AI development for years.

Another major malicious use of this technology and one thats vastly underreported compared to the hypothetical political impact of deepfakes is harassing and demeaning women. Fake pornography of celebrities is prolific, but deepfake porn of regular people is also a massive problem.

A visual threat intelligence company called Sensity discovered a porn bot embedded in the messaging app Telegram that allowed users to create deepfake nudes of women from just one profile picture; by the time it was discovered in late 2020, the bot had been used to generate fake porn of 680,000 women. Vox reported on a 2019 study that showed a stunning 96 percent of existing deepfake videos were pornographic and nonconsensual. An AI app that has since been taken offline allowed users to undress women. And in March, the mother of a teenage cheerleader was charged with harassment for creating incriminating deepfake images of other girls in the cheerleading program, including nude photos, and telling them to die by suicide.

So what now? How do we learn to recognize and discount deepfakes but keep a grasp on reality?

This is a big question in social science, said DeDeo, who believes it boils down to a notion of civics. He recalls being taught in school which institutions to trust and how to be a good consumer of news media. But we have no modern-day civics that helps, say, a 15- or 16- or 17-year-old reason about this crazy world, he said. The landscape is totally different.

What kind of curriculum would you develop to help people be adults? DeDeo wondered. He mentioned the cyborgian deepfakes again, lamenting that people are vulnerable to them because they hijack parts of our reasoning that are actually good in many situations. Trusting a person to tell you the truth, saying Oh, I dont quite understand this, I should figure this out those are great instincts, in certain contexts. But those instincts could lead you to treat a GPT-3 online date as if theyre a human being.

I asked if he was advocating for a kind of new civics education in our K-12 curriculum, and while he said that would be ideal, DeDeo added that we as adults dont even know what the hell is going on, either.

There are no adults in the room, he said. So I think the conversation is partly, What do we teach a 12-year-old?, but its also a philosophical problem for 21-year-olds and 31-year-olds and 41-year-olds.

But DeDeo is optimistic about solving that problem, pointing to the success of the university system and comparing the internet to a gigantic, anarchic community college.

Universities work; they really help people think better and enable science and philosophy to thrive, he argued. One thing that enables their success is the idea of membership and belonging, and that being a member of the system requires you to submit to certain obligations for example, epistemic humility, which requires you to go through the peer review process even if you really, really think youre right.

The thing we know doesnt work is Facebook, he said, describing it as this kind of massively authoritarian state where you have no sort of freedom of assembly within it. So its probably too large and the whole thing is designed to prevent people from self-governing.

Twitter, he said, is a little bit better. But for some of the best examples, DeDeo suggests looking at Reddit and Wikipedia.

Reddit enables a great deal of institution building within a subreddit. Theres very creative stuff that happens. And, he added, Reddit is surviving, even thriving; its growth hasnt leveled off. Wikipedia, at least early on, was also a great example of a community creating institutional structures that enabled it to thrive.

These institutions help detect fake content because gaining social status on Wikipedia or a subreddit is like the worlds greatest CAPTCHA, explained DeDeo. You have to do things that are so fundamentally human.

Something like this played out on Twitter recently, when a flood of apparently fake Amazon employee accounts were created and began tweeting praise of Amazon and making anti-union comments. Twitter users quickly caught on to telltale signs of computer-generated faces, such strange effects around a persons hair or glasses that had frames with an inconsistent style. Many at first assumed the accounts were created by Amazon, but more investigation shed doubt on that, and Amazon told a The New York Times reporter that it was not affiliated with the accounts. The accounts have since been suspended by Twitter for misleading information about the identity of the account holders.

Amid all the concerns about the problems that this technology could cause, DeDeo said he sees at least one upside: a more critical examination of human-generated content that, like bot-generated content, has no real depth.

Theres a lot of not-thinking that human beings do, said DeDeo, who, as a professor, has read his share of formulaic essays. Theres a lot of things people say that sound smart but actually have zero content. Theres a lot of articles that people write that are meaningless. GPT-3 can imitate those to perfection.

By exposing that, he said, clever algorithms like GPT-3 makes us aware of the extent to which things that look like theres a brain behind them have no brain. It disenchants us.

As machines learn to do more things, in other words, it forces us to do some deep thinking about what makes us different what makes us human.

We might think, Well, this is this awful dystopia where machines can write ad copy, said DeDeo. Well, maybe it turns out that writing ad copy is not what it means to be human.

More on AI: You Have No Idea What Artificial Intelligence Really Does

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Professor Warns of "Nightmare" Bots That Prey on Vulnerable People - Futurism

The Evans family, from Canberra, dressed up in their finest outfits for a previous edition of Steampunk at Altitude. Photo: Tess Hudson.

The countdown is on until a steampunk festival is back to turn a historic village on the Monaro plains into a retro-futuristic town filled with family-friendly activities.

Steampunk is a subgenre of science fiction that incorporates technology and aesthetic designs inspired by 19th-century industrial steam-powered machinery.

For the past few years, Nimmitabel has become a meeting place for lovers of the genre with its Steampunk at Altitude festival, which this year is being held on the weekend of 1-2 May.

The festival will feature attractions including steampunk-themed stalls, live music, poetry and a Victorian dinner.

READ ALSO: Canberra company takes robot presence to the world

There will even be teapot duelling, which involves combatants dunking biscuits into cups of tea and keeping them there as long as possible before taking them out without getting drops onto their clothes or plate.

Theres an art to teapot duelling its not a simple thing, laughs Nimmitabel Chamber of Commerce member Tess Hudson. People take it very seriously.

She says Nimmitabel is a great location for a steampunk festival because of the 1800s building facades in the main street and through the town.

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Teapot duelling tiffin master Craig with Tess Hudson at a previous edition of the Steampunk at Altitude festival. Photo: Supplied.

Its the perfect place to have people wandering around in steampunk gear, says Tess.

She explains people love steampunk because it is so encompassing.

Steampunk crosses all the genres and appeals to adults and children alike, says Tess. And who doesnt like dressing up?

Youve got the safety of a persona you create. That tends to break down barriers. People try things they are normally too shy to attempt. People get a real buzz out of it.

READ ALSO: Rowenas monarch butterfly obsession takes flight

The festival will feature artisans and makers of handmade crafts selling steampunk jewellery and accessories, as well as food stalls.

There will be snail races for children, face painting and a scavenger hunt.

And, of course, people will be dressing up in steampunk gear and wandering around the town.

It will be like stepping into another world, says Tess.

Entry to the festival is free, except to the four-course Victoriana banquet on the night of 1 May. To book tickets, click here.

To see the festivals program, click here, and for updates and more information, visit Steampunk at Altitudes Facebook page.

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Steampunk at Altitude will bring lovers of retro-futurism to Nimmitabel - About Regional