We need technology that is less immersive, not more
filiph.net
filiph.net
I used to sneer at the social value of entertainment. Then covid lockdowns hit. I spent a lot of time playing Factorio. When professional sports resumed playing (in empty stadiums, with fake crowd noise on the broadcasts) I was happy to sit on the couch after work and watch baseball.
Without that entertainment, there is no way I would have been able to trudge to my computer and work from home day after day, when the only thing I could leave my house for was an occasional walk and a frightful trip to the grocery store.
So even if the brain surgeon is not using those "nicer-looking graphics" to improve brain surgery (which could very well happen), the brain surgeon might just be looking at "nicer-looking graphics" to unwind after a day of brain surgery, which gets her ready for another day of brain surgery. Entertainment has value.
I agree in the sentiment that we have more important issues than providing ever more entertainment – we had no issues spending our time 50 years ago; Without immersive technologies. Instead of translating the extra resources technology have given to more entertainment, we could have translated it into more free time.
I would happily have less consoles, VR, and games and instead have a nation-wide 30 hour workweek (I need my friends not to work either).
I merely expressed an opinion of an alternative society I would rather be a part of and based on your comment, I don't seem to be the only one.
But it requires us to, collectively, value our time higher.
in the end am I from Denmark. and here we certainly have another approach to work life balance.
I am pretty sure most of a surgeon's surgeries are NOT exhilarating experiences for them, but rather routine activities. Similarly for lawyers drafting contracts, software engineers developing web backends, construction workers building houses, or singers singing their repertoire.
Not all of these jobs can be automated, so some routine will always exist.
Using your neurosurgeon example, I posit that having fewer VR headsets will not prevent the doctor from unwinding. Nor will having mobile phones with less vibrant colors or application with lower engagement metrics.
Sure, they can always fall back on the classic method for doctors to unwind: whisky.
Statistically, the neurosurgeon is unwinding on TikTok and hating themselves for it.
Could VR become immersive and an ad-addled attention destroying mess? Yes we should probably stop that from happening. But otherwise this warning is too early.
When would the right time have been to warn people about the current generation of social media?
We now have a ton of information about how technology will be used and abused, and we have a laundry list of known problems that we have not solved. Algorithmic social media and engagement-driven content are front and center.
To me, the warning is appropriate not based on what hasn't happened yet, but based on what already has.
VR is still in 2006.
Maybe let the first ad run in VR before you ascribe all the same problems to it.
This isn't a "gotcha" question; I'm genuinely curious. To me, VR is a new interface layer on top of a massive ecosystem, and the same people are building it. The ecosystem is where the problems exist, and VR is just the latest facade through which we interface with that ecosystem.
In this framing, it's not ascribing old problems to new technology as much as claiming that the new technology magnifies or intrinsically replicates the existing problems.
> The warnings started appropriately early in 2011, there should’ve been regulations in place by 2015
It's 2024 and the regulatory landscape is very poor or nearly nonexistent. Shouldn't this encourage more caution? i.e. we've already proven that looking back and deciding "oh yeah we should have been more careful" hasn't actually resolved the issue, and taking the same approach with emerging tech that has similar pitfalls seems doomed to repeat that.
I also don't think we had any idea what was coming when we were building the stacks that underlie the current web. We now have much clearer mental models of what the Internet and technology in general is capable of, and the resulting warnings are coming much earlier (appropriately, IMO).
I personally think the larger space of spatial computing (VR, AR etc) presents immense opportunities outside of its ability to just be another vehicle for ads. Leave that part alone because our regime of regulations only creates calcification and monopolization.
Not as important as how they function, but still important.
People, software programs, buildings, landscapes... appearance is information, about quality, about professionalism, about creativity, about attention to detail.
This is in some other aspects means the opposite
How so? I've played all 3 of those, and much prefer the Civ 5. Or at least I think I do? I haven't played Civ 1 or 2 for 20 years now, so it's hard to compare.
Could someone tell UI designers?
It is deeply troubling how much effort goes into manipulating people, or just pleasing managers who’s checkbox includes “flat design, because?”, and how little effort goes into actually making interfaces visually effortless to understand, features easy to discover, and with flexibility to be really usable from a user’s perspective.
Our bicycles for the mind have become conveyer belts for e-mall shopping.
I don't have hard numbers, but I think flat design really became a lot more popular after Windows 8 was released. For a while, Windows 8 was heavily criticized for its UI design (and not just because it was flat), but they stuck with flat design the entire time, and I believe they had a great role in popularizing it.
I guess we'll just need someone else to make their UIs more realistic and 3D, like the old ones used to be, and stick with it no matter what others say, and the style may become popular again if their UI is in wide use.
https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/ml00ac/how_...
Basically all "need" I have of new recorded (to include video games—on-demand and not requiring the attention or effort of anyone but myself) entertainment is social. Any "need" for new entertainment exists because new entertainment is being created. If new entertainment stopped being created entirely, my quality of life wouldn't actually drop at all, because there's an astounding quantity & variety of it already, far more than I can engage with in a lifetime even restricting myself to the likely-to-be-very-good stuff. My friend-group, and entertainment media, could do exactly what we do with new entertainment, but instead by digging into older material we've so-far overlooked, instead of new.
You don’t think there will be better entertainment in a decade or two? That’s what it sounds like you are saying.
for me on the other hand i can definitely see some improvements that i would like to see in entertainment. mostly in the generation of content for games, and graphics quality that is affordable for everyone. (i am not buying the latest graphics hardware, but i play games a few years behind the most modern available, but i expect that to improve as well)
i am happy for things to get better, but i have no desire to spend more money just to have it earlier.
But at the same time, on a broader point, the author has a compelling general idea that it can be helpful to question how you spend your time away from work. I've spoken with people—and have personally experienced—a satisfaction from physical hobbies outside of computer interaction. Rock climbing is especially popular among the people I know (even those with busy schedules), along with martial arts such as BJJ or judo. I also know a couple people (one personally, and another impersonally through his biography as a novelist named "What I Talk About When I Talk About Running") whose life enjoyment is closely tied to their passion for long-distance running.
Outside of physical activity, other low-technology ways of entertainment will remain important. Reading books, especially classical ones, can improve one's writing. I've also read about chess players who have attributed their strong ability to plan ahead—in life and martial arts—to their passion for the game. I've additionally known people whose interests in music performance and production led them to develop good friendships with others. Naturally, this can apply to immersive technology: video streaming or high-graphics video games also have the ability to inspire people in their day-to-day life, or help people make meaningful connections.
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My source of skepticism is therefore not with the people working toward on nicer-looking graphics, as highlighted by the author, but rather with the people who apply psychology in video game design to make certain video games addictive—especially those with free-to-play models, which employ gameplay loops to keep people grinding for rewards even when the game stops feeling fun. I think the author is focusing on the wrong part of the industry: certain game designers have had a larger role with making certain video games have negative effects, as evidenced by somewhat-recent successful lawsuits against game companies that employed loot boxes and overly-easy ways to make in-game purchases in certain games targeted toward children.
Video games and streaming can absolutely have a healthy place in one's life—especially productions created for the love of the art instead of primarily for the money—but only in moderation and not at the excessive expense of other ways to spend one's free time. Graphics development isn't a problem at all, but I do think many people's lives can become richer if they also give passions that don't require a personal computing device a strong chance.
A game doesn't need the most advanced graphics to look aesthetically pleasing, though. It can be made up for by using an art style that doesn't need powerful hardware, e.g. modern pixel art, or the simplistic, cartoonish look that 3D Nintendo games use. Mirror's Edge still looks great due to its art direction and use of techniques like precomputed lighting.
However, different people have different standards. I've been really enjoying playing the game Crypt of the Necrodancer, and I think the pixel art is also pretty good and aesthetically pleasing, but when I showed the game to my friend to see if he might like it, he rejected it because "the art didn't speak to him." Evidently, compared to me, he has a higher minimum for graphics in order for a game to be fun for him.
It absolutely does! But I would argue that "nicer looking graphics" is not required for something to be entertaining.
But they also create systems and media designed to extract as much value from humans as possible, by bypassing any mindfulness on their part. Regardless of any regretful impacts.
Not sure what I am saying, other than completing the picture as it is today.
I've been typing since the early 90s, and can type around 120WPM without looking or thinking about it, and it hit me that in a very real sense, the iPad (and other computing devices) are already an extension of me. I've invested the time to integrate this hardware into my brain via the keyboard interface, and once typing is automatic, the friction between brain and machine is very low. I can transmit information from brain to computer and back relatively quickly.
The thing about immersive tech is that we're already immersed in tech. The next generation of VR/AR promises to immerse us even more, but I think it's interesting to consider the idea that we're already immersed and don't always realize it.
When you start to look at the space around you as an extension of you (and I think there are good reasons to look at it this way - your immediate surroundings are in effect a projection/construct formulated by your brain, and the actions you take within that space modulate your average conscious experience), and when you start to look at the computing devices around you as part of that extension of you, it starts to raise really interesting questions like:
If I could implant a chip in my brain, and if people could control my brain with that chip, I would probably never allow it. But when that chip is outside of my brain in a device I keep in my pocket, why am I more willing to allow other entities to feed me stimuli?
I tend to agree with the broader idea that we need to be less immersed in tech, if for no other reason to reduce this kind of external control mechanism we've all hooked ourselves in to. And I don't think immersion is limited to the obvious developments like that next generation VR/AR headset. Immersion is already extremely high.
there is of course a balance to it. not getting notifications means i spend more time checking for new messages than i would if notifications were on, but at the same time i also forget to check for messages when i am actually focused on something, which i think is the more important aspect of it.
so i am immersed with my tools only as an extension of my self, controlling the tools to do what i want them to do without giving up any of that control to anyone else. (at least so i like to think)
Our eyes and ears are no different in that sense, only they're mostly input rather than output.
Input is just as dangerous in our bodies as it is in some backend that connects to a database, marketing makes use of these vulnerabilities to control us in some way or another.
I don't think people argue we should cover over ears while walking outside out of fear we get hijacked from things we could hear. In the same way, I don't think there's an issue with immersive technology, one just has to learn to treat it as more external input that needs to be validated and sanitized.
We are already cyborgs.
It’s called being annoyed or caught off guard by external stimuli.
I think there is a large portion of people on this website who have not spent a day in years without their devices. That doesn’t mean their devices are integrated with their biology. Just that they have become dependent on things.
Why is that "of course not"? Is your arm part of your body? Your hair? A wig? A pacemaker? A well-fitted mechanical exoskeleton that you use without thinking about it? A poorly-fitted exoskeleton that you're still learning how to use? A Jeep? It's not as clear-cut as you make it sound. If the criteria is: well, I can't feel the Jeep -- well, you can't feel your liver either.
Of course yes.
> Your hair?
Of course yes.
> A wig?
Of course not.
> A pacemaker?
Depends on who's asking and why.
> A well-fitted mechanical exoskeleton that you use without thinking about it? A poorly-fitted exoskeleton that you're still learning how to use?
Of course not to both of these things.
> A Jeep?
Of course not, and framing a Jeep and a human's liver as if the only possible point of difference between them is whether or not you can "feel" them is strange.
Half of us are fully capable of growing an entire other human being within our bodies, with a physical connection so tightly integrated that breaking it causes bleeding for weeks - and yet it's debatable whether even that counts as being a part of our bodies (especially medically speaking). Navel-gazing about the distinction between your body and a car not being clear-cut is simply inane to me in comparison.
The point is, your "of course" is based on some "obvious" definition that always gets fuzzy at the edges. Someone else's "of course" is based on some equally valid and obvious definition that gets fuzzy in different ways at different edges. Don't act like everyone who doesn't think exactly like you is just pointlessly navel gazing. The pointlessness is in trying to have a clear definition at all, which saying "of course" implicitly assumes.
> and framing a Jeep and a human's liver as if the only possible point of difference between them is whether or not you can "feel" them is strange.
Good thing that's nowhere near what I said. I said "I can feel it" is obviously not a good criterion.
I think you'll find discussions significantly more straightforward if you don't make up the other person's side of the conversation for them and run off tilting at windmills.
What part of the comment where I e.g. said that whether or not a pacemaker is considered part of your body "depends on who's asking and why" gave you the impression that I define body parts as being built by you? What part of my comment mentioned genetics at all?
By the by, tattoos are a modification to a part of your body (your skin) but are very much not a part of it (your immune system is literally constantly trying to get rid of them). And your gut microbiota is very clearly considered to be a _separate_ organism from you, with its relationship described in symbiotic terms.
You never specified your "obvious" definition, so I had to reverse engineer it from your examples. I wouldn't have to make up your side of the conversation if you just actually said what it is. You're still using "obvious" and "clearly" as meaning obvious to you, based on every iota of experience you've ever had, but totally failed to justify why exactly your "obvious" opinions should be obvious to anyone else. Either you have a hard and fast definition that can definitively determine whether that thing is or is not part of a body, or it's not obvious. Unless your rule for determining whether something is part of a body is: "just ask filleduchaos, and he'll tell you whether it obviously is or obviously is not."
> And your gut microbiota is very clearly considered to be a _separate_ organism from you
"Very clearly" again. It's considered a separate organism because it has different DNA than your germ cells. But so do your mitochondria. So does a chimeric twin. Is a chimera "obviously one" or "obviously two" bodies? Tell me which one of those is so obvious that I'd be completely stupid to believe the other one, please. I suspect you'll say it's obviously one body, but then you have a problem with gut bacteria being obviously not part of your body.
I think you just improved my Rocket League game by just accurately describing what probably should have been obvious, that's exactly what it feels like to be in the zone.
It's why a new driver feels so uneasy while a seasoned driver can almost "feel" the amount of space their car takes up.
And yeah, I'm stretching the argument a bit -- of course at least on a conscious level there's a boundary at my fingertips where I know that my body ends by the more generally accepted definition of "me".
This definition of "feeding you stimuli" seems extremely broad to me. Are you "allowing other entities to feed you stimuli" when you listen to the radio? When you see signs and billboards on the highway? When you are having a conversation? How could you live your life without allowing other entities to feed you stimuli? How are these examples different from what your phone is doing? (And don't say "notifications": you have far more control over which notifications you receive than which billboards you see.)
If I could implant a chip in my brain that allowed me to tune into any radio station I wanted and listen to it in my brain, I'd probably do that, assuming it's safe and actually under my control. I'm not seeing the dichotomy here.
To rein this in a bit, here's how I'm defining this: regularly "choosing" to interact with a library of content and experiences that are all engineered to evoke certain emotional responses from me as the user and get me to buy more things or change my beliefs. I put choosing in quotes because once a habit loop is established, the behavior is indistinguishable from an addiction and the choice is similar to the one made by a gambler sitting at a slot machine.
Listening to the radio, watching TV and talking to a friend all provide external stimuli. But clearly there are aspects of each of these interactions that makes them unique.
When I'm talking to my friend, I usually don't have to wonder if the things they're saying are only meant to influence my purchasing decisions, or change how I see a political candidate, or support a particular world view, etc. Some friends are good influences. Some bad. If you choose to hang around the stoner who always wears you down and gets you to smoke a joint, that particular friend might not be a good influence.
> How could you live your life without allowing other entities to feed you stimuli?
I'm not suggesting that this is possible or even desired. I'm suggesting that there are certain sources of stimuli that we deem unacceptable that are strikingly similar to stimuli that we deem acceptable and that it's not clear why we categorize them so differently.
In other words: If you would say "hell no" to a physically connected chip that feeds your brain ads for products you don't need every hour, why would you not say "hell no" to a device that could do the same thing without even needing a physically connected chip? (I'm saying this as a person who carries one of those devices, so I'm not a Luddite or claiming to have avoided anything).
> How are these examples different from what your phone is doing?
There are a myriad of differences, but I think they boil down to these key things: Ubiquity, Tracking and Personalization.
Billboards (which are ugly and often the source of controversy in communities) do not know who you are, and they are not in your pocket every minute of the day. They don't insert themselves into the middle of your interactions with friends, or follow you home.
> And don't say "notifications": you have far more control over which notifications you receive than which billboards you see.
I disagree with the premise of this objection, but notifications are only a small part of this. Most people don't turn notifications off, and app makes know this. There is a finite number of billboards you can fit on any given stretch of road, and there is an infinite number of notifications you can be subject to regardless of where you are on any given day.
Yes, you can disable notifications, and I think this is one of the simplest things people can do to interrupt the addiction loop. But many of the most popular apps carefully construct notifications that get you into the app for plausible reasons (comments on your post!) so they can then feed you the algorithmic payload.
> If I could implant a chip in my brain that allowed me to tune into any radio station I wanted and listen to it in my brain, I'd probably do that, assuming it's safe and actually under my control. I'm not seeing the dichotomy here.
I think that "assuming it's safe and actually under my control" is exactly where the radio and social media examples diverge. The point is that much of the content on social media is not safe, and you have less and less choice about what you actually see. With radio, you probably wouldn't choose to listen to the channel that airs Rush Limbaugh 24/7. With algorithmic feeds, you don't really get to choose what you see.
It's a fundamentally backwards-facing view of the self that relies on historical or past depictions of an individual in order to define their current self-concept. It implies an immutability, a static, unchanging quality to the person, since after all - there "you" are, or at least all your photos and your memorabilia, your self-depictions and simulacra, committed to and preserved in the permanent record of the cloud. It's also one that emphasizes the importance of external markers and signals of identity - only those that can be extraverted - to the detriment of the inner life of the psyche, the private life of the mind which is not so readily available for examination or expression.
This way of looking of ourselves through a digital black mirror continues to uphold the illusion of permanence; our self is like a river, and we never step in the same one twice - unless we freeze the river (in time) and post it to Instagram.
Not to mention all the vanity and superficiality of Photoshop, filters, r/instagramreality, etc etc... points which have all been discussed ad nauseam.
Moreover there is the slow death of the literary personality - of one who, in times where media and bandwidth were not of sufficient capacity to generate and retain all these audiovisual representations of our selves, was primarily known through their words and their writing. This is a fundamentally different way of trying to understand one's character that requires much more participation on the audience's behalf to fill in the gaps - the gaps that can't be immediately filled in with high definition video. It becomes harder for one to be identified through their words, and more and more preferable to identify someone by what they look or sound like; another step in the long, slow march away from literacy and to other forms of information exchange.
In this regard I'm reminded of David Foster Wallace uncut television interview [0], which I found incredibly fascinating - here was one of the most articulate men in society, celebrated for his literary works, appearing awkwardly and shyly on camera, sometimes meandering off on tangents in the discussion, sometimes "pontificating" on the interviewer's questions - how does DFW's audiovisual representation compare to his literary output?
Many of the most talented artists of our time don’t do any art — they work in advertising.
The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click adswhich is very close to article’s paraphrase
Artists at ad agencies probably never broke even top twenty jobs by salary.
Now, to be clear, I don't consider GMail "ad tech", even though it is ad supported. I don't see anything wrong with someone like Google want to drive traffic through services that are monetized through advertising. Nor Facebook for that matter.
I will complain about lock in, dark patterns, and other nefarious things. But you can have good ad supported services without necessarily having all of the bad things. Those just bump your margin and revenue.
So, if you feel that the "good" programmers are working on ad tech and analysis, while the "less good" are working on, say, GMail proper, I'd be curious in how that conclusion was drawn.
How many people here work on ad tech directly? (vs, some dual use technology that can be used for ad tech.)
I know a lot of people, tangentially, indirectly, "6 degrees of separation" kind of thing, and I don't know any of them being directly involved in ad tech. None of the "lead geeks" I'm familiar with are in the field.
The closest it got was a friend of mine who worked on Farmville in its heyday, and that's more a dark pattern addiction game than ad tech.
Not really. Advertising is pretty new, modern advertising with targeting market segments didn't exist until around the start of the 20th century[1]. The first ad supported media was in 1838[2].
Behavioral ads targeting individual user's are super new, though I'd argue TikTok and gacha games are orders of magnitude better at using behavioral manipulation than advertisers are.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_J._Barratt [2]https://qprintgroup.com.au/history-of-print-advertising/
Talent isn't in the execution in art, it's in the ideas, and tapestry of the artist's life.
> The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads
This is also not true, because those minds aren't intelligent enough to see the folly of their attention. The best minds see past this and do the work they are driven to do, similar to artists.
> It’s not a moral failing to have a need to make a living, especially if others are relying on you.
Exactly. People make choices in what they do, it has nothing to do with talent being taken out of the market, it's always been this way. There have always been more profitable things to do than making art.
You have a hyper-idealized version of what is and is not art.
And execution definitely forms part of the talent. We should know that just as well. We all know "the idea guy", the guy who has all the "right" ideas, but just can't seem to actually do the thing required to bring the idea to life.
And that's because most ideas are just half-formed thoughts. I'm almost on the other end of the spectrum. It's mostly about execution and the idea actually means very little. The idea of "what if you couldn't make new memories" is the central struggle in two very different movies. In Memento, it's used to tell a detective noir story where we're told who the killer is in the first scene. In 50 First Dates, it's used to give Adam Sandler a hurdle to plowing Drew Barrymore.
And you can find joy in the doing itself. You can make good commercial art. It is possible. There is craft there. And where there is craft, there is art.
No, I made an assertion that the most talented artists make art.
> And execution definitely forms part of the talent.
Seeing that many, many top, full time, talented artists have technicians that execute, I don't think it's the defining quality of a top artist. Execution can be offloaded, ideas cannot.
> And that's because most ideas are just half-formed thoughts.
Talented artists have fully formed thoughts. That's their talent.
> And that's because most ideas are just half-formed thoughts.
Well, I'd suggest your job is at risk. Execution can be automated, ideas not so much. Who is gonna tell the GPT what to do?
> And you can find joy in the doing itself. You can make good commercial art.
Yeah, those people failed to be the top talent in art and did something else. They are still highly talented but not in the realms of top talented artists.
The ability to realize an idea is way more important than "having ideas".
And I say that "most ideas are just half-formed thoughts" because they are. Most people think an idea like "the Uber of X" is worthwhile. It's not. It's hardly a thought, much less an actual idea.
Everything else you said was basically "nuh-uh, I feel differently and assert that my opinionated feelings are facts". And examples won't matter to you because you'll "no true Scotsman" your way through that saying they are "real" artists or "top talented" artists. As if your opinion on these matters were a subjective criteria.
The one about making people click ads grew out of that after the GFC when software salaries started to boom like finance had earlier in the decade.
I'm sure there was something else earlier that diverted intelligent, talented people into socially unproductive pursuits because it paid better. I recall when I was in college there being huge dilemmas among all the students studying geology whether they should sell out and go work in oil and gas exploration.
The problem is in my experience (for quite some smart people) not "which job pays so much better (and thus facing a potential dilemma about selling out)", but rather about actually finding a job.
The job market does not like very smart people, but rather self-promoters and sycophant: I know quite some really smart people (with a focus on people having degrees in mathematics and physics (often comparable to PhD or post doctoral experience)) who had quite some difficulties actually finding a job in industry, and thus rather had to take the job positions that they could get.
Maybe there's something similar in the job market where smart people are more self aware that they may take someone elses spot and more respectful and less good self promoters. Because the other set of people don't even think about that they end up getting the spots.
> I think the original quote is:
> The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads
No, it's a paraphrase of a quote attributed to Banksy and it's specifically about graphic arts, not CS or psychology.
> The thing I hate the most about advertising is that it attracts all the bright, creative and ambitious young people. - Banksy
First time I heard it was in a conversation about how the best students from directing/film making (or was it 3d artists ?) ended up making ads for cars rather than video installations and I am pretty sure it was before 2010.
The sentiment is the same though but I cannot ever let pass an occasion to throw in my favourite quote: "when all you have is a hammer...".
Nope, the most famous form is Ginsberg; I don't know if he lifted it from somewhere too.
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked
- Howl
(EDIT: the grandparent link actually points that out)
No, they appeared in very different contexts and Ginsberg goes in a different direction (1955, drugs, jazz, etc.):
> I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night, [..]
while Banksy deals with the then current state of arts and marketing (~2000/2010?).
Also, it's not explained in the article how Ginsberg and Hammerbacher ideas relate except for an "en-pasasnt" quote from the person originally inquiring the quote investigator opinion, so the grandparent link doesn't actually point anything out.
edit: to summarize: that quote is taken out of context even if it seems to fit
I believe this has been true throughout human history. The greatest artists and thinkers throughout history have earned their keep by providing services to the wealthy or teaching paying students (also often wealthy).
There are upsides, the artists get to eat but they also have all the benefits of being connected to their employer/patron including time spent practicing their craft. If they were to quit and focus on pure art then they would likely earn far, far less and possibly spend less time making any kind of art commercial or not.
It reminds me of this survey that made the front page not long ago about author's that contained this illuminating paragraph:
> While 80% of respondents considered themselves to be professional authors, only 35% said they were full-time authors while 53% said they were part-time authors (with the balance being one-book authors or undecided). The primary writing occupation of part-time authors outside of publishing books was professor/academic (8.5%), followed by book illustrator/author (4.2%), editor (2.9%), poet (2.4%), journalist (2%), teacher (2%), and entrepreneur (1.5%).
So even people who consider themselves professional authors are unable to work at it full time. It makes sense, there's only so much one person can produce and it's quite difficult to find an audience willing to pay for what you make. This likely holds true across all professions i.e. you have to do the work that they want done and not the work that you want to do.
https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/p...
no, the work that pays is the unglamorous stuff that someone wants to get done to make a profit. the stuff that actually needs doing is the stuff that would be a benefit for our society.
In advertising's case, it's such a huge industry because it works. It moves the needle on purchasers' decisions. You can make it work a little less well on yourself with a few mental habits: never buy on impulse, don't save your credit cards, put time and distance between yourself and the purchase decision, have a rigorous self-directed research process before you open your wallet, learn to skip or tune out ads, go for paid media instead of ad-supported media, etc. And you can make it work for you by taking the other side of trade and getting paid when other people click on ads. But there are 8B+ humans who you don't control, and they will do what they want to do.
but i struggle with that other side. i'd love to earn some money on sidebusinesses like that, but i feel like making them ad supported would be close to unethical. i want people to stop paying attention to ads, not take advantage of them.
i probably can't even control what ads will be running, so how would i know if those ads are something i would approve of or not?
So... that's not blame? Is "businesses only do this because you tell them to, with money, so stop telling them to if you don't like it" not the intended reading of that?
My point is that the modern advertising industry is better classed as a result of large-scale structures and societal-scale rules, the same way bread lines were, than as something explained by consumer choice. I mean, FFS, the point of it is to influence consumer choice. This is like saying if the gas pedal doesn't want the car to go faster, it should stop getting pushed so much.
"My point is that the modern advertising industry is better classed as a result of large-scale structures and societal-scale rules"
Does this model result in useful predictions that you can act upon? A model that "advertising works because in the aggregate, it alters buying decisions and leads to more spending being directed to the advertiser" is very actionable: it tells you exactly where the money is, why it is being spent, and then gives you leads to areas you might want to study (eg. human psychology and perception, owning a channel, producing content at scale) to make you better at influencing those money flows. A model that "the modern advertising industry is better classed as a result of large-scale structures and societal-scale rules" may be true, but it's pretty useless. It doesn't have enough detail to make specific predictions, and its area of focus is on phenomena that you don't have any agency over anyway.
My physics professors were always very clear that the true value of a theory is "Can you make testable predictions with it?" My English & sociology professors were always very clear that "Society doesn't actually exist. It's just a collection of individual actors." This was pretty eye-opening when I got to college, because it got me to understand the value of thinking in terms of specifics rather grand theories that sound expansive as a soundbite but can't actually be used.
[EDIT] And that's the optimistic take. In fact a great deal of it is harmful, not just wasteful.
You're thinking of picking up the trash, driving trucks, fixing toilets, and assembling wheelbarrows. That pays shit: the things that "need doing" are mostly just not done, and what is done pays nothing. Advertising has never "needed doing", it's always been an exploit that psychopaths use to enrich themselves at the expense of all of humanity. And the advertising industry is nothing if not glamorous.
Granted, advertising has been taken to the extreme and there wouldn't be harm in cutting back on it to a certain degree, you just can't get rid of all of it so it is in fact one of those jobs that need doing.
The point of my comment is that you can say the same thing about every pair of thing someone wants to do and thing someone needs done and the essential part is that it doesn't matter what the second thing is, people would still complain that all this talent for A was being wasted because they were working on B instead but it's not a waste for a variety of reasons one of which is that there is not enough demand for A. You could easily say someone is a psycopath or antisocial if they choose to spend all their time doing something that isn't needed or not wanted instead of doing the things that other people need done. You would at the very least say they are selfish.
Thats a problem with art today, IMHO.
What I think is much more destructive is when "immersion" just looks like "constant distraction", i.e. the idea that we'll wear these immersive devices all the time so we can be bombarded with "helpful" notifications and, oh look, in-context advertising! That is, when I want to relax I want to relax, and I don't think something holodeck-like is bad for that. But when I want to focus I want to focus, and strapping a headset onto my face for extended periods is not going to help that situation in any way.
I think that would be valuable and might deserve its own follow-up article. To me, immersion in the context of creation or play strikes me as a completely different animal than immersion in the context of passive consumption.
To me the sad thing about my friends in this situation is that they usually aren't in some swashbuckling fantasy epic starring them, but grinding Runescape/WoW/Eve/etc., performing the same repetitive actions over and over, with the occasional burst of actually interesting interaction or story. They've replaced the real-world grind with a synthetic grind, but they are still grinding! At least its cheaper than a sports gambling addiction, and probably marginally less health-destroying than a drinking habit.
Highly recommend both books.
We used to talk about reducing the amount of time people use the product. Doing accounting is NOT what small business owners should be spending time on, and our goal was to reduce the amount of time spent.
As the company got bigger, we started selling adjacent software, and suddenly time spent in the 'ecosystem' became an important factor for increasing revenue per user and the rest is history.
Especially in the B2B space with sales reps, it's hard to sell people on things they don't have to do.
Most of it is probably consumed for entertainment purposes (news, social media etc. - social media's share averages to around 2.5 hours per day). Have we considered that maybe we're just spending too much time on entertainment? As opposed to doing things that actually make us better, like studying, practicing a skill or exercising.
No, I doubt it, unless you have some data that the advent of digital entertainment has changed our entertainment habits. (I think it's a separate question when it comes to social media + smartphones, which work very very hard to steal our attention.) People don't work all day long. Before we had digital media, people entertained themselves with social visits, theater, drinking, reading, meditation... basically all the things we still do outside of digital entertainment.
"First pass yield" was a metric I liked in the accounting and payments space. How many transactions went through without requiring a manual touch.
Relativity means that the Star Trek vision of a galaxy spanning society is probably an incoherent fantasy. Why pursue expensive, dangerous, and disappointing adventures in the real world when you can conjure any conceivable reality with perfect verisimilitude?
Unless a species is completely post scarcity, there is a strong ethical argument to be made that this is the correct thing to do, versus spending a lot of resources on "mere exploration",
So the main fight I see in the future is those who think (similar to the article) all this immersion effort is vapid and superficial. I don't think it is, and for more than just training, but also for rapid iteration in a simulated physical space that doesn't waste actual physical resources until a better product is developed. Ergo, I feel there is hidden value in the virtual space yet untapped in the wider market for combining fun and relaxation with teaching valuable things about the real world.
Just for example, I have been adding my local flora/fauna and edibility properties and medicial properties to one of my gameworlds recently, which could help me accelerate my learning of that particular real world thing but also make the gameworld more fun and interactive.
> A very common practice in videogames is to make your game visually immersive—that is to say, to visually portray the game’s elements in such a way that makes the player, to some extent, feel like they’re “really there.” The most obvious way this is employed is via a firstperson point-of-view camera, as seen in titles like Counter-Strike or Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. In these titles—especially in the highly fantasy-simulation-dependent Skyrim—part of the idea is to “immerse” the player in the world.
> The problem is, this isn’t where “immersion” really comes from. Ever notice how people get incredibly immersed in a great novel? What could be further away from the literal, realistic portrayal of reality that Skyrim brings than a set of glyphs in black and white printed on dead trees? And yet novels routinely engage people to the point where they are completely and utterly immersed.
> The myth is that immersion comes from visual/auditory messages, but the problem is the human mind wanders quickly. We’re curious and inquisitive and while a picture-perfect image might in fact immerse us for a moment, if there isn’t an engaging system there for us to keep us immersed, we’ll quickly snap out of it and remember that we’re just tinkering with some computer program.
> The thing that engages people in interactive systems is actually quality interaction—for games, this means interesting, difficult and meaningful decisions as frequently as possible.
Quote from Keith Burgun's "Clockwork Game Design"
Strangely enough, I feel like there is more friction for me to play video games of this era (and i don't) despite the advancements in and availability of technology to interact with said games. Perhaps the friction I feel has more to do with the bombardment of content (ads, microtransaction, social-media, etc) that gets in the way of and distracts from actual game play.
Then again, maybe I'm just getting old.
Perhaps this is what the author is trying to get at? If we could immerse ourselves in a similar way when we were using "primitive" games and hardware and therefore were subjected to all the temptation and risk, then what is different or relevant?
The quantity of those immersed and additional layer of (arguable harmful) content?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q13CishCKXY
So we do need more immersive technology; just maybe not for games.
There's intellectual immersion. Flow. You can be intellectually immersed reading a book or playing chess.
Then there's sensory immersion. Put a VR on, you're immersed this way.
I don't want to be immersed in Amnesia The Dark Descent just because it would be "more realistic", I can already shit realistic-enough bricks without drowning in the sensation of "I'm going to die".
I want to be invested in Link's journey to save Hyrule or my party's progress in Baldur's Gate and investment's worked fine before headsets were a thing.
I can just imagine the abuse headsets will enable for microtransactions. Got my popcorn ready to go.
This assumption that only games with nice graphics are immersive enough to somehow be a problem is just wrong. Before I had gaming hardware I wasted the exact same amount of time by re-reading books and comics, and it was quite immersive. AAA graphics are not the problem.
> humanity has a variety of important engineering problems to solve, and nicer-looking graphics is quite low on that list.
That sounds an awful lot like the good old "why do we build space rockets when people are starving".
If so, you are in the minority. For most people, it is easier and more natural to put down a book and go do something else, than it is to quit a video game. Media consumption metrics seem to corroborate this.
> That sounds an awful lot like the good old "why do we build space rockets when people are starving".
If you want to simplify the article this way, sure, but then it's "why do we build ever-more immersive entertainment when we could build space rockets or try to address starvation". I think there's a difference. (And of course, even then we're losing all nuance of the actual article, but I guess there's no way around that.)
Games with impressive graphics but no gameplay aren't known for being particularly big drains of human attention.
As another example, take the comments on the recent thread about the browser game generals.io [1]. One might say that 'it looks like a spreadsheet with conditional formatting', but it doesn't make it any less addictive, according to the commenters.
Full immersion is entertainment, consuming your full attention. Like a movie theater or a stage play. That's OK, but not full time. Light immersion is walking around with your nose in your phone for most of your waking hours. That may be worse.
i want it all gone, or else i want us to use it to destroy absolutely everything. because what we have created is so hideous that only the capacity to destroy itself can justify its existence.
The difference between video games and art is that I create the environment that I am immersed within.
Sure, like English or any other language, I’ve inherited the cultural context for my artistic endeavors, but that context is a basic requirement for any sort of immersive activity.
Glancing at your username I think I maybe know you through some mutual sf friends. The Page called they want a lot of their fernet back
Anyways, say hello from me to whomever we know in common!
Claiming that effort in one field is "wasted" or "misallocated" is the height of hubris.
I make satellites that are being used to scan the earth to determine the impacts of climate change, quantify coastal erosion, monitor foliage coverage and crop health, locate buried ancient ruins, predict the weather, and create high-resolution 3d maps of urban areas.
The production of these spacecraft is very low volume, and therefore very expensive.
Research into new lithography techniques for longer-lasting battery-powered consumer devices led to low-power electronics that allow the spacecraft I make to have greater processing power for a given energy budget.
Advancements in more powerful graphics chips for gaming have led to affordable (and yes, despite what you think they are affordable) GPUs used to process and rasterize the data the satellites I build gather.
Unreal Engine is used to build tools needed visualize the results.
The low-profile RF connectors that we use were invented for the specific purpose of shoving Bluetooth and Wi-Fi into thin consumer devices like laptops and tablets and they save us (noticeable and significant) weight.
I can't predict what will happen but I think I can predict what will not happen and given the size of the market I work in I assert that there is an exact and precise 0.0% chance that the resources needed to develop the technology I rely on every day would have been allocated in service of my market. It is too small.
Instead they were handed to me on a silver platter by the consumer electronics market. People playing smartphone games-- and militaries trying to destroy each other have directly led to what I do being possible.
>but I had to admit to myself at one point that, long-term, playing video games for any extended period makes me physically miserable and dumber.
I do not play video games, at least nothing newer than SNES games, but I know people who do and that sounds like a personal problem.
I exclusively workout using the Meta 2 (I don't play any other games on it) and it works really well.
Is it really worth it shuffling digitized crap around at high speeds if the outcome is a worse human experience because we're only applying it to the low hanging fruit and therefore creating a slippery slope for ourselves...?
The irony is that escaping into a simpler VR world with less distractions can help you deal with this, but I don't think its the right move.
I'm also reminded of Lee Felensteins quote from Steven Levy's Hacker's book. "You're doing all that for the computer!? What are you doing for the people!?"
And the more immersive the technology is, the more the back-end should be open-sourced and put under the control of a free market of hosting companies and maintainers, that end-users and communities can pay.
Right now we have:
People
<=> Big Tech Server Farms
People
<=> Communities
<=> Hosting and Service Providers
<=> Developers
<=> Conferences, Certifications
Would you rather spend your years hooked up to Neuralink owned by Elon, or have a say in what you experience and mitigate the power dynamics?
Would you rather spend 9 hours a day in a metaverse owned by Zuck+Facebook (oh sorry, Meta), Elon+Twitter (oh sorry, X), Bezos+Amazon, Page+Google (oh sorry, Alphabet) or would you rather at least have your own Minecraft server? Or better yet, have an open platform that anyone can fork and build on, like Linux, Wordpress or Ethereum?
Technical overview: https://qbix.com/ecosystem
Layperson overview: https://www.laweekly.com/restoring-healthy-communities/
Shameless plug:
I don't think there's anything necessarily wrong with having played a game for 200 hours. Before video games, we had toys like Lego, Lincoln Logs, board games, etc. that children (and even some adults) spent just as long playing.
Video game addiction seems like what he's worrying about, but addiction doesn't require immersion. People get addicted to Tetris, and it's not because Tetris provides an immersive experience.
So I don't know, there's definitely such a thing as immersive experiences that are harmful, but I think for educational purposes more immersive experiences are strictly better than less immersive ones. (Provided that you want to learn as fast as possible and you want to focus on learning.) Now, immersive experiences are also more expensive (especially to get right) than less immersive ones, so cost is a factor but I think we definitely want more immersive education.
immersive games are fine. games aren't failing to teach anything or help you relax because they are immersive. they are not teaching anything because they don't have a good story that would teach something, and they don't let you relax because specific game elements are putting you under stress.
to give two examples: i play elite dangerous. i can travel through space with a VR headset and i trade items between various space stations. very immersive and quite relaxing, until pirates come along and want to steal my cargo. that's stressful. and i wish i could turn that off.
likewise i may play some puzzle game, that is not immersive at all, and that could be relaxing if the gamedesigner hadn't added a timer that forces me to complete the puzzle in a certain time. that's stressful.
so i don't think immersion has any impact here, other than immersive games are just more attractive. both are a waste of time however if they are not educational or relaxing.
but now this issue of entertainment vs advancing society is a problem of the whole entertainment industry. very little content produced is entertaining as well as teaching something.
and so for me the question is not about how immersive the games are but how educational. i believe it is quite possible to create fully immersive but educational games.
looking back at elite dangerous again, for example, the universe in that game is modeled after our actual galaxy. where possible, stars are named by their actual astronomical names, and their looks are designed after what we know about them and i can take a star system in the game and look up its name on eg wikipedia and learn real facts about it. compare that to eve online where the universe is completely fictional. in elite dangerous i can fly around and get a sense of the relative distances of say alpha centauri vs the north pole star or of the position of our solar system vs the rest of the galaxy. (assuming that it is all accurate)
immersive and educational and relaxing (as long as i can avoid pirates)
Are cars better, planes, houses....? Only marginally. I don't even want sensors to tell me my car has this or that issue, lol.
But we have phones, the internet, TV programming on demand, YT, tiktok, games, VR, flat screens, etc etc. it's all about content and the delivery of that content.
Basically all development has been in entertainment while every other industry has pretty much stood still, or devolved (eg food quality).
I also do not buy the core argument. The game industry tends to ask for more and pay less exactly because people romanticize it. That is not to say the most talented engineers do not end up hired to produce bullshit, just that it probably is not games.
Lastly, the desire for faster and more realistic graphics is what commoditized massively parallel computer architectures. Keep chasing those FPS, the future of humanity depends on it!
There's always someone complaining about good things being too good and people lose on the rest because of it. What about letting people have some personal responsibility?
Instead of complaining about games being too immersive, doom scrolling being too addictive etc, how about reminding people to make conscious decisions on how they spend their time and attention?
We're living in the era of external responsibility, every problem one has is caused by someone else.
</rant>
Maybe a challenge for ambient technology is that its nature is non-engaging. If it were engaging, it would be immersive and not ambient.
People can choose their tool of choice but most people will not voluntarily do that because of convenience.
It is a position of privilege to take that technology should be considered primarily as a consumer product.
It's an attention-conservation strategy. Looking at an abstraction takes less precious attention than looking at reality. And abstractions are so malleable, so useful.
You can do it with a page of text. You can do it with no technological augmentation at all, just thinking.
It's so easy and useful that it's become a habit. The border between dream and reality is so blurred now that we've forgotten that there's a difference.
Maybe this is what the Buddhists call "Samsara".
Simple e-ink reader and note taker. No apps. No distraction. Amazing battery life. Easy to write on.
Switch off. Do more.
Similar criticisms could equally be levelled at engaging with any creative output - reading, listening to music etc. And I love being out in nature but it's not teaching me much.
His other point seems to be "talented engineers could be doing something more important" which is slightly more valid but then everyone who isn't saving starving babies could probably be doing something more important.
I think it's the fact that so many resources go into the final few percent of making games 100% realistic whereas there are other, more important issues that get largely ignored.
The article's title isn't "immersive games are bad".
The latter spelling is the correct one.
Also we've had entertainment since the dawn of time. People don't just go home and stare at the wall for sixteen hours before going back to work. Almost none are going home from work to solve humanity's Real Problems(tm). Entertainment holds significant value to everyone plus or minus a few percent.
But really the author has a critique of capitalism and doesn't want to admit it. The complaint is that art is a product you're expected to pay for and consume, and individual artists almost can't even exist without spending all their time advertising. Imagine how much art would be produced if artists weren't forced to choose between making art and paying rent.
All in all, the author is yelling at clouds because other people have values he disagrees with and refuses to understand
The best artists are writing trivial drivel for women to read.
The best minds are finding new ways to sell books.
It's a stupid heuristical argument.
Yes, I'm sure there were some people in the past who said that reading books is an indulgent waste of time. I'm sure you could find articles in old newspapers.
That in itself doesn't mean that working on a VR headset technology is as meaningful as working on a more sustainable energy source or developing software for cancer research, does it? Just because you find a similarity with something that happened in the past doesn't mean you can just abandon all critical thought.
I would never listen to someone who proposes reallocating high-level talent resources as an important and solvable problem where the solution is, tell those people their passions are a waste of time. I also don't believe this person understands the talent market as they quote the "Many of the most talented artists of our time work in advertising," nonsense. Yes their are smart people working in advertising, but it's no deeper than that. There are other spaces and industries that have more brilliant minds.
The truth is, you don't know with certainty if working on VR technology is more meaningful or not.
Who is the arbiter of when it's stretched too far? I am working with the data we have to make an empirical expectation. Speculation is fine, but if we are going to make an effort to ground it in reality I feel like prior art is as the best bet we can make.
> Just because you find a similarity with something that happened in the past doesn't mean you can just abandon all critical thought.
I think I am actually applying critical thought. I am challenging a narrative that doesn't seem to have a precedent and looking at examples from the past that were similar unprecedented technological changes. This seems to be a reasonable approach to set reasonable expectations. Of course I could be wrong, but I feel like at least my pitch is based on some historic data.
FYI the book reading this wasn't just an aside in a newspaper, it was a cultural concern shared by many.
https://timeline.com/what-technology-are-we-addicted-to-this...