Lewy Land

Zeno Clash VS Arkham Asylum

2011-11-14T06:46:00.001Z

Zeno Clash is the artistic antithesis of Arkham Asylum's purely derivative, design-by-committee, bland, sexiness: it is a celebration of ugliness and asymmetry; the stranger realms of "Heavy Metal" (1981) with the soft core nudity supplanted by the broken detritus of an steam punk brawl between H. R. Giger and Pablo Picasso (during his surrealist phase).

In the same vein, the storyline is impenetrably mysterious and schizophrenic, very much "Through the Looking-Glass". The entire game experience could well have just been the oddest dream you've ever had. Batman, on the other hand, is Batman; you're getting the whole multi-billion dollar franchise shoe-horned (very successfully) into a Bioshock meets Streets of Rage framework with a side helping of Assassins creed. It incorporates the current characterisation of the whole mythology quite nicely; an epic win for Batman fans (of which there are many, hence the guaranteed return necessary for investing the effort of a large game developer) but perhaps a pretty uninspiring prospect for some regular folk.

Admittedly Zeno Clash is a ~~rail shooter~~ corridor fighter, which makes it positively claustrophobic compared to some of the spaces available in Arkham Asylum's sandbox-ish environment. However, it's arguable how much all that freedom adds to the game: a lack of location discontinuities does make the story more immersive, but this was balanced (for me) by constantly wondering if I was pointed in vaguely the right direction, or if I had understood correctly which part of the ~~shopping centre~~ island I should be rendezvousing at next. Of course, Zeno Clash is very low budget in comparison, it's creators having had to scale back from a much more ambitious project to get it done at all.

So based mostly on artictic originality, we have an early leader:
Zeno Clash 1-0 Arkham Asylum

The big similarity between these two games (the reason I'm comparing them at all) is their primary game play mechanic: brawling. Each have challenge modes too, that take the place of multiplayer modes. Deathmatchs would be impossible in either case: Ace Team Software simply don't have the resources to implement one, and there's only one Batman! In each case, challenge mode is great for allowing you to get to grips with the nuances of fighting more quickly and then to carry on playing the fun part after the end of the story.

The Batman brawling system was very slick, well, once I eventually got round to rebinding the right mouse button to avoid whipping out a random gadget when I mistimed a block. I presume this unhelpful setup is a vestige of porting from console development. Clearly, much thought, effort *and* testing went into making this part of the game fun. It starts out looking like a button bashing frenzy (left click = punch nearest baddie and repeat), but you are forced to progress in control complexity with the advent of more, better armed minions. Upgraded 'batarangs' and 'batclaw' are introduced and can be used seamlessly in combat. These increase Batman's range and let him engage more opponents simultaneously, preventing it all proceeding like a Buffy the Vampire Slayer fight, where extras queue up to take turns being blocked and dropped. That does happen to an extent, but it still feels cool once really in the thick of it, you have to be careful not to initiate too long a sequence of moves on one target (or else get smacked for behind). Sometimes you really do just have to get out of there when the odds are piling up too deep (like a host of Agent Smiths), then you can just hand spring over some shoulders and start over in a clearer area of floor.

Up close and personal with Zeno Clash

By maintaining the first person perspective at all times, when in control of Ghat, Zeno Clash is more immersive, gritty and personal. The trade-off is that one is ends up being sucker punched (and shot) from behind, while Batman gets a far less frustrating God's eye view. He is a movie superhero I suppose. I had moments of rage bashing the keyboard with both, when they each just wouldn't do anything right. For Batman it was more my poor reactions and the key binding issue. Ghat had trouble getting stuck on scenery details (an age old bane of 3D FPSs), picking up objects reliably when in a hurry, getting stuck reloading a weapon by mistake and, more unavoidably, just not being able to block attacks at *exactly* the right time required to turn a bitch slap into a successful counter. When up against 3 armed baddies in a confined space my success was pretty haphazzard (i.e. stocastic and unlikely). It felt like there were no reliable tactics to use, finally fumbling through the first armed 3-way after many fails and a change of difficulty. I did acquire a better grasp of punching while dodging later on, which helped.

Zeno Clash's hit detection seemed rather too generous to the AI many times. I often backed off instinctively, instead of using the proper block/dodge mechanic, and so took damage despite being a good few meters from the an animated, limb flailing adversary. Batman's far simpler (higher level) control system meant that, for most aspects of combat, the animations could be made to smoothly fit the events. The visuals here are more like illustrations for the abstract button push timing game that one is *really* engaged in, thus avoiding the messiness of truely 3D physics.

With Batman, my reactions (and perceptions) were a touch too slow to build a string of consecutive hits all the way to powered up completion most of the time, but the Buffy style sparing (with multiple patient partners) on it's own still felt fun, rewarding. This despite what I was doing was basically just clicking the 'block' button each time I saw a symbol above a guy's head to shows he's about to hit me (in a second or so). Upon description this seems ridiculously dumbed down and simplistic, but in practice the result was less frustrating and more fun than trying to react in real time to bodily movements of a computer model. Arkham Asylum also adds in subtle moments of time dilation during take downs, which primarily lets one bask in the beauty of Batman kicking arse, but also gives that bit of extra time to spin the camera around and take stock to decide on the next tact. Batman will also seem to teleport short distances to be on the right spot to catch a punch, rather than not block successfully. This all shows that a good game (a fun one) is not necessarily created by simulating reality more closely, it has to be primarily be fitted to human psychology.

Challenge mode in Arkham Asylum (I'm-a gonna hit you!)

Making you feel like you are doing something complex and clever without you having to spend years learning something that is genuinely hard (like a musical instrument or a real martial art). Of course some games are more dependant upon aesthetics and plot elements, while a rare few strategy games actually demand (and reward) longer term practice and careful thought. Many games cheat in that they make it feel like you have progressed when it has merely upgraded your character's stats through various grind mechanisms.

Batman is definitely guilty of this to a small extent, with his lengthening life bar/circle and extra gadgets, but Zeno Clash relies purely on real player improvements in button pushing skills and tactics. This makes it less casual gamer friendly, for sure, but gives it far more potential to be loved as a cult classic by those who can hack it. Less remarkable (easier) playability may mean Arkham Asylum risks near instant oblivion after it's wide success.

I really do wonder how much of the realm of possibilities we have already explored when it comes to button controlled games on TV screens. I mean, I'm somewhat sick to death of the generic iterated shooter (and driving games). Granted I've never been competitive at FPSs, but there are many areas that are less well trodden. I think both games show there is still room for genuinely new games to be created (for IBM PCs and games machines directly descended from gaming consoles of the 70s), rather than the same old formulas with shinier graphics added. There is not infinite space though, so I do look forwards to the new frontiers that completely novel personal interface devices will eventually open up.

Anyway, back to the review meta-fight: Although the fighting mechanic in Zeno Clash is as novel as that in Arkham Asylum, it is far less polished, with some fundamental problems and haphazard levels of difficultly between successive fights. Arkham Asylum also totes the stealth based encounters that really let you get into character as the fearsome caped crusader. So in this round Arkham Asylum comes back, exactly, as "strong as a powered up Batman" for an equaliser to make it:

Zeno Clash 1-1 Arkham Asylum

Zeno Clash, while short (and bitter), gelled together very well. In contrast Arkham Asylum was a huge bunch of cool stuff all strapped together in an heroic effort to give a consumer £30 worth of entertainment. 6.3 hours (according to Steam), which is just fine for an indie game; on a par with Machinarim (which I've also just played), or Osmos (I recommend both). Value for money it's not up there with Magica or Terraria (each of which have taken several whole days of my time in exchange for a few hundred pennies). Arkham Asylum took me 12.5 hours, but it kind of felt like longer. More than 2 years down the line, Zeno Clash is still on sale to download for £10 (but far cheaper in sales and on CD), while Arkham Asylum (also released in 2009, months after) has only just reached this price point due to it's sequel sequel making it obsolete.

So the bottom line is, given roughly equal cost, spend your money on whichever you prefer, or both:

Zeno Clash 2-2 Arkham Asylum. Oh, what'd'ya know, a draw!

+ Extended Zeno Clash discussion (because it was so much more interesting) [Spoilers]:

'Golem' apparently filling the role of Charon
(Ferryman of Hades).

By teasing the player with only vague hints, and blatantly refusing to make an ultimate revelation at the end of the game, the Zeno Clash universe maintains the kind of bizarre fascination that brought Lost so many viewers. In both cases, my interpretation is that we are looking at a world with physical impossibilities, ergo it is not a place in the physical world: they are in purgatory or, rather, a computational simulation of such a place. A 'ghat' is, after all, a Hindu funeral pyre and his lady friend is 'DEADra'...

Zeno Clash could also represent the an individual's shattered mind, particularly with it's "Corwid of the Free" characters, with bizarre OCDs, could be individual personality traits (somewhat like America Mc Gee's interpretation of Alice in Wonderland). My money's on simulation though: talk of journeying to the end of the world makes me think there's going to be a "Thirteenth Floor" (1999) type incounter with the limits of their reality. This fits with Gollum going on about showing them so much more beyond Zenozoik. And his creator's (captors) being long dead might fit into an Omega Point Singularity setting; a place where all possible beings (however arbitrarily bizarre) are brought to life by computer emulation (then, according to Frank J Tipler, their souls would be literally salvaged: guided down a path to peace, love and general goodness). Incidentally, an end of the universe Omega Point is predicated on the possibility of 'Zeno machines' (a Turing machine that does each sucessive calculation step in half the ammount of time the previous step took). I hope there are sequels that explore the Zeno Clash universe more fully and are as cool as the Matrix Reloaded, without a stupid conclusion like Revolutions.

A nice touch, in both games, is that you never actually kill anyone. Zeno Clash is unrelentingly brutal in it's violence and gun use, but this is always against easiliy recognisable characters who come back later (which it gets away with because it's wierd). Arkham Asylum is lucky in being based on an ethical vigilante who only ever knocks out, or strings up, his adversaries. This does leave one wondering if you are making rather a lot of work for yourself: repeatedly knocking down the same dozen poor grunts again and again over the course of the game. The lack of killing is a pleasant departure from most violent games, where dismembering myriad nameless enemies, as is so often the case. Both games forgo the need for ammo and health pack gathering too, thank god.

+ Further Arkham Asylum Criticisms:

No fun for YOU!

Unlike the little indie title, to play Batman you have to sit through 20 seconds of trade mark animations and disclaimers before Windows Live informs you that you *have to* let it update istself (or else sod off), then restart the game for it to complete. The first time I ran Arkham asylum it took 10 minutes before I could actually *play* it.

As for the game itself, one particular plot flaw bothered me: Batman casually calls his VTOL jet fighter right at the end of the game, as if he had forgotten about this minor asset... Then all he gets from it is the zip line rope launcher package thing. That's bad enough; why could I not have had this earlier? But also, why have I been busting my ass running around outside, fighting through certain buildings and passageways when I could have just air-dropped in (or blown half the bad guys to pieces from the sky)...

Anyway, for a full blooded dismemberment of Arkham Asylum see Bent Crowbar's (Zero punctuation) review:

Why Wealth Inequality is Actually Bad

2011-10-17T04:26:00.000+01:00

After putting all moralistic ideals to one side for a moment, income/wealth inequality is still fundamentally bad for a society. (I'll come back to ethics later, along with the Occupy movement and much more besides.)

The monetary system is immensely complex these days, so as a thought experiment I like to imagine money away: ignore it altogether as it has no intrinsic utility itself. It merely directs the allocation of man power and resources, as a dictator might. But hopefully our system has more effective priorities: promoting the spread of useful innovations and keeping society healthy.

Moai - 'Easter Island Heads' are misnamed,
they've been buried to their shoulders by time.

A conservative/neo-liberal might argue that rich people are no problem because they spend more, putting money back into the economy via the people they pay for products and services. However, I think the real problem is with the specific things they spend their enhanced incomes on.

Someone with 100 times more money than the average Joe doesn't buy 100 reasonably priced cars. Maybe they buy twice as many cars, but each one costs 50 times as much. It's actually quite difficult to spend that much money, so they will tend to purchase luxury items across the board, either impractically expensive versions of everyday goods or totally exclusive items like super-yachts.

Gucci handbags, jewel encrusted gold watches, $200M private yachts, giant mansions, hand made super-cars and fancy soirées are all about as useful at stimulating an increase in societal productivity as were the standing stones of Easter Island. For those unfamiliar: Moai (right) were erected all over the small Island as an expression of ancestor worship by clans. Making the statues took a heavy toll; there was total deforestation and ecosystem collapse. The isolated population of islanders had plunged from 15000 to 3000 by the time Europeans arrived in 1722. A 500% decrease, in under a century, with cannibalism. Shortly thereafter the 900 statues were toppled.

The monolith erecting game is taxing indeed for the people of Nias Island, Indonesia, 1915.

Back to the present day, the other thing wealthy people tend to use much of their money for is gaining *more* wealth. So, in a laissez-faire economy, an ever greater percentage of societal effort tends to be directed towards useless extravagances for an elite. Whether or not the top percent or two *deserve* extravagant pay for their services/resources is irrelevant, left unchecked this wealth concentration will destroy society. And in retrospect we will look every bit as dumb as those who built 10 meter tall maoi when all that was left to eat was each other.
OK, so when the super-rich are investing their monies, to make more monies, they are buying stocks which fund businesses to grow (and bonds that help governments to invest in public infrastructure and the like) in theory. If all wealth were evenly distributed (like a satire of communism) there would be no one to finance start-up companies, etcetera (e.g. Google, Facebook). Well, perhaps just a central government, which would be way less efficient than a free market. (Perhaps micro investment by the general populous, via internet intermediaries could soon fill this roll. But I digress). The point is, the vast majority of redistributed money would be spent by the masses on minor luxuries, so there would be way less capital for investments. Far too little in all likelihood...

I am NOT at all advocating a complete abolition of 'the rich' (or even of City financiers); there could just be a far more beneficial distribution of incomes. After all, A luxury car market (£20k-£50k saloons, hybrids, etc) is good because it helps companies deploy new technologies profitably at an earlier time, reducing the cost barrier of innovating. A market for super-cars (>£100k, Bentleys, etc), on the other hand, does not directly benefit us with many useful innovations because they are deliberately inefficient products for a tiny number of buyers.

I think that, since the 80s at least, the UK has moved well beyond optimal income disparity to the point of damaging mass markets by restricting their money supply. I'm not sure that 'all the best things in life are free', but in consumer technology all the best things are affordably cheap. Mobile phones started life as incredibly unreliable bricks to talk into (when in one's yuppie mobile or Bentley), but now even kids on the dole can afford one they work brilliantly, have built in cameras, surf the net and play high quality music and video.

One might argue that it would have been more difficult for mobiles to have reached their current stage of ubiquity without the early adaptors (paying through the nose for a luxury item), but these wonderfully helpful devices (and their supporting infrastructure) would definitely not exist without the final mass market to fund them. Even in the improbable scenario where the top 1% of society were paying £40k for a new smartphone, there would be no noticeable productivity gains to society, so their use would be a burden overall, like carving giant stone statues. Thankfully, the mobile has improved life so much most people can't imagine everyone not having one. They may well have already paid for themselves by improving overall productivity, through efficiency and the creation of entirely new opportunities.

The ironic thing is that the actions called for by movements like 'The 99%' would not just benefit the masses at the expense of the rich, they will ultimately save the rich from themselves too! For, however great a percent of a nation's wealth King Louis XIV owned, he could no more have bought antibiotics or a Wii than the poorest peasant of the time; the only route to the really important (and fun) improvements is through an economically strong and productive general populace.

More examples of mass market innovations befitting even the rich:
The coming of Ford's mass produced cars, with interchangeable parts, turned extravagant death traps into reliable transport. Similarly, post WWI passenger aircraft were pretty deadly until they reached a big market. Production line automation (for all these types of products) that is then applicable to a host of different domains too. Supermarket supply chains (providing a wide range of high quality fresh food) only exist in their fast, efficient form because they sell the quantities that they do. All the various computer manufacturing technologies that go into PCs: processor/RAM transistor count (Moore's law), magnetic storage density (HDDs), solid state RF transmitters/receivers (Wifi, 3G, etc), display technologies (OLED panels, etc), optical disc storage density, optical data transmission (fiber-optic backbone capacity increases, faster internal PC data transmissions), etcetera, etcetera. Battery technologies for hybrid/electric cars (overlap with PCs, all other gadgets and smart grids). Software - those programs that are most widespread are not only cheaper (often free to use), but they seem to work better than $1000 proprietary applications that are limited to very niche markets. This includes web 'software', services such as Google that are directly fuelled by the use of hundreds of millions, each on their own internet enabled computer. Pharmaceuticals - as Alex Tabarrok says in "How Ideas Trump Crisis" (at 4m50s) talking about why the rise of China will be a good thing: which disease would you prefer to have - one shared by millions or one confined to a rare few?; each treatment/cure will cost roughly the same to research/produce, but only the former has a profitable market.

One could rightly point out that there are still millions of iPhones, tablets, laptops, and cars flying off the shelf each month, right? So it's hardly like consumer markets are on the verge of extinction!...

It is quite possible that existing markets have been stressed, slowing the succession of innovations. I'm more certain that the size (and power) of these markets has seen significant demographic limitations: not only the increasingly poor majority of Western civilisation, also the international reduction of market participation due to 'developing' nations being kept poor through unpayable debts, corporate exploitation, trade barriers and unfair (subsidised) competition in food markets (to leave the past travesties of empire out of this altogether; China, India, etcetera). But of course, we can't know what might have been under more egalitarian conditions. Maybe the natural course of innovations themselves were the main cause of disparities, rather than pure flukes of human history.

Anyway... I had intended this piece to be brief, limited to the point made above. However, wealth inequality is somewhat of a hot topic at the moment, so I've been given to a rather more thorough treatment...

+ The Scope of Inequality:

Sticking to Western domestic economic landscape for now, the richest 1% (in the US) control 1/3 of the wealth and receive 1/4 of current earnings. The top 20% own 87% of existing value (going beyond the 80-20 rule even). And if that sounds bad, stock market wealth is even more concentrated. Figures and graphics from http://inequality.org/wealth-inequality/.

Looking back at US incomes (which follow the same trends as in the UK and elsewhere), one can see that inequality was low and falling during the boom period of the 50s-60s (the 4th Kondratiev wave) and has persistently risen since the start of the 80s (at which time the 1% received a relatively reasonable 10% of all income). Interestingly enough, the 1%'s 2007 pre-financial-crash peak (of 23.5% of income) had only ever been higher on one occasion: right before the (first) great depression (in 1928):

From http://inequality.org/wealth-inequality/

From the inverse correlation of these two graphs it looks rather likely that reduction in top US tax rate (and later Capital gains too) boosted the earning capability of the top 1%, both in the last 40 years and right before the Great Depression. That the (world's) highest GDP growth rates occurred during the highest top taxation rates should be a fairly strong indication that taxing the rich does not hurt the everyone through the economy.

Given that they only pay, on average, 22.4% on their total income to the tax man, while they receive over 20% of total income, the US (for one) government could easily levy a huge amount more funding from the super-rich alone. This would be far less painful for them than a very modest hike for most people. Doubling to an average of 50% (overall tax for the 1%) could raise ~ $700Bn/year (based on a total US net income fo $14Tr).

From here.

In the Gini coefficient data we can indeed see the US's inequality climbing consistently since the 1970s, with the UK catching up rapidly the whole way. Only France has made consistent progress in the right direction (with it's 36 days of mandatory holiday, shorter work hours and whatever else). A word of caution in reading the graph: trends are fairly indicative of changes within countries, but absolute differences between countries should be taken with a pinch of salt because it is not possible to correct for the varied ways health services, other benefits and taxes are applied.

From Wikipedia (Please click image for full size)

Please see http://inequality.org/program-inequality-common-good/ for more graphs and links to other sites exploring inequality.

Click above for readable size.
(or direct from the Rugby Advertiser website)

+ At The Sharp End of Inequality:

Poverty in the UK. It seems to be all over national and local news paper (see right). A debate on my local radio station's morning show had spokespersons from IFS, Save the Children, a sociologist professor and a local charity worker talked up a pretty bleak picture. One that shocked the initially blasé Prof.

Many families are struggling to afford sufficient heating and food. Coventry foodbank, has seen an unprecedented rise in it's provision of emergency food. The most shocking thing is that the majority of parents seeking help are in work.

This national piece (with Channel 4 video) talks about the US-style charity operations that have quietly and spontaneous sprung up in the last year, feeding working families in crisis when agency work suddenly dries up (for example). There are probably 1 million people employed this way (certainly a whole load in warehouses around Rugby, in my experience). Recruiting through agencies is a often used as a legal way for companies to palm off income variations/uncertainty on employees (to protect profitability). That this causes works significant stress, increasing disease incidence and shortening life spans, is one of myriad hidden costs that the poorer end of society pays.

After two successive governments committed to eradicating child poverty by 2020, we are now headed squarely in the wrong direction. The gains from the creation of child tax credits are set to be wiped out, with 500'000 more UK children falling into 'absolute' poverty, totalling 3.1Million by 2013 (that will be 1/4 of all UK children). This is down to an expected 7% total fall in the median income (over 3 years) and benefits growing well below inflation. From an IFS (Institute for Fiscal Studies) study.

Of the poorest 1/5 of UK children, 62% had too little money for a 1 week family holiday (anywhere), 18% said they could not afford to have friends around for a snack once a fortnight (from Child Poverty Action Group). The obstacles posed by low income are socially crippling, locking unfortunate children into a near inescapable rut of poverty.

Social mobility in the UK (and US) is appalling, even when compared to other equally developed countries. And even before the unemployment effects of the current crisis. It fell from the 70s to the 80s and has stayed in decline ever since. This is shown roughly by the UK data in the Gini graph and correlates with rising wealth inequality following the end of the economic boom in the 70s (shown in graphs higher up).

From the Guardian. "0.5" means 50% of the economic (dis)advantage is passed from a farther to son.

One of the key mechanisms that entrench our incontinently profound class structure is education (or lack off). Political debates over education revolve around one idealistic, top down, reform or another, that will have (at best) marginal effects. After all, as "The Great Stagnation" points out, the US has doubled it's educational expenditure (since the 60s) with no improvement in fundamental learning outcomes. So why should jiggling the organisation of schools or teachers about a little have a more drastic effect?

"...one recent survey..., has concluded that teaching likely “accounts for about 15 percent of student achievement outcomes.” " (from TooMuch)

By far the biggest influence on a child's learning is his/her socio-economic environment (including family life and neighbourhood). It seems that it will be impossible to lift children out of poverty solely through better education; children need to be freed of their poor environment before they can reach educational parity with more affluent peers.

Rambling Thoughts 1 - Some (callous soul) might say that 'chavs' have too many kids too young, perhaps worrying that in a several generations time the country will be overrun by fecund, jobless louts. But having children younger is a sensible reproduction strategy for the poorer demographics because of their considerably shorter life expectancies (can't find the reference right now). Life (and disability free lifespan) is indeed cut short by poverty in UK; there is a 17 year difference in expectancy for men between the two London wards of Kensington and Tottenham Green. The gap in the rate of infant mortality between top and bottom looks set to rise to 25%.

http://inequality.org/inequality-health/

So, OK; even 'absolute' child poverty in the UK is a relative measure, comparing family income to the median in the country of a particular year (in the case of the IFS study predictions: the financial year 2010-2011). So it doesn't equate them to the starving kids in '3rd world' countries where truly absolute measures talk of lack of 'safe drinking water' and the like. But the UK measure is: less than 60% of median income, and we already know, that because of generally rising wealth inequality, median income has been stagnant for the last 30 years (and has actually fallen in recent times).

What's more, relative wealth *is* a more meaningful measure than absolute: the costs of goods and services are the same for everyone in this country; food costs far more here (than in poorer countries). What is more, low social status in itself directly causes disease through stress (cortisol secretion). This is atop: inadequate diet, lack of exercise, smoking, poor pay, and job insecurity. Men in the poorest areas of the UK have life expectancies lower than the average in "Ecuador, China and Belize" (which have no NHS).

I think the big problem when talking about these issues is that human psychology starts comparing demographic groups (of millions) as if they were individual people. A complete lack of sense of scale is an important problem; No, they couldn't each drag themselves out of poverty if they just tried really hard; relative poverty is a trap that the poor are least well equipped to escape from. "The Pursuit of Happyness" (2006) was a tale of an extremely clever, unusually driven man who succeeded against impossible odds. But that's just the point, someone like that is a statistical freak; the larger the sample size one looks at, the more exactly everything will average out as expected, cowed by the many pitfalls: drastically lower education outcomes, worst general health with higher disability levels, greater chance of unmanageable debt, far higher percentage cost of basic utilities (gas/electric/petrol/public transport), least control over their environment (living in rented or council accommodation).

"The Spirit Level",
A populist analysis of (in)equality,

A forsaken 25% will take a heavy toll on the rest. More than welfare burdens, their lack of a stake in society will cause high crime rates and other negative impacts (like increased health care costs). They represent lost talent; most could be economically productive if raised from poverty early enough. Society is shooting itself in the foot with a false economy of minimal economic support for the worst off. It might be almost cost effective, in the long term, to just pay our fellow citizens out of poverty.

+ Other Angle to Wealth Inequality:

1) Another way of seeing the inequality problem is by thinking of trying to maximise the usefulness of each dollar in the system. Tyler Cowen pointed out in "The Great Stagnation" (covered by me previously) that each additional dollar spent by the government is, on average, less effective than the one before (diminishing returns). Similarly each additional dollar received by a rich person is far less effective at improving their lifestyle than the same dollar would be for someone at the shallow end of the pay scale, where the price of some genuine vintage, birthday bubbly might instead differentiate between: receiving vital medicine (vs illness), more nutritional food for the kids, petrol money (vs an additional hour on a bus each day), or a cheap laptop (vs near total disenfranchisement from the information age). Certainly it has been found that salaries beyond £50K do not bring increased happiness.

2) An apparent consensus on the detriment of inequality follows thus:
Bubbles (like the housing/credit crunch) were the product of too many savings chasing too few opportunities. As Branko Milanovic, "a Lead economist in the World Bank's research department" describes here. I.e. too concentrated wealth is directly a bad thing (destabilising).

The rich 1% already won the real life version of monopoly, but we are all expected to keep playing the same game forever, finding new ways for them to win even more to keep the game from coming to a catastrophic end. See the "Money as Debt" (narrated animation) at around this point http://youtu.be/Dc3sKwwAaCU?t=23m22s. Quote from the video:

"This is a staggering thought. We are completely dependant on the Commercial Banks. Someone has to borrow every dollar we have in circulation, cash of credit. If banks create ample synthetic money we are prosperous; if not, we starve. We are absolutely without a permanent money system." - Robert H. Hemphill, Credit Manager Federal Reserve Bank, Atlanta, Georgia

'The City' (finance economy) is an industry paid for entirely by returns on existing savings. It's employees make nothing of intrinsic value, so their increasing revenue would have to represent efficiency savings through smarter distribution of investments, stimulating the economy to grow faster. But it hasn't been growing fast enough (not nearly as fast as their asset sheets indicate). To continue making money for their clients at the expected rates various impossible investment opportunities had to materialise. Basically unserviceable debts were created all over the place (from sub-prime to sovereign). Like the engineers and craftsmen employed to construct status symbol products, a large proportion of the finance industry is employed by the same people to undertake extremely clever, but equally useless, activities. (In fact they are worst that useless in being directly detrimental.) An ever expanding percentage of the brightest graduates seconded away to perform the finance dance of wealth worship.

Rambling Thoughts 2 - I do sometimes wonder how much our towers of metal and glass are modern finance's answer to the Pharaoh's pyramids... What percentage of their cost has no fundamental utility?

With reduced residential construction (see below), an increasing percentage of building has been commercial offices that do not contribute to increased standard of living (and productivity?) of the populace. What's more the tax free financial district that spawned Canary Warf only increased productivity of those concentrating wealth for the wealthy, and the construction didn't even generate public revenues.

Are our counter-productive financial legacies (practices/institutions), that have been ripping western society apart, the modern equivalent to the forces that destroyed the Roman Empire?: after initial explosive expansion, it's society stagnated (having hit technological limits). It's fall has been blamed on many things, none definitive. I don't expect our societies to have chance to fall so far as to depopulate as drastically as did the Roman empire, but only because the majority of the world's population will shortly catch up, and sure us up technologically. If not for China, India, South America, might financial crises have plunged us back to (pre)industrial times? (As in Vernor Vinge's "A Fire on the Deep" where Singularity level technologies are impossible.)

Random quote from some site along the way:

“The man of great wealth owes a peculiar obligation to the state because he derives special advantages from the mere existence of government.” – Theodore Roosevelt, U.S. President (1858-1919).

I.e. rich business owners should have to pay a sizeable fraction of their profits to government: to fund the various infrastructures that his facilities and employees rely on (roads, schooling, health care, etc). Even the benefit of law, order and national security should not be taken for granted. Particularly that government protects private wealth/property from the masses.

+ Expensive Houses Kill Our Productivity

From "Why isn’t Boris coming up with any solutions to London’s housing crisis?"

Basically, there has been insufficient residential house building since the 70s.

Social housing construction accounted for nearly half of new builds (and is another thing that coincided with the boom time of the 50s-60s) until it stopped dead at the start of the 80s (see graph right). Since then the remaining stock has dwindled (with the "Right to buy") and crumbled (council rented housing used to be a genuinely good alternative to the bad landlords back in the 50s, not a last resort). In addition, LSVTs saw many councils give their housing stock to private housing associations (which are technically not-for-profit), which now manage half of the affordable housing (see graph below).

A Parliamentary Publication

Private builds failed to expand to fill the gap left by the lack of council builds. To be fair, the UK population did plateau for a decade (70s-80s), but construction rates have not increased to meet increased demand since then (and many 'new houses' replace uninhabitable old stock). This is, in large part, because of the "unique economic and political experiment" in which we live: the property owning democracy (see Naill Fergusson's "Ascent of Money" book, series (Episode 5) or movie).

When 70% of voters are owner-occupiers (UK) there is extreme political pressure to avoid negative equity, in fact, a housing bubble is great (until it bursts). So there's no incentive for centrally mediated mass building programs, in fact, this is probably the main reason for 'green belt' regulations (cynical green washing) and other limiting planning laws.

For the same reason inflation is bad, because it lowers house values. Higher interest rates can also cause many peoples mortgage repayments to exceed their house's value. That's largely why both are being set/kept down an absolute minimum since the crisis, even though a burst of inflation might redress the more fundamental wealth inequality problem. In suppressing interest rates and inflation, home owning democracy has (cleverly) created a situation where society at large fights to maintain the economic conditions for the 1% to become excessively wealthy.

Anyway... Private construction companies are in no rush to saturate the housing market with new stock either, as it is more profitable to sell a lower number of units at a high profit margin, in a slowed market or when there's little competition. I believe UK construction is predominantly owned by large monopolistic companies.

This lack of supply, coupled with excessive investment capital (from too few owning too high a percentage of wealth) caused the unrealistically spiralling property values that terminated in the bubble. To continue making loans (and profit), banks had to keep lending increasingly unaffordable amounts for residential purchases. This will have been enabled by lending investment banks/funds (as well as increased leverage). Also, significantly, our money supply is created as debt (in bank loans) so for it (and GDP) to continue to grow at the accustomed rate, banks had to keep lending more to keep the economy from falling over. But, of course, the increase in loans was not buying more houses, and a better standard of living for society, just more expensive houses. So the assets (the loans were used to buy) did not actually increase the productivity of society anywhere near as much as they value suggested. I would suggest that disconnects in this productivity/price relationship would be a way to spot major bubbles in the future.

From PricedOut.org.
From a cybernetics viewpoint the graph shows clear evidence of excessive positive
feedback mechanisms (and/or lack of dampening): price fluctuates increasingly wildly.

Because the extra cost of housing is artificial (a product of scarcity and other corruptions) people are not buying enhanced earning capability (through improved standard of living). So individuals have less resources than before to spend on genuine innovations (the stifled technology markets I speculated about in the first section). Society at large has been made no more productive by more costly houses, so the extra has all been going into make the rich relatively richer, widening the inequality gap (and in turn exacerbating the situation further in a vicious cycle).

Excessively costly housing exhausted savings, removing so much
slack from the monetary system that it became brittle (and broke!).

Worst still, people are being forced to cut back on essentials, like food and heating, and/or move away from expensive areas with better jobs and schools. See "Rent 'unaffordable' in over half of England" (Channel 4). So houses (or lack of) are actually making society less productive (and more divided). The situation is worst for those dependant on the expanding private rental market; private rentals more commonly contravene safety regulations or are just in a poor state because residents fear "retaliatory eviction". London prices are 50% above most of the country too, exaggerating the above problems. See "Housing Crisis in London" (by The Pro-housing Alliance). This also tells of how the 'affordability' measure is currently far too optimistic because it is market relative, not evidence based.

This whole, perverse situation is avoidable; there is no fundamental reason our society could not supply good quality, affordable housing for everyone. Innovations should be making the provision of the basic essentials for living (including houses) continually easier (i.e. cheaper to afford) and/or better (better comfort and utility). That housing costs had been shooting up well ahead of wages (and CPI inflation), should have been a stone cold sign that real living standards were dropping. Spending more of one's money on one's house is equivalent to having to spend more time and effort building it (having to go back to hand making each brick or something ridiculous).

Rambling Thoughts 3 - The artificial limits imposed on expanding housing stock (and real productivity) help transition the economy from positive sum towards a zero-sum (game). Here, one can only gain wealth at someone else's expense. We see that the majority of the value of property purchase is the land itself, not the useful product of human labour (the structure). Indeed, TV programs like Grand Designs often show the demolition of perfectly habitable houses to obtain land for a new build. This is an example of economics having the opposite effect of it's purpose. If it does this too much it is broken and needs changing. It is not a law of nature.

The value of the artificially scarce commodity (land) is dominating over the real resource of living space (infrastructure). 'Green belt' policy (for example) increasingly looks to me like just another convenient excuse to inflate land prices (to increase indebtedness and bank profits). 40% inheritance tax on houses prevents the vast majority of citizens from benefiting from their parent's productivity, forcing them instead to start almost from scratch, acquiring a huge debt in order to have a place to live. We have effectively returned to a societal model of peasants working to live on the estates of gentry. Albeit an illusive gentry who own the bank's profits.

Personally I am torn: I don't know if a system that keeps the majority poor (via inheritance tax, mortgages, etc) is helpful in the long term by forcing members of society to be productive...? I mean, if people were allowed to live on their (dead) parent's land for free they would need to earn/work a lot less to live (particularly now our population is roughly stable). Particularly the wealthy, better educated middle classes could afford to retire very early, or do 2-3 day weeks, or worst still not be motivated to train for highly skilled, better paid jobs. The GDP of a lazier society would surely increase slower, corresponding to less innovation: reaching the technological Singularity would take longer, or perhaps even be impossible?!

Abolish Inheritance tax (on houses/land), i.e. free houses for all:
For - People would still have to work to pay for utilise, food, new technologies (and council tax).
For - It might increase motivation to buy and invest in a good house knowing it would be passed on to children.
Against - Wealth divides would be even more entrenched.
Against - Government would need to make up the tax shortfall with other (more general) taxes. [about £4Bn/year]
Neither - Inheritance becomes increasingly irrelevant as people live longer and we approach the mathulselan horizon (where no one dies of 'old age').

Abolish necessary indebtedness:
For - Just like slave labour was inadequate for use in the (semi)skilled industrial revolution, maybe labour motivated purely by the desire for the basics in life will prove ineffective for our next societal revolution. For innovation we need people motivated by a fascination with their profession (science, engineering), just as no influential musician started to learn their instrument with the sole intent of riches. The heart needs to be in it.
For - The debt system creates many inefficiencies:
. The extravagantly wealthy waste efforts on producing luxury goods.
. Demolition of useful housing stock for financial reasons.
. People employed to administer the debt system.
. Brain drain from science/tech/arts to an excessively large finance 'industry'.
Against - De-motivation for work and innovation (societal laziness, as above).

Is money even becoming so rare for most people that it has started to loose it's usefulness as a medium of exchange. I read this somewhere but have no evidence. Artificial scarcity of resources tend to spawn black markets, so have there been widespread use of different (illegal) mediums for value exchange recently? Certainly this might drive alternative currency creation (like bitcoin, or even just Linden dollars, WoW gold, etc).

Could the wonders of the internet allow us to do away with our system of financing everything using the savings of the super-rich: Anyone could be an investor/trader, and with more investors there would be a bigger market for investment advice, more competition and hopefully better advice and a more diverse range of investments. So a society with near perfect equality might be more efficient at promoting innovation through investments than at current... Hmm, sounds dubious.

+ Profitable Genocide:

The investments scramble away from the collapsing housing market (in 2006) spread the housing bubble to food commodities (which have not long been deregulated). Grain and wheat shot up almost 100%, and rice 300%, forcing 200 million into malnutrition and outright starvation, causing mass food riots and toppling one government. All this despite increased production and slightly decreased demand (and negligible rises in non-traded staple foods). See links below for details:

Johann Hari: How Goldman gambled on starvation (Independent)
Food speculation: 'People die from hunger while banks make a killing on food' (Guardian)
The Financial Crisis and the Food Crisis: Two Sides of the Same Coin (Food First)

One may say: fine, so re-regulate the food markets if they are causing so many deaths. But of course, this is not happening. The US senate got bogged down (due to donations of successful speculators) and a Tory government is not going to restrict a London that became a trading capital of the world, especially as it was due to Gordon Brown's deregulation. Reducing the wealth disparity, to remove the excess investment capital, almost seems the more plausible here.

+ Hope For Redress?:

An OWSt assembly (by Nathalie Rothschild).

The Occupy Wall Street (OWSt) movement, and others like it, even the violently disruptive cretins of the London street riots, have essential the correct grasp on the situation: too much wealth is allocated to too few people. There's also the 'Tea Party' movement (in the US), which has been criticised as re-branded Republican astroturfing (Wikipedia); it seems to want to fix the financial crisis with conservative style libertarianism (putting out fire with a flame thrower?).

At any rate, I find OWSt more promising. For unsympathetic coverage of the original OWSt protest see Nathalie Rothschild's piece, it perhaps misses the point (see below) but is pretty fair compared to various knee-jerk attempts to snipe it down (as woollie headed, hipster, socialist, nonsense).

It is a conversation, not a protest movement (thanks theAtlantic). If it were embodied as a movie trope it would probably be Agent Smith's Yang to Neo's Ying: in this case, the natural anti-force to the all conquering neo-liberal-capitalist-democracy behemoth that refuses to consider change, even in the face of near immolation. An amorphous ball of intelligent discontent that refuses to provide a solid target for politicians/old-media/corporations to batter down. The inevitable child of the under-paid, disenfranchised masses that have taken residence on the internet, becoming steadily more over-educated until the surplus has spilled out...

It kind of seems like this movement is the end product of a process of evolution; there have been many varieties of failed attempts to change the actions of the social/political elite: the UK election were decisive only in that all parties garnered mediocre interest, the massive anti-cuts march was ignored in favour of the violent periphery and the London riots achieved more attention but pressed for no mandate. This new movement thing feels different though, as if it's learnt from other's past mistakes. OWSt's crowd sourced human megaphone solution, to a ban on artificially amplified voices, alone is kind of inspiring (in a cringe-worthy, slightly creepy way).

It sounds an awful lot like the 'movement' is just sitting about trying to figure out how to govern *itself*, via consensus only. Douglas Rushkoff on OWSt (also, see his section at the bottom of this Guardian piece on the similarities between OWSt and the 'Tea Party' movement). A co-operative anarchy... Could it be the birth of Bank's 'Culture'?! (possibly AKA "The Conversation"). If this crucible for ideas on self government succeeds in solving enough problems preventing egalitarian societal organisation, could it replace our existing government(s)? Or just run in parallel, shoving things in the right direction when they get too far wrong? This movement may die out (and I fully expect it not to live in Zucotti Park *forever*; it'll move online and expand, perhaps quietly), but it could still be recognised (in retrospect) as the thin edge of of 'democracy 2.0', inspired by the same economic crash that brought us the Arab Spring of democracy (1.0).

OWSt has branched out to many other cities all over the world, including London as of today (15th Oct). Maybe it will stick first time: 15october.net/. And even though it is the well equipped middle classes applying pressure, as in Egypt where the poorest just could not afford such extravagances of behaviour, we should be fighting the corner of the most deprived in society too. Some of this almost brings an hopeful tear to my eye: "...'til all are one!... TIL ALL ARE ONE!"

Even in egalitarian, mild mannered, Japan
there was a show of solidarity. Bless 'em.

Solutions to Inequality:

- The short term answer, one that the economy seems to have produced by itself, is inflation. Inflation, in theory, reduces the value of all savings compared to earning power of those in employment (or receipt of decent benefits). It's a kind of automatic debt forgiveness. Though voters supposedly don't like it, and the central banks and politicians try to avoid it like the plague. They have been accused of 'disinflation' (forcibly reducing inflation below what it should be is akin to deflation, which makes the rich richer). Unfortunately, wage inflation (and benefits) are tracking well below consumer price increases (~5% vs ~2.5% at the moment), so this is currently making life even less affordable for those at the low end.

- A medium term answer might be something like a Robinhood tax on financial transactions. Yes that would make business models slower and less efficient, but that should be the main point!: Prevent capital from outgrowing real gains in productivity. But such schemes would be complex and frustratingly nuanced in their application to reality, so I'm not going back any particular stance on such things. I just don't know (yet), but maintaining the higher rate of tax, in the UK, and ideally increasing it further would be a fairly sure-fire, direct approach (that seems massively unlikely under Conservative rule).

Hopefully we don't forget the rest of the world in any new world financial order; it would be good if nullifying odious national debts run up by toppled dictators was as high up the 'international community's' agenda as doubling down Greece's unpayable IOUs.

- Long term, it seems pretty clear that our existing economic paradigm is drawing to a close; central currency just doesn't work in the information economy; it *is* going to go into decline, this may be the beginning of its end. So, it is time to start trying to make alternative currencies and resource allocation systems work instead (otherwise we will ultimately starve to death).

Unlike Douglas Rushkoff or Paul Grignon (Money As Debt) or other commentators, I *do not* want to aim for a steady state, sustainable economy, I don't believe that is even possible. I truly think that infinite exponential growth (through technology) is necessary. But they are right to an extent: real growth will not come at an arbitrary rate demanded by greedy finance, nor in a form that lends itself to traditional capitalisation.

In many ways I liked the idea of libertarianism, but knew that it is as flawed as the market systems it runs on, so government would still be needed, but ideally only in the capacity of regulating and redirecting the markets when they clearly fail to deliver true benefits to society. What we're ended up with in reality is almost the opposite of this: big government regulating everything in society except for finance. I wonder now if the libertarian utopian ideal is as unobtainable, in practice, as true communism (perhaps more so).

So, I am hoping against hope, that when the good citizens of the world finally get some control over their destinies, there is a perfect compromise between the incumbent economics of growth and the revolution of equality. There has never been a better time to set a direct course for technological utopia.

"Adjustment Beauro" Critique

2011-10-06T03:35:00.000+01:00

Adjustment Beauro is [SPOILERS!!!] The Matrix with a benevolent Architect who is blatantly THE man upstairs. As a white Obama in the making, Matt Damon gets his own Inception as he dances gracefully through NY city reenacting parts of Eternal Sunshine. At least they cast the beautiful Emily Blunt as the worryingly gullible supporting actress, and the plot does move along at a comfortable lick.

We're supposed to believe earth has been running continuously under watchful eyes since before the Roman empire (at least), so Christianity's wrong. And, as in the Wackowski's masterpiece, us cretinous humans have proved ourselves insufferably reckless when we were previously allowed behind the wheel of our own world.

Yet another K.Dick adaptation, it pisses me off by being so cliche: blame the stereotypically bad events of Western history on human nature, saving God the embarrassment of holocaust responsibility. Also, his children sat around in the 'dark ages' just sucking our thumbs, but were able to discover nuclear fission unaided because *that's* so reckless...

What would be the point of a society perpetually tweaked by some 'God'? Other than as a game for the entertainment of a massively transhuman AI I suppose:

At least they made this God fallible; being unable to see indefinitely far into the exact future of a impossibly complex ensemble system that is human global society, that is something quite probably computationally impossible, even in a completely deterministic simulation one would have to run it in it's entirety to know for sure what the outcome was going to be when it was run...

"MAtT dAMoN!"

Got a bit carried away with this Photoshoping idea...

Kondratieff Waves... Crashed Our Economy!

2011-10-05T14:14:00.001+01:00

This article presents a divergent hypothesis from Tyler Cowen's lack of 'low hanging fruit' hypothesis for the current Stagnation (discussed in my previous post).

I was going to make one quick mention of a pure economics based thought that might have contributed to our current depression but it was based on an understanding inversion (see tiny writing below):

The 1970s switch of Government policy away from Keynesian practises towards monetary policies that buffered the economy from depressions and recessions may have precipitated the financial crisis by their very success: economic fluctuations shake the wastage out of the system, forcing inefficient businesses to shut down, reform or lay off unproductive staff. Keeping things steady just allowed more detritus to accumulate on the buckaroo donkey, saving all the pain for one big, inevitable mess... Well, actually that's complete nonsense!; It was *Keynesianism* that involved strong state intervention (like The New Deal). The 70s and 80s saw the rise of neo-liberalist policies promoting deregulated, free markets and privatisation. So, if anything one would have to blame *over* optimisation for the crash.

+ Introducing Kondratieff waves:

To say that (inter)national economies are complex things is a blatant understatement. Many factors can effect a short term change in GDP growth rate; changes in: money supply, taxation, national interest rate, financial/business regulations (or removal of), public sector redundancies, etcetera. These have each caused quick and apparently large fluctuations in the past, but ultimately such disturbances only manifest for a couple of years at most before return to equilibrium. No amount of fiddling with these factors can stimulate sustained economic growth. Period. Yet on aggregate, since records began, the world GDP has *always* grown, year on year, even during the great depression, world wars and right now.

US GDP per person - "The Singularity is Near"

This continual rise in per-person wealth, standard of living and productivity has come from a succession of technological innovations that have permeated society. Although, from an historical distance, the long term growth trend of a country looks pretty smooth, innovation uptake by members of a society tends to following a wave of adoption. Very gradual at first, rapid as it gains widespread popularity, but then perhaps never quite reaching *everyone*.

Wikipedia - Diffusion of innovations

There are only a discrete few innovations that are such majorly influential improvements to life as to have become ubiquitous (for example: mains electricity, automobiles, the internet), so they are spaced along our past. Each major innovation stimulated frenzied economic activity, indeed much employment was necessary to build, from nothing, massive infrastructure or industry (e.g. the railway/motorway network, industrial revolution). Lulls occur after each wave of innovation (because science takes time and) because the start of a wave is dependant on the new environment created by the previous one. So one should expect GDP growth history to be a little lumpy; a series of economic revolutions.

Nikolai Kondratieff wrote of his observation of a long wave economic cycle, back in 1925. It earned him Soviet Gulag, death by Stalin, and title to this theory (respectively). He estimated a fixed period of 50-60 years per cycle of: expansion, stagnation, recession. Since then it has been more commonly split into 4 seasons or irruption, frenzy, synergy, maturity (or such like).

I have led this introduction confidently extolling the effect of new innovations writ large, but economists have proposed purely different possible causes for K-waves: credit cycle (excessive debt), a generation-learning model with non-linear dynamic behaviour of information systems (from Tessaleno Devezas, as 60 years ~ 2 generations). However, there are many accounts that emphasis the historical role of innovations, with some focusing specifically on principle infrastructure (Arnulf Grubler "The Rise and Fall of Infrastructures", with 55 years between peak growth of successive transport modes: e.g. canal, rail, road).

+ A More Encompassing Explanation for Our Current Sorry State:

Cowen listed the most dramatic innovations of the previous century and a half, talking about their application to society as if they stimulated perfectly smooth growth across the whole period. He fails to highlight the unevenness each major technological revolution created. I think he glosses over what we might now call K-wave 4: that that boom of innovation started even more abruptly than it ended; a clear cycle.

Cowen, I think erroneously, groups "free land" with his technological and social innovations. This comes from the modern American perspective of the book. I would look at it from the impersonal point of view of the land mass, which spontaneously acquired democracy (a constitution) and access to cutting edge, European technology. Once free from the repression of the British Empire, USA took a ballistic growth trajectory, like the one China (and India) has been on since the 80s, just like Japan's recovery after WW2. Because they were/are catching up with to the cutting edge society all their growth S-curves merge together, no need to invent the technology for the next one. As Cowen himself puts it:

"Borrow and implement the best technologies and institutional ideas of North America, Europe, and Japan."

But that's exactly what the US was doing until the beginning of the 1900s, catching up with the UK, it's economy inflating to the more dominant status it should already have had, courtesy of it's superior material resources (had modern society blossomed evenly distributed across the globe). Similarly Asia 'should' be economically dominant in the world (already), and it shortly will be at it's current rate (but that's for another post).

Screen Grab of Hans Rosling's entertaining 2009 TED India talk.
Graph shows: UK (orange), USA (yellow), Japan (small red), China (big red), India (blue).
Play with this dynamic graph yourself at GAPMINDER.

So my point is that, from a US biased perspective, economic progress may actually have come in a continuous flow, from the 1700s right up until the the 1970s (the world wars saw the US continue to grow by gaining relative economic advantage over a ravaged Europe). The influence of K-waves was obscured from US history; the 'stagflation' slow-down of the 70s and 80s might look like a isolated event to them. This might have helped hide the presence, and danger, of (the end of) another wave (the 5th). 'Planet finance', was overextended, but did no bank on an external, global economic shock like a K-wave depression, so instead of their housing bubble smoothly deflating, it burst. It was quite similar to the bust of the Japanese housing at the start of the 90s:

Japan had been growing rapidly, at 10% up until 1980, until it reached technological/social parity with US & Europe and it's per capita growth abruptly changed pace. Their housing market apparently failed to notice this change of pace and kept booming right through the 80s until reality set in a decade later, wiping a factor of 3 off the value of many properties, back to 1985 prices. (See "Ascent of Money - 'Safe as Houses'"). Although the losses in US (and European) housing have not been quite so dramatic, USA's global dominance (making it the safest investment) meant it's housing crash had a stronger global impact.

+ Rambling Thought 1 - Why do major technological innovations tend to clump together so as to reinforce a long wave pattern?:

[A] Inventions happen to be clustered together in meme-space (a massively multi-dimensional graph that encompasses all possible ideas, in which we are slowly uncovering the hugely convoluted tree of useful ideas). Spontaneous structure, like the gaps and island of stability in the periodic table; strongly defined features can arise almost mystically from the complexity generated in the interactions between simple, deterministic structures.

[B] Their real world uptake influences the discovery of each other:
[B1] An upswing in growth/productivity from one invention triggers forthcoming innovations immediately, sweeping the rest into a uniform wavefront.
[B2] The down-swing/stagnation provides a more fertile time for effective research/creativity (better motivation).
[B3] The massive changes in society wrought by a ubiquitously successful innovation/revolution obscure/repress the expression of other significant ideas for a while (memetic incongruity). Like the refractory period after a neuron firing, except it takes a whole generation to get over a successful paradigm.

[C] Each successive technological revolution is entirely dependant on the platform created by the previous one. Kurzweil's series of overlapping sigmoids (logistic functions); In practice there is an invention, design, perfection lag that prevents the next sigmoid starting halfway through the previous (historically). Specifically, completed infrastructure provided by the previous revolution might be a prerequisite for the next revolution to even *start* taking off.

[D] Maybe if I'd finished reading "Bursts: The Hidden Pattern Behind Everything We Do" by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, then I would have another idea for the apparently 'Bursty'sequence of major innovations.

+ Why are Kondratieff Waves 52 years Long?

This paper by Andrey V. Korotayev: "A Spectral Analysis of World GDP Dynamics" describes the results of a Fourier analysis (basically) of global GDP growth data. It claims to have found statistically significant evidence for K-waves and other cycles.

Fig.2B from Korotayev's paper.

Specific cycle frequencies identified by author, as they relate to previously recognised phenomena:

2-3 Years = Kitchin cycles (inventory lag; slow/speed output).
7-11 Years = Juglar/business cycles (investment; building factories).
15-25 Years = Kuznets swings (may actually be misidentified 3rd Harmonic, below)
17-18 Years = 3rd harmonic of Kondratieff Wave
52 Years = Kondratieff wave (technological innovation/paradigm cycle)

This 52 year wavelength certainly seems to fit the 50s-70s peak well (see below), but the 00s peak was far less pronounced, and the Western world is already plunged deep into recession with apparent stagnation ahead. Also, the author has considered that the data from the World War years are aberrations are so were excluded from most of the power spectrum analyses, so it's little wonder the 1900s-20s peak doesn't look to fit at all. I'm don't think the absolute magnitude of the plots are supposed to match.

Fig.3D from from "A Spectral Analysis of World GDP Dynamics":

Plot 1 is an idealised Kondratieff signal (primary and 3rd harmonic combined).
Plot 2 is the actual World GDP growth rate.

I quite fancy hypothesis [C] for my 'rambling thought 1'. If the periodicity of K-waves is tied into the large amounts of time it takes to build out infrastructure/manufacturing capabilities throughout a whole society. As well as sucking up huge volumes of labour and finance, each new infrastructure could only be built upon the previously completed one. The industrial revolution required the large towns/cities created by freeing much of the population from subsistence via the farming revolution (otherwise England could never have produced >70% of the worlds textiles). The steel age mega-constructions required existing railways. Telecommunications lines ran side by side with railways. Internet required mature telecoms.

In this case, for the next Kondratieff cycle, one should perhaps be looking out for large scale infrastructure, something(s) that will take a matter of decades to deploy (not just some gadget that will provide large productivity gains). So green energy infrastructure perhaps; solar PV (on a smart grid with bits of other renewable projects and electric cars) would fit well here I think, especially as it's growth is currently a rising exponential (likely the start of a sigmoid curve). A tablet PC revolution is not infrastructurish; genetics, nontech and robotics revolutions don't seem to fit well here either (though the practical part of genetics would require years long integration into existing health services).

'Infrastructure' is not exclusively land networks, it can include 'airways' (aeroplanes, airports) and shiping stock (and port fascilities), which are major investments. Arnulf Grübler has carefully plotted real world data showing lovely S-curve adoption, smooth log scale infrastructure growth (perfect exponential expansion, like this one for shipping, below) and switch overs between dominant energy types. What's more the plotted midpoints for principle infrastructure (rail, roads, etc) are spaced 55 years apart. (See full book PDF)

Plot from page 87 - Arnulf Grubler (1990) -
"The Rise and Fall of Infrastructures: Dynamics of Evolution and Technological Change in Transport"

+ Rambling Thought 2: - If the turn of this millennium indeed co-incided with the prosperity phase of a Kondratieff wave, why was it so much less pronounced than the 1950s boom?? (in fig.3D, above):

[A] The 4th K-wave (50s-90s) was unusually pronounced for some reason:

The nature of innovations of the 4th wave lent themselves particularly well to making GDP growth figures look good. Perhaps the modern concept of GDP was even conceived during this period (so is biased towards it's specific virtues).
Perhaps the 4th wave *was* just that much more significant!; cheap fossil fuel powered air, road, rail and wave transport made a massive change to the physical world which required a huge effort investmenting in the accompanying infrastructure and manufacturing.

The Green Revolution massively boosted the output of all developing nations during the 4th wave.
Japan's post WII, 10% catchup growth will have significantly contributed to making wave 4 stronger. Likewise China's growth should smooth out the lull between K-waves 5 and 6, then strongly reinforce Wave 6. The first K-wave recession after China reaches cutting edge GDP parity could be a real bitch though: think the problems of the 70s rolled in with a 00s housing boom bust 2 times bigger! :os

The 1st and 2nd wave can not be compared because of the paucity of data from those times, the 3rd wave was mired by WW1 and government naivité to macroeconomics (as well as lesser information collection). Explaining a gentle 5th wave is more difficult.

[B] The 5th wave (90s to present day) looks too small for some reason:

The 5th (and later) waves may be simultaneously damaging GDP (while growing it in some ways): e.g. by causing greater unemployment.
Maybe false growth in the 80s and early 90s took the edge off the information technology boom. We did have Thatcherist neolibralism after all.
Traditional GDP measures are becoming less appropriate as they fail to include all the free productivity taking place in the digital economy. I don't just mean pirated music/movies, more like all the user generated (useful) content: blogs, wikis & forums, multimedia entertainment (remixes, free unsigned songs on youtube). Hence old fashioned GDP measures, aimed at a mass manufacturing economy, severely underestimate contemporary useful output.
There may also have been massive missed opportunity for traditional economic growth of new media content distribution models and such, due to strangling IP legacy laws and belligerent existing monopolistic business interests.
Rising wealth inequality (in the most developed nations) suppressed true economic growth; these countries are productively weaker than they should be; mass infrastructure investment, or such like, was impaired by low median incomes. This could be the long shadow of the Thatcher legacy, extended by further deregulations and financial innovations that promote increasing concentrated wealth. Cowen claimed this, but was not specific as to causes or effects.

Korotayev's spectral analysis shows whole world GDP data, so growth from emerging markets undergoing continual (catch-up) growth, as yet unrestrained by technological limitations, will be superimposed. I think Kondratieff waves only describe the economic growth patterns of the currently most advanced nations. Previous to K-wave 4 the economic activity of the undeveloped world would probably have been negligible (by definition) or else automatically excluded by lack of records.

+ Rambling Thought 3 - Filling in the Economic Details of Kondratieff Waves:

- The rise of a wave: A massive new industry 'primes the pumps' (as Maynard Keynes had the US government do in the 30s) of the whole economy. It persuades the monied to part with their savings on mass, investing in new businesses that clearly have a profitable future. For example, US Steel had a bigger turnover than the US government at it's inception in 1901 (the prosperous part of the 3rd wave). More employees are needed and are paid better with apparent job security so spend more too, but I think the big investors are probably of primary importance in determining boom or slump (they are more able to take or leave investment opportunities).

- The fall: After a couple of decades of boosted growth, financial markets are are over-optimistic; the extra employment and capital returns from the revolution start tailing off has been taken for granted. There is a last fling of fake growth with too little real basis and so a bubble grows and bursts. Unemployment rises (as society is no longer undertaking a massive overhaul). Inflation may hit too it seems. Perhaps this is compensating for an inappropriate, but unnoticed, previous increase in the money supply, during the 'fake' growth period, at the end of a wave? Or, more directly, a government might have attempted to prop the slowing economy with spending that essentially boils down to printing money. 'Differential accumulation' might be a major cause: firms aim to beat the profit of competitors and dominant (monopoly) firms are more able to get away with this. They would be selling less product, so hike the price to maintain profit, hence stagflation may result if the downturn in sales is linked to increased unemployment.

+ Are K-waves Truly Fixed Frequency?:

If generation based learning models are genuinely meaningful in describing K-wave length, then one might expect a slight lengthening of their period as populations age, have children later. The observation that the houses in 50s TV shows contain roughly all the same items as contemporary abodes is a weak anecdote of great stagnation (fro my liking). However, Cowen noted that major scientific discoveries are getting more complicated and difficult (including Huebner's graph of slowing innovation per person). Public science funding always seems to be getting a raw deal too. If fundamental scientific discovery were falling behind schedule then this could well lengthen K-waves (at least until China catches up and sorts it all out for us).

On the other hand, I quite fancy that this current bust/recession is an earlier than expected falling limb of the (5th) cycle. It's a strong indication of the end of a the computer revolution when the biggest manufacturer sells it's hardware business because it's products have become a (less profitable) basic commodity. In this hypothesis the dot.com bust could well have been the raising edge overshoot (the 3rd harmonic). So the primary Kondrateiff cycles are speeding up. The idealised waveform might even eyeball fit the raw data plot (of Fig.3D) better with waves 4 and 5 closer and 3 spaced a little to the left.

The spectral analysis result might make it appear that there is only direct evidence for fixed period waves, but as I've pointed out, there is anthropic selection of data (insufficient was collected before mid 1800s) and with the data for the war years removed there was only really one and a half wave lengths of data analysed, and that was dominated by the super-strong K-wave 4. One should not over weigh the significance of evidence purely because it produces a pretty graph or numerical result.

And so to segue onto a Singularity friendly variation on Kondratieff waves...

Daniel Šmihula's - "Waves of technological innovations and the end of the information revolution"

Šmihula's paper (full PDF) is rather wishy-washy, in that it shows no explicit data analysis, it seems to be purely a literary review from all the sources that it quotes. He asserts that successive innovation waves/revolutions are getting shorter in length (see below).

He links his modification of K-waves with the observable economic phenomena, we have so far dealt with, as "strong but not absolute"; he says of the latter, more recent waves, "their mutual cohesion is more visible than in a case of earlier ones". Perhaps the big 4th K-wave I talked about signalled a resonance when the two types of waves overlapped. The shortening innovation wave length matching up with a more purely economic phenomena.

Šmihula's accelerating progress tallies with Kurzweil's observations of the increasing rapidity of technological uptake by the general public, such as telecomms devices as plotted below:

From "The Singularity is Near"

If there is something in Šmihula's musings (and mine) then the 6th innovation wave is starting now (in the depression phase) and it should be about 20 years long. So the next ~10 years will be a relative slump as green energy infrastructure grows through the slow early phases before finally blossoming (then bubbling and popping, no doubt). Clean energy may be dominated by a couple of technologies that seem to come from nowhere (following exponential growth): cheap, efficient solar PV being a near certainty. Kurzweil puts PV equivalent to entire world's energy requirements just 16 year away, perfect to fuel an economic boom in the early 2020s. After clean electricity production rises past a significant fraction (~30%) of total production, energy storage technology will (need) to start to explode too (to buffer the surplus between day/night, etc). For example via domestic hydrogen storage tanks a-la Dan Nocera.

Perhaps Craig Ventner style artificial oil, brewed using modified algae will be an overlapping innovation between the second part of the green energy boom, linking the 6th K-wave with the genetics revolution propper (predicted in the 2020s by Kurzweil). I think health services are going to see a transition from treating illnesses to treating patients over the 2010s. The advent of cheap, personal genome sequencing will enable this for certain. I'm not so sure about the treatments themselves, but hopefully computation systems modelling will produce personalised treatment plans too. Perhaps in-vivo genome modification will mean cancer is effectively cured and various other ailments can finally be addressed directly. I do not forsee the genetics revolution producing the same kind of employment boon as green energy installation should, but rise in quality of life could be palpable.

Extrapolating along the same progression, the 7th K-wave would be ~14 years long (2030-2045ish), which takes us right up to the forecast of a Singularity. It could well be nanotech dominated with a side helping of superhumanly intelligent robots, which if I allow myself to speculate wildly (for a change) would probably mean the final nail in the mainstream economy as we know it. Any 8th and later waves would have a different meaning for humanity (if they aren't bypassed altogether).

* Concluding Summary:

Nikolai Dmitriyevich Kondratieff

I think: Kondratieff waves are a are real, emergent phenomena. They arise from the interaction of practical, psychological and social (economic) limitations with the largely continuous progress of science. This produces a repeated pattern of societal innovations with invention, refinement and adoption. This last stage, the spread of the innovation throughout society, is the massive signal buried in GDP data, too big and slow to see: the forest behind a screen of trees (recent events). I think the current bust/recession signals the end of a Kondratieff wave and the fully developed countries should expect a relative stagnation period of the order of a decade before the next sustained economic boom.

The issue of the periodicity of Kondratieff waves is more uncertain. Being familiar with, and optimistic of, a Technological Singularity I gravitate towards the Smihula type (shortening exponentially). I do not feel the spectral analysis of global GDP data rules this out. Also, I imagine that most economists would be unknowingly biased the other way, by natural assumption that any repeated oscillation in the economy would be either regularly periodic (or random); the general populace tends to think in terms of a steady state reality or linear progress. But if one takes a cybernetic viewpoint, such assumptions seem arbitrary (and odd).

Looking at human endeavours from high above, outside Earth looking in, society is composed of (many) individual humans that each behave in ways determined wholly by the culture of technologies around them (and their genetic heritage). Society moved far slower in, say the 1600s, because of the way information spread (on horseback at best) and how weakly linked society was; each town was practically isolated from the rest of reality (by current standards). New technologies may primarily have arrived via immigrants to an area. The engines for 'industry' were animals, or human toil so building *anything* took a very long time, let alone re-making a whole nation. One could think about any society having a characteristic resonant frequency: the low density, loosely connected 1600ers like a the undulation of a soft bed, while the present day thumps like the skin on a drum, singing together almost in unison.

I certainly do not think there will turn out to be a Kondratieff wave of exactly repeating periodicity given that society, and every human constinuant of it, has been changed so substantially along the way; I can see no basis for such a phenomena. There could perhaps be an observable Tessaleno Devezas style repeated pattern based around learning patterns of successive generations, it could be superimposed in addition to the other causes; but again, given the statistical uncertainties, this could well turn out to be coincidence. I have most confidence that future history will consider a Smihula style wave pattern to have been most significant, with a sequence that only approximates to a geometric sequence; the impossible emergent complexity of global society and it's specific history always adding extra details.

The real test of course will be the economic data for the next 20 years; I predict we will see a sustained lull followed by a clean-energy + biotechnology dominated boom that causes 'Westen' GDPs to plateau in 2022 (plus or minus 2 years).

The Great Stagnation(?) by Tyler Cowen:

2011-10-01T06:22:00.001+01:00

This mini-book appeals to me because it talks about economic progress/stagnation/crisis as primarily attributable to innovations. However, his surprisingly compelling idea, to account for our global economic finance bubble, seems to clash directly with Kurzweil's portrayal of miraculously smooth technological advance. (Although Ray does talk about an overall exponential composed from S-curves through successive paradigms.)

I came upon this (£2 Kindle app special) book via a link to this blog post considering stagnation vs relocation (of the world's economic centre to China).

* The Book's Central Thesis in A Nutshell Painted by Me:

The natural course of technological innovation, following the tree of scientific discovery, yielded many 'low hanging fruit' from 1870-1970 that greatly benefited the whole of western society. Transport, communications, home conveniences, mass production, free fertile land for US settlers and perhaps cheap fossil fuels. These rapidly raised the standard of living for just about everyone (in America), doubling it ~ every 25 years, also creating universal employment.

However, in the the last 40 years there have been no innovations with the same level of wide ranging public utility. We, in the developed world reached a plateau of of technological productivity gains in the 1970s. Advances since then have been *marginal improvements* that have mostly benefited private consumers (to an extent dependant on wealth). The lack true economic growth was hidden by the uncertain value of growing government expenditure. [Perhaps outright "Pollyanna Creep" too (my thought, or rather Douglas Rushcoff's from "Life Inc.").] Markets and individuals, caught up in the endemic false expectation of continuously strong growth (from the previous period of reaping 'low hanging fruit') all simultaneously overstretched to the point of buckling.

The Internet is a sole exception of innovation, in that it has had a great qualitative benefit to peoples lives, for that part of society sufficiently educated to enjoy it's many wonders. However, it has not yet raised standards of living as ubiquitously as did electricity in homes. Furthermore, it contributes very scantly to employment and GDP. Computers do almost all the hard work, so massive companies (Google, Facebook) have few employees, hence (in part) the 'jobless recoveries' of the last 2 decades. Also, it's very difficult (or just plain unnecessary), to monetise most internet content. Time well spent on-line, for the individual, may well decrease spending elsewhere, hence reduce GDP and government tax income. The net is just too damn efficient!

* More Details:

We've been subject to a terrible case of diminishing returns in general: real education costs (per pupil) have doubled despite no quantifiable increase in academic ability and the number of school graduates has actually decreased since the 1960s. Health spending has been ballooning, almost exclusively to benefit the elderly, being near impossible to quantify the true value of any care because it is not subject to anything like free market valuation, and by the ambiguous nature of many treatments themselves.

In general, government size and expenditure has continued to increase despite it being unsustainable to do so without the massive productivity boons of the century previous to the moon landings. The contribution to GDP (i.e. our main indicator of prosperity) by government is measured by raw *cost*, instead of by end *value* (like goods, e.g. apples). Therefore, increased government spending increasingly obscures evaluation of our true prosperity. Furthermore, because each successive dollar spent by central government is less effective (on average) than those before (as size of government increases towards 100% or GDP), larger government causes more greatly exaggerated perception of growth (and national well being).

This ongoing financial crisis was a result of: "We thought we were richer than we were". We were fooled by lying growth figures, and complacent from a string of minor financial crises (from "savings and loans" and "Black Monday" of 1980s, up to the "dot.com" of 2001) that never really caused much trouble long term. Politicians had happily backed the poorest in society gathering unpayable debts against overinflated house values, but sub-prime loans were merely the canary in the mine heralding the start of *everything* finally coming to a crunch. From museum owners making overly ambitious expansions, to the banks themselves who had massively overstretched themselves (having leveraged up from 12:1 to 30:1), etc. What's more, the cheap/free pleasures of the internet just accelerated the downturn with people more happily able to avoid some personal spending.

* My Meandering Thoughts (Discussion):

+ What about the advent of computerised logistics in the 80s that brought us the modern supermarket? This provided many significant efficiencies and price-performance improvements for consumers. Though it probably produced a net loss of jobs through the same efficiency savings (putting many more smaller, more specialised, shops out of business), so part of the later 'jobless' technological boons.

[First graph from book.]

Perhaps there is no discrete cut-off of useful innovations circa 1970, more of a gradual sliding towards developments that favour lower employment, higher wealth concentration. Supermarket logistics would kick in around tipping point of this transition. Could it be that GDP figures are roughly right, but the richest have been getting richer by stealing the majority's growth in standard of living? (Inadvertently stifling overall productivity.)

Cowen does state:
"If one sentence were to sum up the mechanism driving the Great Stagnation, it is this: Recent and current innovation is more geared to private goods than to public goods. That simple observation ties together the three major macroeconomic events of our time: growing income inequality, stagnant median income, and, as we will see in chapter five, the financial crisis."

Although Cowen never gives any specific examples of possible future innovations that will benefit all society, I got the impression he expected there to be some in the future, that we are just on the flattened middle of an s-curve or progress. That either the discoveries to be made will happen to be fundamentally egalitarian in nature, or society will start gearing their application thus.

But what if the slide towards greater wealth inequality can only increase with forthcoming technologies? After all, each successive level of automation raises the threshold of intelligence/capability required to enter the workforce; what happens to the (less academic) majority of the workforce when all shelves are stacked automatically and check-outs scan items while still in a trolley? What about when every home has a nano-replicator that can print *anything* and 'earning' is limited to those who own the 'interlectual propperty' (ok maybe that's looking way too far ahead for this discussion). My point is there is an unavoidably expanding segment of society that is incapable of submitting to employment, even if there were job openings for them.

Our Marxist economic paradigm draws to a close: being broken by digital technology. The internet has no static factories ripe for taxation: it's 'factories' often don't even *sell* anything. And this digital 'economy' will continue to grow, well beyond virtual shop fronts for distance selling. I wonder if alternative currencies, perhaps even ones based on reputation, or other such abstract measures, can help fill the gap here.

Ultimately, I think, our technology is going to stop needing homo-sapiens altogether. With that in mind, it's never been a better time to start figuring out what to do with our growing mass of economically disenfrancised individuals, because one day that demographic could encompass all of us.

+ Did the mechanised & chemical horrors of WW1 and the nightmare of atomic destruction that ended WW2 are cited (elsewhere) as badly damaging the public reputation of science in the developed world. Could this have stifled a continued rise in the popularity of scientific/engineering careers, derailing the natural course that would have yielded sufficient advances to sustain (3%) continued growth throughout the last 40 years too??? Or did we just hit an unavoidably slow patch in the universe's tech-tree?? Or *is* the economy just moving East afterall???: Paul Krugman - "The New Economic Geography".

+ The only solution (to Stagnation) Cowen proffers is to "Raise the social status of scientists" (in the west). More in line with how the technical minded are revered in china/India.

I have been in *total* agreement with this for some time, and there are hints of a turn in this tide, like the popularity of "The Bing Bang Theory" TV series, for example (maybe). But then UK government (for one) is *cutting* it's science funding, always protecting short term commercialisation ahead of longer research too. And I'm dubious of commercial R&D, with pharmaceutical giants (for example) accused of shortsightedness due to conflicts of interest.

To be honest, I was already resigned to the west ceding intellectual dominance to China (et. al) straight after economic. I don't see this scenario as something to be avidly avoided. Even 'Chinese democracy' has certain benefits over that of the USA, and it should be forced to evolve still kinder manners for individuals as the wealth of their populace grows. I think we would be alright for US/Europe/Japan to take the co-pilot's seat in the long run. The greatest worry, in my view, is the unpredictability of an economically humbled USA, with it's legacy of global military might.

+ Jonathan Huebner's gaussian curved graph of innovation per person (by global population)... I made a point of *not* flying to the defence of accepted Kurzweilian 'wisdom' here, instead considering this figure with an open mind.

[Second graph from book]

It may indicate that good inventions are becoming rarer; fewer per global citizen. This could mean that either there is a decline in interest in participating in science/technology (which seems, to me, to have been a trend in UK culture during my life time). Alternatively, good inventions are rarer or more difficult to create now (which fits with an observation that cutting edge physics has moved from individual philosophers of natural science to massive team undertakings like the LHC, etc).

The dipping peak of this graph does correspond to global population growth, so one could claim that the *total* number of innovations may still be growing rapidly, it's just not keeping pace with the overall population increase. However, Cowen points out that (1965-1989) the number of *researchers* in the US, West Germany, Japan doubled, tripled and quadrupled (in turn) while number of pattens held roughly steady. So the later seems to be dominant: innovations require successively more work.

This doesn't really surprise me; I know first hand that the more cutting edge solid state physics (so useful for all materials science and computing advances) is increasingly abstract, with details beyond my mental capabilities. And with increasing complexity comes larger idea spaces to explorer (with more dead ends). But I suppose I would assumed that increased computing utilisation would overwhelm such obstacles.

- Perhaps the west is paying the price now (with recession) of getting too far ahead of the rest. We need the collective might of the majority of the world's population to pass the last few levels of the technological invention game. So when Britain was Empiring all over the place, enslaving India and suppressing the Chinese with opium it was like 'we' thought the game was Mario Carts, when really it was Portal 2.

Would 'the great stagnation' we are in now be the end state for our civilisation, if China and India could not eventually catch up and save our collective bacon (see point 1, below)? I would like to think that the West alone would *eventually* figure out all the steps to technological immortality alone, but what if it is not like walking down a long straight road of progress?; we should think of societal networks of increasing size and complexity, so maybe without sufficient population to build a sufficiently big network, humanity as we know it will fail to reach it's ultimate goal.

After all, technology companies have had to agglomerate ever bigger to be able to manufacture the increasingly complex new devices upon which society relies: only 2 major carrier jet manufacturers, only 2 major desktop CPU manufacturers, each requiring ever bigger markets to fund their ever increasing assembly plant sizes. Matt Riddly, in this talk I often reference (from 12min), gives examples of cultures that have become isolated from the rest of the world and subsequently lapsed back to using less advanced tools, simply because they no longer had the population to sustain all the necessary trades to make artefact's of contemporary complexity. Perhaps digital technology changes the rules here, stopping us from forgetting the latest technologies or something more subtle.

Ultimately, what stops me worrying about Huebner's graph, even if it were exactly right and the selection of innovations isn't flawed as Kurzweil claims (in New Scientist back in 2005) or misleading in other ways, is essentially this: human beings may reach an ultimate population limit on earth, but technological Humanity (A.I.s), once created, should continue to enjoy an exponential increase in computational resources available for their existence as technology continues to miniaturise and spread indefinitely. After artificial minds swell our population, innovations per *person* is going to get seriously outdated fast.

+ This raises some interesting questions about reaching Singularity, along the lines of those raised in Vernor Vinge's "Marooned in Realtime":
1) What if asia (the land mass and peoples) never existed, would the world still be able to reach technological Singularity with, say, only 50% of the population carrying capacity?
2) Would Huebner's rates of innovation per person hold in a world with a lower population carrying capacity, that world would experience a more gradual exponential curve towards Singularity? Or would it hit a brick wall and stop; is there am absolute threshold population for achieving singularity?
3) Is there a global rate of advance that is too slow to reach Singularity?
4) What are the failure modes (if they exist) when progress is too slow? (Annihilation? Stagnation and regress? External threats: e.g. asteroids, volcanoes.)
5) Can progress be too *fast* (in a world with greater population) causing failure through dangerous instability?
6) Could (something like) humans have evolved on a planet too small for them to grow to the threshold population, or would other factors (such as strength of gravity too low for atmosphere) prevent this in reality? Are there worlds out there stuck permanently in an paradigm of Roman Empire level civilisations because they have total habitable land masses smaller that that of Europe. Or does that species eventually become extinct to be replaced by a smaller one with more efficient brains and so find the limited biomass sufficient? (there must be a hard limit to biology somewhere)

* A Kind of Conclusion

This book felt like another missing piece of my understanding of reality was falling into place; a joining of my recent recurring interest in economics with a contrasting view on technological progress. Having said this, neither Cowen's vague optimism, nor Huebner's graphs have shaken me from expecting Kurzweil's predictions to materialise, broadly speaking. However, these meditations do add a hint that the flavour of future realities my taste a little sour to many. Also, this book makes a good effort to explain the financial crisis where I've not noticed any convincing explanations from Ray. A fellow Singularity Summit speaker and sponsor is Peter Thiel, who's also referenced by Cowen for blazing the way for his book. I've already discussed Thiel's thoughts on the lack of innovation in the middle of this blog post about a possible green energy bubble (with Summit talk video included). Though it is odd listening to financial/technological advice from a guy who captained a $7.2Bn hedge fund into a 90% loss...

'Recursion' by Tony Ballantyne

2011-06-03T12:25:00.001+01:00

From a distance this novel should be right up my street, with a plot about self replicating machines that eat up entire planets. But his visions of the future are generally uninspired and wholly lackluster, mired in the clunky, Simple-English-Wikipedia of his prose.

+ Criticism:

It may be Ballantyne's 2004 debut, but it looks certain that his later work will never progress beyond amateur hour in comparison to (for example) Ian M Bank's fecundly imaginative narrative, or Reynold's brooding atmospherics. The scant few unfamiliar technologies presented in Recursion are named entirely literally, like the pivotal "Von Neumann machines" (or "VNMs"), for example. The number of raw ideas in Recurusion would barely sustain a couple of chapters of a Stross book. Also, either of my aforementioned favourite writers usually leave me with a post-it note full of fun new vocabulary that required Googling (if I'm in a literary mood), I almost feel I might have done a better job myself.

The 2051 (chronologically earliest) storyline was the most compelling in terms of character, and managed to build tension, terminating with a modicum of surprise (although it may as well have been set in 2020 in terms of future-fantastic).

The spy thriller thread (in 2119) was unconvincing and the coherence of the protagonists falters badly when he tries to write a frantic fleeing scene, that incidentally felt like it owed much to 'Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind'. In fact the cumbersome way details are often spelled out, some needlessly arbitrary events and the odd gaping continuity hole leave the whole thing feeling like the synopsis for a Hollywood movie. Which seems to be where much of the author's inspiration comes from.

My impression from the opening page, with 'Herb' in 2210, is that it could have been written in 1964, not 2004. Incidentally, his impression of a black skinned antagonist in this opening chapter left me somewhat uncomfortable (embarrassed on the author's behalf). Herb is the least believable character, supposedly smart (for a human) he is made to act overly retarded, attempting to paint the robot character as implacably smart, and allow many details to be spelled out to the reader through dialogue.

+ Nuts, bolts and spoilers:

We are presented with cliche Star Trek space travel: unaugmented humans in penthouse luxury apartment interiors with magical artificial gravity and convenient "warp" travel. Then into this blandness Ballantyne shoehorns in the caveat that all modern technology can self replicate, magically fission into 2 identical copies, each with half the original mass, a whole spaceship in a matter of minutes... No suspension of disbelief there for me!

The depiction of VNMs was overly simplistic for my tastes too (and their abilities too unphysical). He glosses over how they could self assemble equally easily from any rocky planetary matter, regardless of element (avoiding talk of gaseous planets altogether). Each batch of VNMs are are monoculture of clones, I would have liked to have seen specialised body plans, totally different shapes and sizes all working together like the 250 odd diverse cell types in a human body.

The three converging lines did indeed tie up on pat, after several rounds of very evenly sized chapters each. But the final chapter felt like he had run out of writing steam altogether and just wanted to finish off communicating all his thoughts quickly. He wrestles, like a man with no arms, with the idea of what the existence of an omniscient AI should mean for humans. It starts to look like he's about to go with a tired, pseudo-religious, movie industry style, meaningless moral (of things are just best off with humans being as them are, etc), but then avoided pissing me off entirely (like 'Calculating God' did, with a similarly engaging writing style too). It just left me 'meh'.

The core flaw in it's underlying philosophy are it's lack of conception of where ideas and technological change come from and the unstoppably disruptive effect this progress (increasingly) has. There is clearly no memetics at play here, he talks of all the advanced technology being impossible for humans to understand, requiring the omniscient/Omnipotent world brain AI to drip feed such things to humanity on a whim, arbitrarily decades ahead of the generally available state of the art. Formulaic, lazy, nonsense. Idea's can not be conjured into existence as if intelligence were 'the force', ideas evolve from a pool of existing ideas that continually grows, whether in human brains or virtual environments.

His super-intelligent AI are also able to predict deep into the future, apparently oblivious to (or ignorant of) the presence of computationally irreducibility, particularly in the chaos of reality.

He doesn't explicitly deal with the lack-of-technological-singularity-problem, but it could be argued that the supreme AI guided things away from such explosive changes, rather than herald them as might typically be expected. And anyway, I'm used to this oversight.

+ Verdict

This was a fairly harsh review. To be fair, I was sufficiently absorbed to finish the book, and it did present a few ideas to think on. If nothing else it inspiring in that it left me feeling hope that a geeks with merely nominal literacy can write and publish full length sci-fi too.

Magicka - A Rave Review

2011-04-01T01:58:00.000+01:00

I steered clear of this game for a while, mostly because of the fantasy setting gave connotations of WoW to mind, but I was totally wrong, and it's an EXCELLENT game, the most fun I've had for years!

Embark on an adventure to prevent the world from changing... Forever!

Magicka's fictional land of Midgård was conceived of by a bunch of Swedish Uni students to be vaguely Norse Mythological. But is dominated by computer game influences and popular geek culture references, from Return of the Jedi to Disc World via Monty Python and the internet. The fixed view, walk-towards-mouse-pointer format is most reminiscent of Diablo, but there's zero grind in sight; one's success in battle is determined almost entirely by raw ability and knowledge of spell combinations.

It's a game that uses boring legacy PC peripherals like a Guitar Hero controller of pure awesome: with each 'chord' one blasts out a volley of ice shards, a massive fire ball, a freezing electric death beam or random healing bombs that throw you right across the screen. [Tangential Note 1]

In terms of cultural significance, I would say it's the "Scott Pilgrim" of the games industry. The myriad hat tips to geekishness past and present are sandwiched in a satirical narrative that pokes fun at (for example) the ridiculous contrivances necessary to string such a notable story of adventure and battles together.

The overnight success of this £8 Steam wonder is probably largely to do with the multiplayer element. The trailer gave me the impression that combat would be an impenetrable clutter of mayhem; Streets of Rage and Golden Axe played concurrently in a rastafarian laundry explosion. Throw a bunch of rookie Magickians together and it's worst still. Ferment this in an alcohol fuelled LAN party for ultimate LOLZ! (And thank god for 'Revive': the first and most used multiplayer 'Magick'.)

However, multiplayer is up to 4 player co-op only, no official PvP (yet), squabbles and frequent accidents discounted. There are 2 bonus "Challenge Arenas”, but inevitably you end up only playing the campaign part multiplayer. While we're on the negatives, it has a hideous tendency not to connect. Then if you figure out a work around there were/are more bizarre coding bugs during game play than there are giant spiders, with a roughly zero percent chance you'll make it to the end of the campaign without the game fully crashing out.

8 Basic Elements

But the number of bugs should hardly be surprising when there's the capacity to combine a selection of 10 elements* in 5 slots per spell. [*N.B. ice and steam are compound elements that augment the 8 fundamentals] And that's without accounting for the more the apocalyptic 'Magicks', each garnered from one of 20 odd books found along the way. Creating a black hole singularity in the middle of the screen can cause no end of unforeseen circumstances (come a following in-game cut scene for instance).

Even when you win you can still loose the cut-scene...

The heart of the game is undoubtedly the casting system, which creates a combinatorial explosion of distinct phenomena. Each species part of a family, the most common of which being beam spells. Because each spell is a manipulation of the virtual environment, their effects combine, often unexpectedly. Friend or foe, crossing similar beams reinforces and deflects them at their point of meeting, but when composed of some opposite elements a large explosion results. Interactions also cover any elements in-hand (ready to be cast) resulting in countless more emergent experiences. Granted that initially these are mostly of the noisy + deadly mistake variety, but ultimately this mechanic yields subtle exploits and besides, the surprises are always interesting and fun. This can make enemy mages the trickiest foe to deal with, even the handful of spells they cast almost at random, you don't want to be casting ice and/or lightening when they hit you with a beam of water! [Tangential Note 2]

Magicka unleashes a level of inventiveness usually reserved for some Crazy/Incredible Machines game. And that's where this game really grabbed me: puzzling my way through single player. Even away from my PC, Magicka has monopolised my default network for hours on end, forcing it to dream of new combinations and tactics; memetic crack cocaine for my brain.

I found the challenge mode complemented the main game nicely, using it to wreak experiments upon instant waves of miscreant monsters. This helped me get through the story fro the first time, single player, over a few nights of playing (about 14 hours campaign time), only afterwards looking up the absolute-most-hit-points-possible spells on magickapedia.net. Definitely my recommended way to play; multiplayer is frantic fun 'n all, but can get tiring much more quickly because, rather than exploring combination ideas, you are inclined to exploit your existing knowledge before all the baddies are turned to minced meat.

Mayhem on "The Glade" Challenge: Druids cast lines of mini volcanoes, adding to my mess as I shield myselffrom a horde of Beast Brutes.

Large groups easily dropped by spamming AOE spells.

Also, 'area of effect' (AOE) spells, in particular, and most powerful Magicks are best reserved for solo play: their indiscriminate effects will not please your friends. This friendly fire limitation cleverly re-balances the difficulty without the need for any different settings. Sure it can be a little frustrating at first when your wizard gets randomly flung to his death, but the checkpoints are regular enough and it's a lot more rewarding when you do succeed. I reached full achievements at just under 40 hours, only 6 of those dedicated on the task of completion itself. No ridiculous gaols, all very well crafted.

Since then I've tried modding challenge arenas (via easily accessible text files, made simpler with a third party editor) and exploring speed run techniques on YouTube and in person. Pretty sad perhaps, but thus is the inciting brilliance of this game. Very much looking forwards to the forthcoming Vietnam expansion.

Conclusion: Magicka's malfunctions are sizeable and frequent, but barely dampen the scintillating fires of it's ingenuity and high speed humour. If there's anyone out there who *hasn't* already had a go, I highly recommend you do!

[Tangent Note 1] Come to think of it, it's a bit like playing as Mo, the wife of the computer nerd protagonist in "The Atrocity Archives" series of novels. She is a 'combat epistemologist' who vanquishes hyper-dimensional daemons by playing mathematically unpleasant sounds on an white violin made of human parts. I just finished reading the 3rd novel in this 'Laundry' universe created by Charles Stross: "The Fuller Memorandum". It was pretty good, but not in danger of beating the uniqueness of the first in the batch, a book that created a genre: computer age spy thriller trips over Dilbert and crashes head first into H.P.Lovecraft. Win!

[Tangent Note 2] Upon reading "Emergence" (Steven Johnson) several years ago, I realised that I have been waiting for solid new games that build themselves around emergence, as Simcity did. Spore near totally failed in this respect, with only small niches of it (i.e. the gait of your created creatures) being generatively coded. I've no idea if Arrowhead Studios took a ridiculously brute force approach to rending the legion possible magick effects, that's beside the point, it is a clear spiritual campion for the ilk of which I've longed.

For the next step up I would quite like a competitive RTS, like Supreme Commander, that builds something as dynamic as a Simcity city by using mechanics as fun and emergent as Magicka's... Something an order of magnitude deeper than chess, but as simple to grasp as a catchy pop song... Something where the most interesting possible outcomes are totally unknown to the developers, floating out in there in game phase space for the players to create!

Bioshock 2

2011-03-07T11:31:00.001Z

In one sentence: the Bioshock 2 single player campaign has a worth while story, but the difficulty arc is very iffy.

Summary in more that one sentence:

Game play wise, innovation is comparable to Halo 2 verses it's predecessor, mostly just adding 'dual wield'. There are the same gruesome aesthetics one will have habituated to in the first title, and again they are juxtaposed with the cheery 50/60s style infomercials for deadly plasmid powers. However, the alternative game play section towards the end impressed me in that it genuinely shocked my sensibilities in a very artistic manner. I have not played, and am not commenting on, the multiplayer aspect. The ridiculous protection and Games for Windows Live situation I shall leave alone too.

"All good girls gather"...

Criticism:

Early in the game I found it very tough to successfully defend a little sister from splicers, while she harvested Adam, even on medium difficulty and after careful preparation of traps/defences. I was all out of money, heath packs, eve and trap ammo. But having struggled through, a few upgrades and various weapon acquisitions later, the same situations were far easier. Then the number and difficulty of enemies dropped right off before mid game, making my main problem having so much ammo and money I could rarely pick any up.

The research-your-enemies-while-fighting-them mechanic (inherited from good ole System Shock 2 - 1999) kept things a little more interesting, as in Bioshock 1. But, however diligent, it seems it would be near impossible to get some of them completed until right at the end. I finally obtained 'Armored Shell 2' gene tonic just in time for ending cut scene. I need not have bothered, as I had resorted to turn the difficulty up to full by that point, due to boredom (though it seemed to make little difference).

I think the game would have been better played at pace, rather than trying to find every morsel. One would miss many of the supplemental audio logs, and a few poetically macabre tableaux, but I expect the core of the story would be unaffected. It fact, it would probably feel more urgent and flow better overall, especially if you complete it all in a couple of days. The quick approach seems to have been catered for with the 'Drill Specialist' tonic (can't use projectile weapons, but more efficient eve use) however, I expect one would be continually running out of drill oil. Lacking all upgrades would also help make the game more challenging.

I don't mean to claim that I didn't die (and get revived) a few times towards the end, but that was mostly down to me getting lost in the process of flailing though the unruly selection of weapons/ammo/plasmids. Annoyingly the shortcut keys for the plasmids are forcibly reshuffled each time one is upgraded or added, and it's impossible (or very time consuming and fiddly) to put them back in the order you are used to. The alternative is to scroll through sequentially, but chances are that I would miss the one I wanted on first pass, then with 10 more slots to cycle through would find myself back in a 'vita chamber' before reaching it a second time. 'Turning off' the vita chambers in an attempt to make the game more challenging would thus have just made user interface failures more irritating (as well as contradicting various plot mechanisms).

Meaning:

The plot, the best aspect of single player, was pretty good but can't compete with the feel of originality that came with the first instalment. [Spoilers below!]

It examines the failure to achieve Andrew Ryan's envisaged utopia, effectively blaming inherent human weakness. Elanor Lamb (the Antagonist) attempts to create utopia through the a perfect individual: her daughter, filled up with the 'genetic memories' and abilities of all those trapped in Rapture. Utopia through a 'Utopian' feels like Hitler’s version of Nietzsche's Übermensch. Indeed, Lamb sacrificed many loyal followers (and enemies) in pursuit of her supposedly selfless ideals.

In contrast to the libertarian theme of Bioshock, this sequel illustrates a tale of religiosity. It could be interpreted as saying that all humans are just one hopeless situation away from spontaneously believing the first crackpot evangelical to come along, to the extent of worshipping her as her girl slaves drain their life from them. Lamb's mind control plasmid perhaps complicates this matter. Her initial recruits to "The Rapture Family" cult (AKA "The Family") may have been through regular persuasion/manipulation, as an ingenious psychologist; she may have only resorted to more forceful, and sinister, means after Ryan had her incarcerated due to their extreme difference of ideals. This mirrors the real world insomuch as religions and big state governments have held tight (often tyrannical) control, suppressing more liberal ideals (which eventually win out through upheavals, etcetera).

A problem I found with the in game story telling of Bioshock was that It felt too disconnected from the reality of the game play, always following a long dead ghost trail, right up until the underwhelming confrontation with Ryan and then the over the top, uber-boss fight against Fontaine. Number 2 feels a little more alive, but it's still fairly unbelievable that anyone would actually be living in the environment, and there's a massive disconnect between the unscathed (and god like) main characters and the regular, messed up splicer canon fodder. It seemed like they were all zombie-morlocks in a Mad Max race to the bottom of a rotting corpse of a city 8 years ago, how the hell are there droves of them still left alive down here now?!

Back to Reality:

Sci/tech realism briefly: genetic memories are an order of magnitude more unbelievable to me than superpowers by injection, but what-the-hey. I will also leave alone the engineering impossibilities of a vast under-sea city, it's existence is an axiom for whole fictional tale, and it is a beautifully ominous setting.

My main criticism is of the implicit use of the lone genius theory of innovation [1] (and/or the 'Great Man Theory' of history [2]). Rapture is too small and isolated from the rest of the world to have forged *ahead* with science and invention (however unrestrained it's laws/morals); historically, cultures that have become physically separated from the rest of civilisation have *regressed*, because there's no long sufficient specialisation to fill all necessary roles (even long, long befre industrialisation) [3 - at 12min30s]. The pool of ideas (memes) is important above and beyond any individual, who can merely increment existing understanding/inventions. This failure of Bioshock dovetails with other subtleties, like the anachronism of the impossibly advanced control electronics and artificial intelligence displayed in the security systems.

Links/references:

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heroic_theory_of_invention_and_scientific_development

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_man_theory

[3] http://www.ted.com/talks/matt_ridley_when_ideas_have_sex.html

N.B. All images are my in game screen captures.

Rough Rebuttal to a Kurzweil Critic

2011-02-23T16:20:00.016Z

This is very much an 'off the top of my head' response to a blog post by my friend, found here: http://www.simonpstevens.com/News/FlawWithTheFuture

A) Nit picking - I guess you are probably just simplifying matters for the sake of a concise introduction paragraph there but:

Vinge popularised the term 'singularity' in this context in 1983, but Stanislaw Ulam talked to von Neumann privately of singularity well before (1958), and Turing spoke of machine thinking taking over (1951). [1]

More significantly, Vinge's expectations for singularity are distinct from Kurzwiel's in that he expects the more sci-fi friendly course of events, with an AI spontaneously boot strapping itself towards super intelligence. He also estimates an early to mid 2030s time scale.

Kurzweil's vision, on the other hand, needs no Skynet (Terminator) type event. He sees little/no distinction between us and our machines. Our computers already form a kind of inseparable hybrid intelligence with our biological selves, and the level of integration will only increase in future (no clear machine/human divide). Kurzweils brand of future fantastic is about as boringly down to earth as his speaking style.

Also, I believe Kurzweil expects human level AI well before 2045 (as you stated), he in fact estimates that one could acquire (for $1000) computing power equivalent to all the brains of all the humans currently alive Earth by that date.

B) Given that the graph of his that you included goes back 10^11 years (most the way to the beginning of the universe) you can't really get away with saying we could be at the * beginning* of the growth curve! ;op Also, remember that curves are mathematical structures that approximate the real world, not the other way around. Reality is not pootling along trajectories inscribed by God or gods. The 'laws' of the universe emerge from it's increasing complexity, they do not exist outside/before it's existence.

I mean to say is there is no reason to assume that complexity is likely have some physical limit to its growth (or rate thereof), just because it approximates a curve in a similar way to many domain specific phenomenon in the physical sciences, etc. In each of those cases growth hits some out-of-context-problem that breaks the simple approximation to a mathematical equation. Complexity of the universe itself is unbounded, for there is nothing 'outside' to limit it by definition.

C) Besides, Frank J Tipler showed that eternal progress in finite real time would be possible in the case of an Omega Point singularity at the end of a closed universe (big crunch). Life is bound to permeate the universe and cause this to happen. He also got obsessed with equating it to Christian heaven, but that's beside the point IMHO. [2]

I came to Kurzweil's singularity (in 2005) after being gripped first by Tipler's (back in 2002). I was initially uninterested in this 'new' kind of singularity, after all, how could it be more significant than the ultimate fate of the universe?! Time has reversed this; I no longer worry about whether experimentation will verify/disprove Tipler's predictions about the mass of the Higgs bosson necessary for his Omega Point, or about the cipling problem of the speed limit of light for that matter (as I had done 4 years pre-Tipler).
The main feature of the technological singularity is that we are bound to find our current understanding of reality hopelessly myopic. Either laws of physics we now consider immutable have convenient get out clauses in the fine print, or they only limit things which turn out to have no relevance to continued progress.

D) Initially I was quietly sceptical about how much Kurzeil's equations could be considered scientific theories. However, I grow increasingly convinced that their continued success at predicting (technological) progress is every bit as valid as the sucess of Newton's laws in predicting the motion of apples. In both cases they let one know almost exactly what's going to happen, provided you stay away from singularities...

There is an important distinction to be made between Kurzweil's specific predictions and his overarching theory(s). Each prediction is a instance of him using his own intuition to extrapolate general trends to specific domains. Each one is prone to error and some *will* be wrong. He acknowledges this. These predictions are not like the hypothesis of a theoretical physicists, for a very fundamental reason: the complexity being created by humanity (including technology) is an emergent phenomena. It is *actually* impossible to predict the *exact* details of what will happen until it has already happened; an NP complete problem as deterministic but chaotically unpredictable as the weather.

The 'predictions' are more like exacting illustrations of the way technological change is *probably* going to affect our lives. They should always be taken together and in this context. A few iffy illustrations do not disprove his central theory. His only hard predictions are the core, numerical, rate(s) of change. Even these are not considered immutable though, because the main characteristic of the singularity is that you *can not* predict what is happening the other side of it.

E) Humans are inherently illogicall, usually deciding based on personal emotional response, then telling themselves (and others) a cleverly constructed, post hoc, story about why this point of view is valid. Or, if there's no excuses to cherry pick, anger or upset tend to fill the chasm of inconsistency.

As with the knee jerk response to Aubrey De Gray's call to end ageing, people generally respond negatively when claims might unseat fairly basic assumptions in an idividual's mind. This would take much mental effort, time and emotional readjustment (pain). Instead the brain does what it does best and resolves on a shortcut, throwing out the first reason/excuse it can find to disregard Kurzweil entirely and save all that trouble.

Experts in the domain of Kurzweil's predictions can be *even more* prone to reject his ideas out of hand because even more of their personal axioms would need uncomfortable scrutinising. Also (warning - dodgy metaphor coming!) they are so intent on the bugs in the cracks of the bark they can't see the forest fire approaching (i.e. forest for the trees).

Also, the cult of individualism does not help here: when each invention and discovery seems attributable to one special person, smooth trends in overall technological progress are highly unintuitive.

But progress is smooth, just as the number for road fatalities in a country from one year to the next are exceedingly close (when no legislation or such makes global changes) despite almost every individual accident being an unique and freakish culmination of circumstances. As Hans Rosling tells in one of his wonderful videos about stats.

I find Susan Blackmore's memetic view of society to be a helpful mental tool here. It supplants magical/mysterious creativity of individuals by looking at things from the point of view of ideas themselves. Humans are only vehicles (or conduits) for these 'selfish replicators' (memes) that succeed and spread (or fail and dead end), mutate (like Chinese whispers) then meet and combine to form ever more complex concepts and creations, just like one of Stephen Wolfram's cellular automata or Conway's game of life: complexity from simplicity.

From this thought framework there is an obvious link all the way back to the origin of life with it's genes, which have produced increasingly complex phenotypes. There is even the parallel of the accelerating progress: life reshaped the earth forming new environments (ever more complex) upon which new layers of creatures base their existence. The rate of increase of complexity accelerated, not purely with physically more complex bodies, but in terms of the amount of information encoded in each cell's genome. The number of different cell types per organism and, more crucially, the possible number of behaviours this gave each cell and it's organism. (I bet that even 'junk DNA' is essential here: a repository of complexity, ready to splice in for some impossibly unlikely new behaviours in single generations)

Looking at an earth 100 million years ago, teaming with increasingly diverse life, it would have been easy (for some ethereal being) to say: Sure, the complexity of genomes in those creature/vehicle things the genes use has been increasing along an exponential curve for ages, but it can't possibly increase exponentially *forever*. It's gona be sigmoidal. The earth is only so big, and the genomes each take up ever more of it's material resources (start of negative feedback), and the whole over sized petri dish will be torched by the death of it's power source in a few billion years anyway...

How could they have predicted that those gangly limbed tree dwellers would have evolved to create a new environment of replicators in thier heads?! Illusive entities that behave like genes but with a totally different physical basis (memes). Who'd have thought these 'memes' would be so successful as to take control over most genes (and the materials they control) and then go beyond the available, using previously inaccessible materials (mining, etc) to further aid their propagation. Then they did the impossible and climbed right out of the petri dish! Even weirder, they've started making themselves increasingly *small* and efficient vehicles in which to reside.

But it's ok, because these will have ultimate limits too! Right?...

Links
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_J._Tipler#The_Omega_Point

Physical Interweb Pipes for Produce; "FoodTubes"

2010-12-07T19:38:00.000Z

* From this article on ilookforwardto .com.

Initially this reminded me of a system I envisioned a few years ago. That was more for of a local loop thing: store to household delivery of groceries, post & small parcels or restaurant food. Self powered bogies, the size of supermarket home delivery crates/boxes, that run through rectangular cross-sectioned conduits under roads/pavements, finding their destination by being forwarded like packets of data on the internet.

[ XKCD - http://xkcd.com/827/ ]

I thought my idea would be unlikely to make wide scale implementation, given the massive investment required merely for wiring up households with new data/communications lines. It seems more likely that automated intelligence will solve the problem by utilising existing infrastructure: an extension of driverless cars. Either the recipient of a delivery walks out to collect the package from said robot car (that would not complain about unsociable hours) or, some years later, properly smart humanoid delivery bots could be deployed from the cars for the last 10 meters.

* However, this FoodTubes concept has more fundamental benefits:
+ Energy efficiency - "1/5th of current freight prices" when HGVs/vans/trains use 92% of their energy to move purely the vehicle.
- These are based on current scenariors, which is fine for now, and as long as the scheme can recoupe it's cos before the advent of 100% electric lorries, charged of solar PV, AI drivers.

+ Food security (independent of roads and severe congestion or temporary fuel shortages).
   - Though (with a single main loop) I would worry about it's reliability (resistance to natural structure failures, capsule collisions, or even sabotage) and repairability (possible methods to clear out or even replace tunnels that where bored underground.

+ Boon for car drivers; fewer HGVs means:
   - Less getting stuck behind slow or overtaking lorries.
   - Significantly less wear on the roads.

[ Top - Capsule (2m long, 1m diameter). Bellow - conduit construction illustration. ]

* Will it happen?
The FoodTubes website looks very 90s at the moment, and designs are all vague concepts, so a 10 year minimum time-frame might be par. It's basically a set of case study documents that did well in this "St Andrews Prize" competition (ideas for reducing environmental impact or something). Although, there are some pretty high brow members of the team (professors, industry experts, prominent layers). Not sure what type of company would be able to spawn a division capable of this flavour of (inter)national scale undertaking...

As an 'internet for goods' there needs to be common standards, like the shipping container system currently used worldwide on ocean vessels and lorries. Island UK could get away with a bespoke system, but Europe would require more consensus, for example. Having cylindrical capsules rules out direct compatibility with containers, and possibly even pallets, so massive repacking operations will be necessary at ports or other distribution centres.

With China looking set to use our currency from their trade surplus to finance rail links to us, this kind of scheme would make even more sense: as the last leg of a faster, more reliable (than ships and lorries) delivery system for manufactured goods, which will be increasingly customised, in smaller batches, with ever more desire for shorter lead in times from manufacture to receipt.

Vince Cable produces fallacious mitigations for further science funding cuts

2010-09-08T18:31:00.000+01:00

... is what the title of this BBC article should read. [1]

Waving a banner of necessary austerity to reduce public services and support for the lower paid majority of society is borderline morally corrupt, but cutting science funding is outright stupid. It's the equivalent of trying to buoy up a sinking hot air balloon by throwing fuel canisters overboard. But I can't say my dismay is a surprise, even when stimulated by the words of a prominent member of a political party I recently supported as our best hope.

Vince Cable and David Cameron in India (from the Dailymail.co.uk)

UK science is already under too much financial pressure, and has been for some time. Short term (2-4 year) projects are favoured too heavily over those that are more long term ('speculative'). Also, efforts I've heard of to commercialise the information products of university science have only left the universities out of pocket while lining those of layers and other middle men.

It is highly likely that the route to technological advancement is computationally irreducible, i.e. it is impossible to predict which research routes will yield important advances. Viewed from a great height scientific research is a process of memetic evolution. Evolution is not just (or rather rarely) about making gradual improvements to an organism, it mostly involves creating increasingly greater complexity by expanding into and creating as many new niches as possible, spreading tendrils out to every direction of phase space.

Adonna Khare -"Goldfish with Legs" (2008)

If mother nature were incarnate, and on a tight budget for biological evolution, would she have given the go ahead for fish with hydro-dynamically goofy protrusions, unable to know that these whimsical contrivances would eventually be used as the fist ever legs, spawning a vast new evolutionary tree of mammals. Please don't get caught up on my inadequate metaphor here, what I am trying to say is that limiting resources to the 'most promising' could create detriment well beyond a linear contraction in output.

In a previous post [2] I speculated that financial bubbles might be a boon for better businesses/technology, fostering evolutionary explosions after mass extinctions. But these austerity measures are non cyclical: a more gradual squeezing. What is more, the survival criterion are arbitrarily biased away from the most beneficial break throughs, towards short term money spinners and well entrenched "internationally excellent research".

[1] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-11225197
[2] http://lewyland.blogspot.com/2010/04/utility-of-green-energy-bubble.html

Victims of memetic selection: Pee Lady and the Purrminator

2010-08-27T06:34:00.001+01:00

Whilst writing a condensed summary of Susan Blackmore's "The Meme Machine" is still a future aspiration I have nonetheless mentioned some of it's ideas ('memes' if you like) in passing, where they apply to otherwise unrelated blog entries. This quick piece, however, is purely a rumination on memetics in contemporary culture.

In an evolutionary anthropological discussion of the origin of memes, over 2 million years ago in our hominid ancestors of the time, Blackmore considers that it would have been very difficult to know what memes to select for, from a point of view of the (selfish) genes. Once imitation of ideas (i.e. memes) existed in a population, they would spread and change host behaviour at a rate orders of magnitude more rapid than genes could hope to (through survival of the fittest individuals). Hence human genes only provide vague heuristics for meme selection (i.e. what things humans find intrinsically interesting/captivating). Here are some of apparently inbuilt selection criterion:

Copy the most obvious memes (simplest, most fully understandable, least likely to be miss-copied).
Copy the most popular memes (others finding it worthwhile indicates memetic usefulness, best not to be left out just in case).
Copy memes for: sex, food, winning battles, gossip (each has strong genetic survival advantages for our social hominids).

Fashion sense, joke telling/humour, altruism, and religiousness are largely products of run-away sexual selection for mates that are good at spreading memes in general. This is due to the selection pressure applied by memes on genes, and appears to have had the same effect on hominid brain size as Peahen's sexual selection has had on Peacock's tails. But I digress; the point is that humans have these built in hot topics with universal appeal.

+ 'Pee Lady' (AKA Wendy Lewis): recently gained notoriety for urinating on a World War II memorial [1,2].

[From the Telegraph.co.uk]

This non-event only got so much media coverage because there was CCTV footage of the (frankly inadvertently) sinister act (perfect for TV news and article photographs. Also, the helpful camera operators called down a rapid response police team that caught her in the heinous act of fellating some bloke. Add to this her 'colourful' past that made her a perfect instant target for hate from the oldest generation, and her having to attend a court hearing to face charges.

If one is honest, this fiasco says very little about the individual concerned, much more about the structure of our society in general, and more still about us human apes in a media dominated world. Drunken individuals relieving themselves on the streets is par for course in our society of binge drinking, and to be fair she appeared to be ducking down behind part of the memorial for cover, oblivious to it's nature (a generation gap thing). Unlike the fresher student who pee *on* the wreaths of a memorial in 2009 [3]. Again the perpetrator was unlucky enough to be caught on camera (a still shot that time), hence why it is the only other case one will find newspaper articles on, despite a reported total of 4 similar cases in the last year.

One cat see how several of the aforementioned buttons of the human psyche are pressed by this gossip worthy 'faux pas' (with sexual connotations) and a resulting threat of social confrontation that is all the more easy to comprehend thanks to pictures.

[From the linked to Sun article]

+ 'Cat Woman' or 'The Purrminator' (AKA Mary Bale): you have probably already head about [4,5]. She became the centre of rabid attention from media hounds and cat loving nutters the world over when her story went viral. For some reason the Coventry lady (who happens to work in the RBS in my home town) had a momentary lapse of sanity while walking down a street. She petted a friendly cat before lifting a green wheelie bin lid and pushing it in (off it's perch on the adjacent wall). The cat was found unharmed 15 hours later, while the woman still has an inordinate burden of stress to cope with.

Again, this event wouldn't even have made the local rag if it hadn't have been for the video footage. I'm sure that, on any given day, crazy neighbours get away with thousands of pranks far more malicious. However, this piece had the makings of a classic, lol-cats type, internet meme, though it's views on Youtube pale in comparison to the air time given afforded to it as TV and paper news the world over jumped on the band wagon.

One should be mindful of the anthropic nature of 'news' stories and the over-reactive repercussions they often bring, but it was not my primary intention to condemn such things, like the earnest commentators launching into a diatribe on societal decay. I merely hold them up as illustrations of our function as 'meme machines'. The cat theme links me smoothly to my recent discovery of "theChive.com" and it's interlinked cousin sites...

+ The memetic equivalent of crack:
It's interesting how the internet has allowed the creation of entities (sites) increasingly able to dispense with the limitations of a defining pretense or purpose, in favour of purely the most riveting bits. For example, I'm an avid follower of "Boing Boing", which is a step up the instant interestingness scale from earnest news sites thanks to it's brief entries and freedom to publish whatever frivolously cool stuff the blog authors manage to find. However, they still limit themselves by being as truthful as possible and even banging on about boring digital rights issues on occasion.

[from icanhascheezburger]

Mainstream online advertising has created large incentives to make sites that can pull in as many viewers (and page views) as possible. Sites like "failblog" and "icanhascheezburger.com" capitalise using content of absolutely minimal size, for maximal morishness: the picture + caption = instant comedy (LOLs or lulz). While their memes are packaged to be as compact as possible, they limit themselves to the themes of Schadenfreude and our love of cute feline companions (respectively).

Instead of competing for users and advertising revenue by being the best site in a given domain (a depth first approach) "theChive" aggregates any and all material it can get away with using (a breadth first approach). It takes the memetic jam sandwich that is the internet and strips away the boring bread in the hopes of becoming "Probably the Best Site in the World". It's the Sun of photoblogging, awash with plenty of girls, humour, semi-naked girls, military hardware and antics, celeb girls, general freak-show material and even some bona fide art. For maximally broad appeal it seems to be porn free and even has a sister site ("theBerry") flavoured for women (plus two others devoted to more male obsessions with cars and military stuff). Also, while the amount of on page advertising is blatant, and it opens up a new tab for each new item, it is not sufficiently maze-like to put off the casual surfer (unlike far dodgier link-bait sites with fake torrent downloads or porn).

I can personally attest to the potency of this formulae for holding one's attention captive, it really demonstrates how thoroughly memes have subverted human brains to spread themselves. Parasites that pray on our conscious attention in the hope of being spoken/sung/repeated (that tune you could not get out of your head earlier), their influence has even managed to shape us such that we desperately want to usher more of their kin into our brains. We are all hapless victims of the selfish memes.

+ Links
[1] http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/aug/20/urinate-sex-war-memorial-blackpool
[2] http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/top-stories/2010/08/21/guard-of-dishonour-115875-22502693/
[3] http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/2684084/Lout-urinates-on-war-memorial.html
[4] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-coventry-warwickshire-11068063
[5] http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/3112104/Cat-in-bin-purrminator-Mary-Bales-apology-after-death-threats.html

Why SETI is stupid!

2010-08-24T17:24:00.000+01:00

Many minds have pondered the tired, old 'Fermi Paradox' (the conspicuous lack of alien buddies out there in our humongous universe).

[XKCD]

+ Susan Blackmore's solution to the Fermi paradox (see her TED lecture): the necessary paradigm shifts to each kind of replicator (genes, memes, temes) are apocalyptically dangerous. Each (necessary) transition reduces the chances of a fertile planet bearing space-faring life forms; each adds an extra constant to the Drake Equation. She speculated in "The Meme Machine" that meme's evolutionary force driving bigger brains may have overstretched the physiology of our hominid peers, driving Neanderthals extinct. Mems have also, through humans, have wiped out more genetic diversity than a mass extinction, fostered luming terrors are nuclear annihilation, or terminator style runaway AI. I'm more optimistic, seeing only the risk of delay, not unrecoverable oblivion.

[TED (2008) - http://www.ted.com/talks/susan_blackmore_on_memes_and_temes.html]

[The (standard) Drake Equation]

+ In the BBC news article (that triggered this blog article): "Alien hunters 'should look for artificial intelligence'", Seth Shostak is interviewed as saying we should look for AI aliens, rather than flesh and bones. e.g. not just concentrating observations on biologically 'habitable' planets, but areas richest in mass and energy where only machines could exist.

[BBC - http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-11041449 ]

So it seems the realisation may be approaching mainstream consciousness: ogling the skies for alien peers is quite clearly pointless. Not because (the conditions for) life is necessarily rare (or because of any literal religious truth), but because life (e.g. humanity) will pass through this (SETI) phase in gynaecological evolution so rapidly...

From first radio broadcast to Matrioshka brain within 2 centuries (by my reckoning). On a cosmological timescale, biological life's coming of age will create the briefest of blips, detectable only by our local galactic neighbours, followed by it's star (e.g. our sun) suddenly disappearing. Waste heat radiation will be shifted right down towards background microwave levels. This is supposing something unpredictably odd (a transcendence of the known laws of physics) doesn't then happen, which it almost certainly will.

[Wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matrioshka_brain ]

But what if it's not possible for a super advanced civilisation to 'sublime' (an Iain-M-Banks-ism), having attained the unimaginably lofty intelligence levels afforded by using an entire solar system's mass/energy to efficiently perform calculations (i.e. thinking)? (Or even if it is possible) This stellar scale engineering artificial life would be unlikely to be satisfied with utilising one system's resources, when all the whole universe is sitting ripe. Kilogram sized Von-Neumann probes could seed a whole new solar system. As each new island of mass (solar system) was converted to computronium, swaths of a galaxy would disappear (as far as external optical observers are concerned). The blob of darkness would balloon out at just under the speed of light. Entire *groups* of galaxies, around a single space faring seed-culture, could easily have vanished by now.

Humans, Earth and our solar system have been proved to be entirely un-special in location, so why should this 'Mediocrity principle' not also apply to our relative position in time (impossibly unlikely we'd be the lone first sentience)? A civilisation that happened to evolve 1 billion years before us (<8% of the time since the universe began) could have harnessed a volume greater far greater than the largest type of 'void' suggested by astronomical observations.

[New Scientist blog - http://www.newscientist.com/blog/space/2007/08/colossal-void-may-spell-trouble-for.html ]

To be sure, computer simulations of the universe's (gravitational) evolution can naturally produce the 'filliments' (and voids) of observed galaxy distribution; structurally, there is no need for intelligent life to have hollowed out these shapes. It could, however, explain the overwhelming percentage of 'dark matter' in the universe. But surely we'd have noticed if the *majority* of the universe was composed of alien technology??!!...

+ From 3rd Year Cybernetics lectures on information theory: a maximally efficient use of (serial) transmission channel capacity requires a coding system that will make it appear indistinguishable from perfectly random noise (unless one knows the coding algorithm). e.g. a digital signal with 50% '1's and '0's, where there is no discernible pattern left that could be represented more miserly. Earth could be bathed in a deafening cacophony of super-intelligent cocktail-party chatter, and still be helplessly solipsistic.

To stand a chance of detecting any civilisation more advanced than our own, they would have to be deliberately trying to signal us. Here on Earth, radio transmissions are rapidly decreasing in power while the coding density (e.g. switch from analogue to digital terrestrial television). Any signal lost into space is wasted energy: economically stupid.

Civilisations capable of sucking stars dry would easily have the power to create signals detectable by us from half a galaxy away. But imagine the situation when the amount of energy required to send a recognisable ping message to the our Arachibo telescope could instead be used to emulate a thousand human level intelligences, or 1M, or 1B, or a thousand alternative planetary civilisations even... why would they bother with a ludicrously expensive text message to a bunch of apes, when they could create perfect virtual replicas of them (or better) in-situe for the same or less resources!

+ Stephen Wolfram has been advocating hunting for aliens in the computational universe for some time: since his ground breaking work on cellular automata in the 1980s that showed how all the complexity of the universe can arise simply by iterating a deterministic algorithm.

[Cellular Automaton (rule 30) meets Arecibo Message]

Self Congratulatory Celebrations!

2010-08-05T09:11:00.000+01:00

To celebrate me finding the settings option for the new (much improved) Blogger post editor, I've created an "about" page for this blog.

I've long been thinking of writing down an explanation of my core beliefs, and also making a brief guide to the future. This will have to suffice for now.

I've also meant to make a post featuring the artwork I made specifically to customise the blog: this flying-cyber-brain thing (which I consider the main logo), and the human evolution meme variation (which is used as the separator between posts and 'gadgets'.

The "Mass Effect" 1 & 2 (full brain-dump)

2010-08-04T06:34:00.028+01:00

* Introduction (for those living under a rock):

Mass Effect is a sci-fi space opera presented in the form of a single player, action role playing game (RPG) for XBox 360 and PC. The first instalment was released in November 2007, and May 2008 respectively (XBOX then PC), to much critical acclaim. Ridiculous overreactions to the brief (and tasteful by TV standards) sex cut-scene raised the game's media profile (and spawned the "Alien side-boob" internet meme).

Mass Effect 1 (ME1) incorporated a high quality, non-linear story line into a detailed universe with plenty of 3rd person shooter action. While plenty of first person shooters (FPSs) can claim better action, Mass Effect is somewhat unusual in that two AI controlled characters assist the player during every shooting segment. This is bold given that AI co-op has historically been a recipe for disaster.

It also brings in the option of 6 different main character classes (with different abilities in combat), male/female appearance (with facial customisations) and levelling up of various traits/skills as the game progresses, including those of the 6 squad mates you pick up. The contrasting personalities of the supporting characters ensure something for everyone, letting you chose your favourite 2 to take on missions, which one of 2 possibles to sweet talk, and even which die (permanently).

Equipment management (weapons, armour, ammunition modifiers) is a major part of ME1, as is driving around the surface of planets in an APC (the "Mako"). Both are dropped for the inevitable big budget sequel (ME2), released January 2010. ME2's increased focus on combat (with various tweaks and reduced distractions) seems to have helped it achieve an even better reception, with many perfect review scores. ME3 is now a certainty, with many fans (like myself) hoping it comes sooner rather than later.

I read somewhere that Bioware's development team had twice as many artists as programmers. At any rate, with such high artistic value, this franchise may, in future, be referred to as the turning point when single player computer games really came of age: truly occupying the same level of entertainment territory previously monopolised by TV series, movies and novels. I have

* Navigation:

If you have not played these games yet, but there is a good chance you will, I strongly suggest stopping reading here, for now, and coming back later. However, I have marked certain sub sections with {!Spoiler!} warnings to help minimise damage.

All in game screen shots were taken by me. Click pictures to view full resolution.

Given that this review turned into a 10'000 word dissertation, I have provided an mini-index:

Introduction (for those living under a rock)
Navigation
Overview (praise)
General Gripes
A Fix too Far? (Mechanistic Changes from ME1 to ME2)
Interlectualisation (Deeper Discussions)
Summary

[Navigating plot through conversation options (ME1)]

* Overview (praise):

+ That sci-fi thang {!spoilers!}:

Mass Effect is not cutting edge sci-fi, by my standards (being devoid of revolutions in genetics or nanotechnology, and AI mostly banned, the need to deal with technological singularity is avoided). It is more a pastiche of established mainstream materials. But this should not belittle it's worth, for it presents a veritable smorgasbord of sci-fi influences from films, TV, games and literature; a hugely detailed fictional universe. I could easily have written a whole article listing it's more interesting/amusing references and speculating on the etymology of it's memes.

I can't help but think that, in a way, Mass Effect is an epitaph for a large subsection of sci-fi. It could be said to stitch together a canon of works from the last 3 decades (at least), making a cogent body of materials; an institution that will be as commonly recognisable as "80s music".

I am thinking of the likes of:

"Babylon 5" (an obvious inspiration for ME's 'Citadel').
"Star Wars" (the 'Spectres' are politically equivalent to Jedi).
"Star Trek" (away teams/missions, 'Krogans' share the Klingon archetype, 'Jenkins' dies like a red-shirt etc).
"Firefly" (a quirky crew of tallented misfits).
"Battlestar Galactica" ('Quarians')
"Starship Troopers"/"Starcraft" ('Rachni')
"Halo" ('Avina' = Cortana, vehicle sections, etc).
"System Shock" (Everything! It was set on "Citadel Station").
Alastair Reynolds "Revelation space" ('Reapers' = "Wolves").
Charles Stross "The Jennifer Morgue" ('Sovereign' =vividly= "Deep Seven", likely that Lovecraft is the common influence).
Many other seminal games and novels I'm blissfully ignorant of, I'm sure.

[Above - Babylon 5. Below -The Citadel (ME1)]

Major plot features are the most obvious references to point out (like the strong similarities between the explosive opening sequences of ME2 and the new Star Trek movie). But the sci-fi geek intrigue only increases the closer one looks into the game. For example, the Citadel's 'VI' (Virtual Intelligence) superficially provides tourist information, but in one instance will muse on the (im)possibility of abolishing poverty, saying that: 'cornucopia machines' (C.Stross - "Singularity Sky") could work but only exist in sci-fi literature (LOL).

Also, a pivotal (though sneeze and you'd miss the explanation) plot detail from ME1 tells of something (a 'Cipher') extremely similar to a "pattern juggler, shrouder-mind-transform" (A.Reynolds - "Revelation Space"). This indicates that the writing team, from top to bottom, are genuine, high calibre, sci-fi fans. An asset almost never used for entertainment products aimed at a mass market (hence my continued 'tutting' on many a cinema trip).

For a sci-fi fan, such as myself, it's very gratifying to see a title that manages to bring so much popular interest to the genre. I hope, as always, that it helps inspire new fans, serving as an entry point to other deserving fictional materials. Perhaps even fuelling young enthusiasm for science and technology (or the arts or anything). Maybe Amazon's recommendation system (or it's successor) will pick up on such details (similarities mentioned above) and start to directly steer ME players towards some of the fiction literature that I hold most dear.

+ Gaming Legacy:

Mass Effect is not revolutionary in terms of game-play either. I'm far from a history of computer games expert, I'm almost entirely new to RPGs (Role Play Games), but it seems obvious that it is nowhere near "System Shock" in terms of ingenuity. That legendary title garnered massive critical acclaim, but far less popularity. Though I have never played the 1994 classic, it sounds like “Bioshock” is basically a re-contextualised version with better graphics, and most popular storyline shooters have a lot to thank it for.

Mass Effect's critical acclaim is down to it being carefully engineered to contain the right combination of elements to maximise popularity (more on that in my "Interlectualisation " section). But it's financial success probably has as much to do with the deep market penetration of computer gaming (consoles, etc), as it does with increased sophistication of the game playing public. As the market for interactive entertainment continues to inflate, the maximum budget for high end game production is able to rise too. So, provided a title can tick enough boxes, it can afford artistic values as high as Hollywood movies. Potentially higher even, given that games typically sell for 3 to 6 times the price of a cinema ticket.

The time has finally come for the likes of "System Shock" and "Deus Ex" to go mainstream, and Bioware has positioned itself well to capitalise on that.

[System Shock 2 "Remember Citadel"]

+ Little Touches:

- You can't walk off the edge of platforms, which is a relief. Quite why avoiding accidentally falling to your death is such a popular game mechanic, I don't know.

- All four of your weapons are visibly carried around on your Shepard's personage, expanding out of storage mode like mini-transformers. And ME2 rectifies the realism-fail of being able to conjure a helmet, or any inventory item out of nowhere.

- The interior layout of the Normandy fits the exterior model well. Also, the SR2 even contains toilets and showers, aspects of spaceship life infamously glossed over in Star Trek (original and TNG) and other sci-fi.

* General Gripes:

+ Location, Location! LOCATION!!!:

The squad AI did not seemed much the same across both games, except that in ME2 they made a few changes to make it seem less problematic. Better designed maps avoid tricky features (like narrow access ramps they often went to the side of), no smug quips about “rough terrain” or “helicopters” making it less irritating if figuring out how to cross a room illudes them, and they may teleport to your side any time your back is turned. I figured this out *after* walking into a tough battle on "Horizon" with my squad mates stuck the other side of a door that refused to acknowledge their existence (and subsequently dying). One can just give the “rally” order, turn around once, and have team mates miraculously appear at right next to you. It seems like a bit of a heavy handed fix. Very disorienting too, to have wayward team mates suddenly appear in front of you on certain maps.

Ordering squad members to positions anywhere other than just in front or beside you in battle can be a right pain too. For starters, it would be helpful if the pause-cam view swung up and out a bit, to see over obstacles. Second, even when you have pin pointed the exact mark to stand on, they may refuse to go unless you hold their hand. Not so useful when trying to flank an enemy, or wanting your pet Krogan to get up-close-and-personal while you stand off.

+ Minimum wage?:

The monetary rewards for completing assignments for minor side characters are always pitiful. Ripping off a “Hanar” trader (on “Noveria” in ME1), by cutting him out of an illicit weapon deal, will only net you an extra 500 credits. For 5-10 minutes of dialogue interactions and running around, you end up with less than the amounts one repeatedly finds serendipitously lying around during missions. Totally negligible towards buying a slightly superior weapon (ME1) or weapons upgrades (ME2) that you currently have your eye one. These are usually around the 60k mark (per piece). Not at all worth the bad karma either (i.e. renegade points instead of paragon).

I presume that the rationale behind this weighting is to allow the game to be fully playable by those purely wanting a faster paced action romp, not willing to carefully examine every corner for some feckless sap who'd like you to pick up their laundry. But really, why not *actually* make it "worth my while" to look deeper into the details of this epic fictional universe? I reckon that the mini-rewards could easily be 10 times bigger without those in a rush feeling like they're missing out. Scaling up by 20-30 times might even induce the more attention deficient shooter fanatics to expose themselves to the more nuanced sci-fi/ethics/cultural ideas contained in the backwaters.

+ Epic Fail:

I compiled a long list of glitches I experienced in ME1, from the camera apparently falling through scenery and becoming stuck, to all out bizarre graphics melt down, to individual squad members refusing to follow me. To be fair, I hadn't installed the patches, which happen to particularly target issues with AMD systems. I didn't make the same mistake in ME2, and only ever had one unrecoverable glitch: getting stuck in mid-air on “Illum”.

* A Fix too Far? (Mechanistic Changes from ME1 to ME2):

It is clear that Bioware took popular criticisms of ME1 to heart when creating the sequel. Personally I think that they might have gone a little too far in pandering to some gripes:

+ Wipeout the Mako:

Driving the "Mako" (APC/rover/tank) between mineral resources, 'anomalies' and mission objectives (in ME1) got super tedious very fast. However, this was probably just a way of padding out ME1, something that would have been unnecessary had it had the budget of ME2. Also, when the Mako was used as a vehicle (double meaning) to transition between sections of main missions, it worked well. It gave a break from fighting on foot, and seamlessly linked physically separate parts of the same world, facilitating the impression of grand scale. Halo (for example) did this years ago (and just as proficiently) so it is arguably not a defining element of ME1, hence dispensable.

Notably, the "Hammerhead" (a sexed-up Mako replacement) is used to link the 4 parts of "Overlord", the latest DLC (downloadable content). This may suggest that others agree with my above sentiment. But this time the transition from vehicle to foot (and back) is far from seamless.

On the other hand certain unpleasant idiosyncrasies of the Mako have been eliminated:

Shooting nothing but sky when on an uphill slope (or having blundered into an obstacle while 'strafing').
Unfathomable manoeuvres when stopping reversing during a turn.
Ridiculously slow charging shields.

[Top - Mako (ME1). Underneath - Hammerhead (ME2)]

+ Stockpile Feng Shui:

Inventory management is *gone*! Absolutely true that ME1 totally messed up the balance of acquiring new weapons: To start with there are relatively few freebies, all with near zero retail value, while the few upgrades available to purchase are astronomically expensive. Rampant inflation then ensues, meaning that by the "Virmire" mission (3/4 the way through) you are finding more free weapons than you are killing bad guys! With the level of resistance on this mission so sparse, I reckon that figuring out what to do with all the free weapons slowed me down more.

[Overloaded Inventory (ME1)]

Selling just part of the resulting horde to a merchant meant I was then swimming in more money than I could spend, and dissolving the rest into 'omni-gel' meant there was no point playing the decrypt mini-game to unlock objects any more. A small upside perhaps.

However, I still found the process of finding/buying, choosing/equipping progressively better weapons/armour additively satisfying. I would have been happy had ME2 simply rebalanced the acquisition rate and streamlined the user interface for choosing/dispensing with items more easily. Needing an in level armoury console (rare) to change weapons arguably makes the game more realistic. One no longer implicitly carry a stockpile of guns around down one's pants (i.e. unseen). But then am right it thinking there might have been something in the “Codex” about the weapons being physically reconfigurable through software upgrades? This would make sense, having them composed of smart (nano) materials; having the same lump of gun material reconfigure in the field (to cleverer design specifications).

Instead, ME2 transitions to a pretty much upgrade only mechanic for weapons/equipment. These improvements are hidden away, all piled up together in a single alphabetised list, making it near impossible to figure out just how much better you are doing (especially since enemy health scales up with your experience points). This seems like a major enjoyment fail to me: 'grinding' hours away for improved equipment/stats is a massively popular (and profitable) pastime (WoW, and other MMORPGs). Why the hell would you throw all evidence of such hard won trophies in a metaphorical cardboard box under the bed?!

+ Probe Away:

The change of inventory upgrade mechanic might have made the whole game significantly slicker, if they hadn't made it necessary to play a tedious planet probing mini-game (to afford to implement discovered upgrades). I wouldn't have begrudged this flagrant grind style gaming mechanism had the planet scanning ship upgrades *actually* sped up the process. As it was, one did nothing and another merely gave me double storage capacity for probes... What would have been wrong with dispensing with the big pause between launching a probe and being able to continue scanning? Or perhaps visually indicating resource distribution. Or, to be more imaginative, auto-magically lunching 5 probes to the most resource rich spots on screen? Or to be less imaginative, have the probes bring back more resources; these are entire *planets*, there should be literally tons of even the rare earth elements just lying around.

[~~The Deathstar~~ Planet scanning mini game (ME2)]

+ Infinite Ammo:

I thought the inexhaustible ammo in ME1 was a pretty cool idea: a negligibly small lump of metal is riven from an internal store, but still highly damaging due to massively high speed (accelerated in a *mass effect* field); very futuristic. Obviously other people didn't appreciate this, as ME2 requires equivalent suspension of disbelief one would have required to take classics games such as "Doom" seriously: just the right amount of replacement ammunition packs are conveniently laying around on the ground wherever you are fighting. Yes, they're actually “thermal clips”, and they are (usually) dropped by dead enemies, bla-bla, same difference!

It's not like this creates a particular need for ammo conservation tactics (provided you are not an *appalling* shot); it's rare that my sniper rifle ran dry. Also, team mates appear to have an infinite amount of ammo stashed about their person, which might go some way to explaining why even the biggest of them can now only cope with carrying 2 guns, while my fem-Shepherd easily manages to lug around 4, including the team's only 'heavy weapon'. It also seems somewhat unlikely that the Illusive Man (with his unprecedented wealth) could not afford to replenish my heavy weapon ammo between missions (or my “medi-gel”).

+ Stunning!:

Stun attacks in ME2 make Shepard stand up from cover, and freeze on the spot soaking up fire: very irritating. The biotic attack in ME1 that knocked Shep unconscious on the floor for a couple of seconds was tolerable by comparison.

+ Interface Niggles:

The combat UI in ME2 seems unnecessarily cramped and folded away. Plus, the key bindings for pause-time and sprint have inexplicably been swapped over between releases (causing me much confusion when panicking under fire). Further to this, is now used for 3 different functions (sprint, take-cover/vault-over-cover, activate/interact) ensuring occasional irritating mistakes, like hugging walls one is trying to run past (then getting shot in the back).

Also, the menu interfaces (messages, upgrades, etc) are all very mouse intensive, with no support for keyboard navigation or double-clicking. Ironing out these PC niggles is probably not worth the 6 month delay invoked by EA games getting Demiurge Studios to port ME1 post-production, as opposed to Bioware building both versions of ME2 together.

[Combat UI comparison (paused): Top - ME1. Bellow - ME2.]

+ Big Bada-Boom?:

Big guns were sourly lacking in ME1, having to nibble away slowly at the hardest enemies, so it's good to see some high end ordnance in ME2. However, because the (universal) heavy weapons ammo is severely limited (unlike the regular kind), I found myself perpetually holding it back for a rainy day. The "Cain" makes this situation worst, by the time I came to fire it a second time, I was up against the end boss. Then, for some odd reason it's projectile managed to miss it's mark, appearing to travel at mere missile speed, despite the weapon supposedly delivering damage using a large slug fired at near relativistic velocity. Hmm...

I did like the arc (lightening) gun though, and freezing people can be pretty fun (even if the thermodynamics don't quite add up), but the rest of the arsenal never seemed to do enough damage be worth using.

+ Injury:

In ME2 Shepard and allies auto-heal at a rate that would make Wolverine jealous. Healing related armour upgrades are no more and health bars are hidden. This may give the impression of increased realism, but they are still in the game engine somewhere. Plus, enemy health bars still appear, and the poor saps don't have the same mutant abilities.

This is one of the many simplifications that streamline the game. Having just started a quick replay of ME1 as a male vanguard on veteran difficulty, the lack of health regeneration has become, shall we say, irritating. Swapping over my only “medical interface” armour modification to the most dead squad member is a right pain. At least I can revive them for free each time they die.

[Killed "Critical Mission Failure" (ME2)]

+ Getting off:

The source of much frustration in ME1, lifts are out of ME2 in favour of frantically detailed station/ship model animations that cover loading times instead. This breaks up the immersive continuity (though I tended to get a “loading” message pause when departing lifts anyway in ME1). But is pretty tough to avoid describing this change as an improvement.

[The Longest Lift (ME1)]

* Hail to the Successor (ME2 Prevails):

+ Little Improvements in ME2:

- Core *and* optional mission locations are now marked on galaxy map, so no having to remember and track down oddly named planets.

- Each system and cluster is marked with a percentage complete, so don't have to guess where you have and have not been yet.

[Galaxy Map (ME2)]

- Shepard can always sprint in ME2 (until tired). One can only do so while in battle in ME1, frustrating when running about the ship, or going back over a cleared out area for a missed item, etc.

- External disturbance (noise) while aiming sniper rifle is gone. This was a fairly clever idea to make it harder to hit targets when your sniper skill is lower, unfortunately it tended to make the sniper less accurate than the hand gun, and probably caused general frustration.

- Ammunition modifiers are clearly displayed on the side of each gun once applied.

- All weapons Shepard carries can be used; no lugging around a sniper rifle one can't even sight down (due to being the wrong class).

- Perhaps not such a “little improvement”, the class specific special powers are far more decisive in ME2: the cloaking is on a par with Crysis, while the other powers are even more inventive, and fully implemented, than those in ME1. But one has to replay the whole game to appreciate more than 1/6^th of these. While each class of powers will cause the player to apply different tactics in battle, it's a significant use of one's life to keep replaying a game this size.

- Task switching (Windows) back to ME2 is far faster than ME1. On the other hand, I have to disable my second display to avoid accidentally falling (switching) back into Windows, when ME1 coped fine.

+ Production Values:

There is little doubt that significantly more effort (investment) went into the second instalment of this franchise. Even the smallest side missions have unique level design, unlike the couple of generic mercenary bases that pop up repeatedly in ME1. More big name actors make cameos in ME2 (not that I'd have noticed most of them myself), and the score is even better.

+ Eye Candy

In addition to augmented audio content, the graphics are noticeably prettier, while running at an equivalent frame-rate to ME1 (on my PC anyway). Although, I do have to stick to a lowly 1280*1024, which seems pretty poor for a PC that I built for £600 (base only) around the time ME1 was released, but ridiculous hardware obsolescence rates are far from unusual in PC gaming.

Squad characters in particular are profoundly more graphically detailed, making Shepard's rear more aesthetically pleasing. It's not quite on a par with the likes of Half-Life 2 Episode II, most noticeable on the rarer outdoor missions with natural landscapes. But then ME2 is far longer (and was more quickly developed). The camera angle seems a little narrower, which may give the intricacies of Shepard's back more screen space, but but also gave me a slight case claustrophobia to start with. No where near as blinkered as the view in “Dead Space” (which made the game unplayable for me).

[In game engine prettiness (ME2).]

+ Amusement:

ME2 is even funnier, with greater attention to detail everywhere. It riffs off the imagined universe created in ME1, even subtly taking the piss out of certain game flaws directly on occasion. Taking the time to activate video adverts or listen to (particular) radio items is rewarded with comedy genius. Ship side, Joker and Mordin usually have a quip funny enough to warrant visiting them between each mission too. Gags have even been written into cut scenes and characters in the combat section of missions.

ME2 could probably beat many comedy genre movies on a laughs per hour metric (if it's fight scenes were condensed).

+ Deep Characters...:

There are twice as many squad member characters to choose from in ME2, each with separate recruitment and loyalty missions. Again, each mission is wholly unique, but mostly involves shooting your way through crate littered terrain occupied by mercenaries, mechs or geth, with 2 squad mates along for the ride (as always). There are only a couple of missions with significantly different play mechanics, but they all greatly enhance the depth of the character involved. Squad characters are easily the main strength of ME2, which is a good job because their missions account for at least 3/4 of it's substance.

[Squad Selection Screens: ME1 & ME2 respectively.]

+ But Shallower Plot {!Major Spoilers!}:

On the other hand, enigmatic antagonists are lacking in ME2. Marina Sirtis (aka “Deanna Troi”) destroyed the credibility of one particular villain with some atrocious voice acting in ME1, but the remaining nemeses displayed enough charisma to support an intriguing series of twists and revelations. There are few surprises in ME2 if one discounts 'jumping the shark'.

In many of the character missions the battlefield pawns that you dispatch belong to one of the three mercenary groups (Blue, Yellow, Red). They can plausibly be involved in anything because they'll fight for money by definition. Their unique traits, leadership and backgrounds are briefly explored in an early recruitment mission. One gets to meet quite a few local mercenary bosses, and such, each impressively distinguishable from the next. But character development is not something they need be concerned with after meeting Shepard, so they don't get the chance to become particularly memorable.

[Collector General (ME2)]

The opposition during the core story missions are anthropomorphic, insectile aliens (“The Collectors") who remain stoic, other than the odd battlefield taunt from "The Collector General". He/it looks pretty cool, especially during it's brief appearance in a cutscene at the end of the last mission. It's a shame it gets barely any lines (and no interactive dialogue). There's another "reaper" telecommuting in too, but you probably won't realise that without paying close attention...

"The Illusive Man" goes some way to fill this gap. The highly questionable ethical conduct of his organisation, discovered in ME1 side missions, are explored at greater length in ME2. Even his high level employees constantly rub your nose in their distrust of him. One is supposed to stay on edge I suppose; waiting for him to turn on you. Seems like good odds of him being an evil mastermind in ME3. One only ever meets him via holography, so I wonder if maybe he will turn out to be an AI (or an old guy, dead and simulated).

[The Illusive Man (ME2]

What I'm trying to get at is that you spend *all* the game building this massive, kick-ass team of powerful freaks and then there's barely any ass to kick... Maybe I'm at fault for failing to get into the right head-space; not finding the collectors that scary, even after they kill me, repeatedly escape my clutches, abduct my crew, etc.

My main problem is that the much anticipated 'suicide mission' is anything but. The fighting actually gets easier the closer one gets to the end, with the final confrontation being utterly trivial. The complete opposite of ME1, which was probably one of the hardest boss battles I've played: I was frantically skittering about, hiding, mostly with time paused scouring the combat UI (user interface) for any power the team had ready to fire off. The impression of needing near perfect tactics and execution was very much provided. ME2 fell back on a lazy: hit these weak spots a couple of times with whatever gun you like, maybe duck a bit every other minute.

+ A good day to die? {!Spoilers!}:

I strolled through the ME2 finale, so it was irritatingly unconvincing when, after having made all the right choices, the game decides that half my unloyal crew members died for no particular reason, *just* before returning to the ship. It is, I suppose,the last opportunity to make sure you get a slightly bitter-sweet ending, but it felt rather arbitrary to me. The only way to get 100% survival is to do *all* the character's loyalty missions first (or, alternatively, not pick them up, in some cases). Because of a certain surprise that only kicks in a certain amount of time after a certain mission, I would have had to go almost halfway back through my save games to achieve this. Given that the game took more than a week of my life (full time), I don't think I'll be doing that.

To be fair, the surprise does force you to move the game along (or risk certain consequences). And the surprise itself was kind of cool: providing an opportunity to feel very brittle, defenceless and scared. Although, having to replay the whole surprise due to walking blithely forward (previously the correct tactic) instead of cowering quietly, seemed somewhat unnecessary). Also, provided you were not saving the best for last, you will have done the loyalty missions for the more interesting/likeable characters, so they will be safe.

The perma-death choice(s) in ME1 were incorporated into the plot very convincingly. A proper 'Sophie's Choice' almost guaranteed to evoke emotion as one agonises over who to save. Whereas, in ME2, all the 'decisions' are made in (or right before) the final mission, and my predominant emotion was confusion. I knew I was making life and death choices, but there was no way to be sure some arbitrary logic would not be applied before the outcome. Psychologically speaking, this is a perfect recipe for dissatisfaction: one has no idea which bad things one is causing down the line, but they'll all be entirely your fault! Also, unlike in the rest of the game, the dialogue options moved on after only one choice. So if you don't catch something, or you mis-click (and need to revert to save), it means replaying 10 minutes of unskipable cutscenes and a cargo-bay fight.

Exploring the surrounding dialogue slightly differently the second time around (and having done a bit of research), the conversations did make complete sense, and contain blatant hints about who would be best for each role picked.

* Beyond the Last Save Game:

I really hope one's entire entourage transfers over to ME3. That would make my above gripe obsolete, and make replaying ME2 for perfect survival more worthwhile too. To be honest, I can't really see this happening, given that it would dissuade new customers from jumping straight in at the third instalment (unless they gave ME2 away free/very-cheap with ME3). Importing an ME1 save into ME2 carries negligible advantage (no squad members, weapons, upgrades skills or disposition), so again, unlikely on precedent.

The extra details, dialogue options and non squad characters that an import unlocks still makes it worthwhile playing ME1 first. But add those frills alone to ME3 would make it a struggle to justify spending so much time specifically recruiting a dozen temporary squad mates in ME2 (only to have to start all over again).

[from: memegenerator.net]

+ My Speculative Plot Predictions for ME3 {!MASSIVE SPOILERS!}

Basically, galactic apocalypse has been descending since the discovery of the reapers in ME1. ME3 has to involve a full on confrontation with this dark armada. Glibly sneaking a deadly software/wet-ware virus into their systems just ain't gonna cut the cheese in terms of rounding off a convincing story arc. And creating an self replicating swarm of robot spaceships to sweep the galaxy clean of you enemies just would not require enough shoot outs.

[A Vision (ME1)]

Whatever the plot, it's going to have to involve a whole lot of FPS action, unless Bioware spontaneously decides to go with a space based RTS where you marshal the spaceships directly (I think not)! So, instead of/as well as gathering up a squad, one could have to visit various leaders/factions and convince them to join an armada of light to fight the ~~Shadows~~ Reapers:

- ME1 gave the option of saving the Rachni Queen, who is then definitely out there mustering forces in ME2.

- The Geth's numbers can be swelled in ME2 by brainwashing the heretics (thus increasing their numbers in the big battle?).

- There's your old pal Wrex, who seems to be getting along well uniting the Krogan into a single army.

- Tali is positioned to take a place on the Quarian admiralty board, thus she could take command of at least *some* of the migrant fleet.

- Cerberus should still be on your side, but with all the pessimistic squad comments if you hand them the collector base/Reaper tech, that might turn out to set them against you (to some extent).

- The council seems most likely to abstain from getting involved, as usual, leaving your rag-tag alliance to do the hard work. The Turian, Salarian and/or Asari governments could have been compromised, in which case there could be missions to kill/expose those traitors or corrupted individuals. This would suit Garrus well.

- A certain type of mysterious Prothean artefact have been increasing in profile; in ME1 there was at least one massive floating sphere (reminiscent of a Clarkian obelisk) sitting around on a random planet, discovered if you bother to drive out to investigate an 'anomaly'. In ME2 the culmination of the “Firewalker” missions is the reward of a mysterious mirrored bowling ball (dropped by an identical a 'shperelisk'); it gets used by Shepard as a table ornament.Could it be that some Protheans survived after all, hiding themselves away inside an A.Reynold's type 'shroud' (think "Sphere" 1998 for appearance). Can these recluses be convinced to lend a technologically magical hand, or point you in the right direction? Missions to hunt them down through archaeology sites, would suit Liara T'Soni (presuming the upcoming "Den of the Shadow Broker" DLC releases her from the vendetta that kept her from your crew in ME2).

[Prothean Spherelisk (ME2)]

- The derelict Reaper-ship you half-inched the IFF from in ME2 had been hit by some massive weapon. Again, perhaps another mysterious group of old ones. Perhaps just a tie in with the above idea.

I imagine there will need to be a boss fight, reached by wading through the next batch of foot soldiers for the Reapers to reach a control centre for an all powerful weapon. You directing it's Halo ring scale power against the Reapers instead of the galactic civilisation.

There was the mysteriously overheating sun that Tali was investigating in ME2 that came to nothing so far. In the “Revelation Space” trilogy the Wolves deploy a mechanism to "sing" a star into ejecting a large amount of material to cleanse a whole stellar system of life. Given that the heretic geth were pretty unhappy about the Quarians studying the stellar phenomena, one could presume they are responsible. Either as minions or independent agents (fighting to avenge Sovereign). Presumably the increased solar output is evidence of some kind of ~~mega~~ ~~giga~~ google-weapon, seeing as harnessing the power to run a matrioshka brain would be far too sensible (and would, besides, cause a dimming of the sun).

I fully expect I'll be entirely wrong about all of this, despite setting pinning my hopes a lot lower than I did with my anticipation of the third Matrix movie.

* Interlectualisation (Deeper Discussions):

+ Memes of Mass Effect (reductionist view of success):

Most summer/Christmas blockbuster movies will have been carefully crafted, using focus groups and such, to ensure they contain enough of each element to please each demographic of the family. In terms of memetics, a successful product will contain types of memes the brains of the target audience select most strongly for. Because of our evolutionary background, humans are generally most partial to memes about food, social intrigue (gossip), weapons/power and sex. Hence the Transformers movies (like many others) incorporate romantic interest, gratuitous volumes of fighting, and gratuitous amounts of Megan Fox. Food is mostly outside the scope of cinema (restricted to the glut of evening cooking shows), but humour is very important too.

The problem with cooking up films to feature sufficient amounts of these types of memes, on demand, is that it can start to look quite obvious to (some) consumers. This is problematic in a product where suspension of disbelief is generally required. Meanwhile, computer gaming appears to have spawned a niche with a better aptitude for integrating disparate components: the RPG (Role Playing Game). These are naturally strong on social intrigue; meeting and interacting with various characters that are often more interesting than people IRL. Hence the higher female demographic. MMORPGs (massively multiplayer online RPGs) have cleverly short-cut decades of improvements in AI by using real people in the roles of game characters. Much success has been had, but as I say, real people can be quite dull, and are also prone to breaking through 'the forth wall'. Carefully crafted single player games can still scratch plenty of entertainment itches that multiplayers can not.

Since their inception, video games have been synonymous with shooting and hence commonly being classed a male domain. This is mere coincidence that fighting and weapons are easy to simulate convincingly on computers. Increasingly immersive first person shooters (FPSs) are the mainstay of contemporary gaming. Mass Effect wisely uses this as a major ingredient, and ME2 increases it's role still further. StarCraft was a successful single player game because of a strong storyline, too. However, I think real time strategy (RTS) is even more the preserve of men than shooters, and a smaller subset of them too (given the greater level of abstraction involved).

I am curious as to what story/RPG/management elements there are in StarCraft 2, given how long Blizzard has spent polishing them. I can't foresee that they'd be anywhere near as successful as those in ME2 though; it's much easier to shoehorn pretty much any story to a shooter (in-game-engine cutscenes are even more flexible than movies), but an RTS is far more restricted. StarCraft is shackled to tell the tales of the races and persons included in their carefully balanced strategy game, while Commander shepherd can fly to any unexplored region of idea-space and point his/her gun and anything he/she damn well pleases!

Controversy over the sexual content did ME1 the massive favour of sexing up it's image. The romance component is pretty small, the sexy cut-scenes more modest still, but it was enough to spark intrigue and tick that box. ME2 ran with the interest and more than doubled the number of romance options. With oodles of humour cleverly written in too, ME2 has all the most catchy types of memes covered. I'm not sure why the advertising material was entirely earnest, perhaps jokes are too hit-and-miss?

+ Customisation

Taking the meme/food metaphor further, if a movie is a set menu, ME2 is an entire buffet; providing a different feast for each consumer. Beyond the obvious (picking your romantic involvement), one can also chose to ignore irritating characters. For example, Thane was supposed to be a stone cold heart throb, but I found his flashbacks cringe worthy and his religious nonsense a turn-off, so I simply didn't go talk to him. Similarly, one can neglect a character's loyalty mission, or not even bother picking them up in the first place, if replaying. If you *really* dislike someone, get them killed (catharsis bonus)! Just like that, Bioware has got the users to tailor the entertainment to (precisely) suit themselves. That's even more effective than the targeted advertising on Facebook.

Another advantage of games over movies is that interspersing plot development with blowing aliens to pieces greatly reduces mental fatigue. Sitting still, passively watching, is quite tiring: suppressing the majority of the regions in your brain, or whatever. Interactive entertainment is more accessible (than movies) in this way.

The six different main character classes let you customise your fighting style too: fast paced guns blazing as a 'soldier', up close and brutal as a 'vanguard', elusive and deadly at distance as an 'infiltrator', etc. One can then lead the charge, recklessly throwing everyone at the enemy, or one can pick squad mates to complement your abilities. In this way one can send them in ahead of you, like hunting dogs, while you snipe flushed out enemies (I'm not sure the AI is quite good enough to be able to reverse these roles).

[Cut down skill customisation options in ME2 (bottom)]

Going further, one could let squad mates do all damage, merely babysitting them, stopping them getting killed too often and reviving them when they do. However, ME2 probably does not reach the level of specialisation that's common during WoW raids, but then I know nothing of that myself. So aside from nerfing your enemies, with the difficulty slider, these possibilities should allow a wider range of people to play (even enjoy) the fighting (maybe even girls!).

I would be very interested to see a title similar to Mass Effect that allows the player to choose what game mechanic to use altogether (for the most part): FPS *or* RTS *or* puzzle solving *or* RPG interaction to reach the end goal. Of course, the chances are that by being a jack of all trades it would also be a master of none.

+ Inversions (and AI) {!spoilers!}:

I was very impressed with the change of perspective ME2 brought on certain plot aspects taken for granted in ME1, opening up expansive ethical grey areas. "Mordin Solus" presents the most prominent example. His sub-plot reveals that the Krogan Genophage was not developed as an ultimate weapon of genocide, it merely modified the fertility rates of the rampantly expansionist, warrior species to more stable levels. A delicious moral grey area for players to ponder: Mordin presents irrefutable benefits of weaponised bioengineering, while still genuinely troubled by his role in creating it. He would already have been my favourite character, courtesy of his XKCD worthy lines making me LOL during nearly every ship-board interaction.

[Mordin Solus, the Slarian Scientist (ME2)]

The Geth are a break-away race of AI/robots, the primary source of enemy fodder in ME1, but are found to be two disparate (adversarial) groups in ME2. This pushes beyond the stereotype, homicidal monoculture popularised in Terminator, the Matrix and Battlestar Galactica (also featuring religious robots). Although "Legion" is intriguing, he/it does not do a great job of explaining the differences in each faction's beliefs. It does explore the possibility ditching democracy and politics in favour of building universal consensus, through rapid communication (like the “Demarchy” in “Revelation Space”). However, this is shown to fail during Legion's loyalty mission. This is a little unfair, as it was required to facilitate a major game plot choice.

ME1 has a Cortana (the AI from Halo) clone. However, it is the polar opposite of Bungie's deus ex machina. “Avina” is a Citadel tourist information hologram; a bimbo "Virtual Intelligence" (VI) more akin to the MS Office Paperclip. ME2 introduces EDI as a functional equivalent to Cortana, but she is heavily shackled, locked out of most ship systems, her mere existence is controversial. Proper AI is banned after the Geth went all Cylon a few centuries hence, rampaging across half the galaxy. For some reason, they appear to have become an entirely steady state culture after the initial inflation of their revolt. Of course it would have mess up our nice little space-monkeys-with-pea-shooters fictional universe if they were to have had a technological singularity (one that didn't just involve quietly 'subliming').

Overall, AI receives a refreshingly good treatment, including EDI's portrayal. She goes from looking like a conspicuous HAL-9000 knock off, to a loveable ship mate, with a couple of hilarious one liners along the way. Even her main detractor ('Joker') is shown to form a close working relationship with her by the end. This kind of material will hopefully guide public consciousness to consider AI rights in a similar light as racial discrimination; an eagerly awaited step in the right direction, I say.

[Avina (ME1), Cortana (Halo), EDI (ME2)]

+ Religion {!Spoilers!}:

Mass Effect sticks mercifully close to the humanist feel of star trek, with only sparse reference to real world religion:

- Ashley: is a stereotypically preachy Christian. Maybe this is a good thing if one lives in the bible-belt, but it turned me right off romantic involvement with her (or it would have if I'd had a male Shepherd). Her xenophobia didn't help either.

- Thane: talks about traditional “drell” beliefs that sound suspiciously similar to Hinduism. "Yes; A polytheistic religion."!

- “Hanar”: (species) worship the Protheans as the great makers. Their beliefs are seen to be discredited as the story unravels.

- Geth: are robots that worship (false) gods. It is somewhat novel having irrational robots, that still look like robots, but it is unrepresentative of religions: the archetype of savages bowing before conquistadors is rare. All successful world religions are far less literal, with their cores composed of complex mythologies woven from astronomic facts and pre-existing folk-lore. Beliefs are rarely so provably wrong.

+ Treatment of race, nationality, gender, sexuality {!Spoilers!}:

- Black non-squad characters are ubiquitous, however, there's a distinct lack of persons of Asian descent. So, while the one obvious US minority is catered for, political correctness does not appear to have been aimed at 'eastern' markets. I think this is a major oversight. Arthur C. Clarke's 1982 novel ("2010: Odyssey Two") has Chinese astronauts stealing a march on a joint Soviet-Yankee mission to the Jovian system. It is long overdue to start acknowledging the massive influence Asian nations and peoples are going to have on the future. Especially at a time when China (and India) are moving into economic dominance, more in line with their superior population.

“Kasumi” (purchase DLC) does appear to be Japanese, if one pays close attention. A very minor concession to that part of the world, or maybe just a super-cute Japanese girl for Caucasian gamer boyz to lust after (if one is cynical).

[Kasumi (ME2 DLC) from www.masseffect.com]

Something that only just occurred to me well after playing both games is the similarity between Tali's full cover outfit and the (Muslim) veil. With continued armed intervention in the middle-east, wearing of veils has managed to reach controversy status in western countries. Heartening then, that Tali is easily the favourite character in polls (favourite romance option too) [reference]. But the connection to contemporary Arab peoples (and the *Tali*ban) is only subliminal, while her accent sounds closer to Russian/Eastern European (like the Romani Gypsies that the displaced “Quarian” people so resemble).

[Escapist Magazine - http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/9.172365-Poll-Mass-Effect-2-Favourite-Character]

[Tali & FemShep]

- A quick mention of Joker as a token disabled guy. As the best pilot in the fleet (despite brittle bones), and with some of the most humorous lines in the games, the player also gets to step into his shoes briefly. Surely a positive thing.

- I think there is pretty reasonable gender equality in ME. Some argue that females are shackled with 'mage' archetype by making all the Asari biotics (and that the "fearsome" Asari commandos were actually lame). Yes, all the female characters have perfect dimensions, but why the hell not, in a fantasy future setting? There are well stated reasons for not meeting any Salarian or Krogan women: in both cases they are in short supply, so only found on home-worlds, but are told to command greater political power. However, the lack of female Turian characters is conspicuous. I suspect that is mostly a technical art problem: making them simultaneously distinguishable and plausible.

The big win is that the player can chose a fully female main character (FemShep), and she has better voice acting than the male. She is a totally believable, strong female lead; not at all an over sexualised Lara Croft descendant. On the other hand, she has been entirely excluded from promotional materials, but this could be blamed on sales and marketing department doublethink.

Single player RPGs are interesting in that they let the player slip into the shoes of a character of opposite gender without having to worry about other's perceptions. Men playing FemShep seems pretty common, with those that didn't first time more likely to for a second play through. I think it is commonly accepted that this doesn't infer homosexuality (indeed the most raucously manly men love to dress in drag IRL).

So this option should help to improve cross gender understanding (provided one feels any empathy for one's avatar). Personally, I jumped at the first opportunity I've had to control a serious female character. I found it interesting how attaching my agency to it subtly changed my perspective in game.

Romance wise, Kaiden's clumsy advances and brittle ego repulsed me in ME1, so he ended up dead and I got the controversial blue alien scene later. However, come ME2 I found Kelly too shallow, Samara far too... old, Thane too irritating and Jacob a non-starter (he also got dead on my first "suicide mission" play-through). But Garrus was quite acceptable: all dark and broody (playing the tragic hero at first), but entirely unassuming. FemShep had to make all the moves, leaving me giggling like a wee girlie. Perhaps he reminded me of me (narcissistic or what?!). If I had of played maleShep, I think I would have been torn between the giddy tech-geekette (Tali) and the pyscho SuicideGirl (Jack), each a little too far down their stereotypes.

[Garrus & FemShep (ME2)]

I have failed miserably to find poll results for overall masculine/feminine Sheppard selection preferences, but from these poll statistics [reference] on a Bioware forum I would estimate that just under 30% of Mass Effect players are women. It also implies: roughly 50% of female gamers played a male shepherd, and at least 1/3 of men tried FemShep. Interestingly Garrus was the most popular male romance choice among (young) men (Kaiden for women), and Jack was the most popular female romance for women (Tali stormed it for men).

[Reference - http://social.bioware.com/forum/Mass-Effect/Mass-Effect-1-amp-2-Characters-Classes-and-Builds-Spoilers-allowed/The-Demographics-of-Character-Favorites-3268563-1.html]

- An indication that FemShep might only be intended for male titillation is the presence of lesbian liaisons (in ME1 & ME2) despite the complete lack of homosexual male options. That Asari are *not really* male or female, is no get-out: they are every bit as female as the human women, going by body models. I sincerely hope this is not deliberate choice to avoid upsetting an infamously homophobic male gamer demographic (or just outright bigotry). I imagine it's most likely to do with age certification and general controversy; more a sad indictment of established (inter)national norms. This seems all the more feasible when considering that ME1 got itself banned in Singapore over the "lesbian sex scene", and had prominent American nutters condemning it's ability to be "customized to sodomize whatever, whomever, however, the game player wishes"...

[Wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_Effect#Controversies]

+ Too Young (to Die)?:

ME1 is rated 12 by the BBFC, which is approximately sensible, given the graphic (but surreal) gun violence. By extension, it's not surprising that ME2 earns a 15 certificate given Jack's potty mouth, an option to 'torture' a prisoner and a body count that pisses on "Hot Shots! Part Deux". [ref - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iGh5dgvg_U0]

They got 17 and 18 ratings from EU and US bodies though, which is pretty meaningless in my opinion. Naturally many kids below the age classifications will have their parents buy it for them, and they won't have any problems. Certainly the minuscule hints of sex aren't going to pervert or traumatise *anyone*, and gun violence seems almost hard wired into boys anyway. I'm not going to embroil myself further on this issue at this point.

[Dead bodies everywhere]

+ Morals (or lack of):

ME1 features the paragon/renegade mechanic. Basically it appears to have been created to make one's conversation choices carry significance without making the game's decision tree intractably massive. Doing things in a bad (renegade) way is not so much tipping your karmic balance south as exercising your being-a-bastard skill. The more practice one has at being a total git, the more impressive are the things one can do with a mere conversation threat (e.g. convincing a major antagonist to shoot themselves in the head in ME1).

The problem is, to avoid having the special renegade/paragon conversation option greyed out towards the end of the games (e.g. recruiting Morinth), due to insufficient points, one has to concentrate on being either entirely good OR bad only. This may change the level of the gamer's thought processes from truly considering the moral implications of a situation to merely searching for the option they're *supposed* to pick. A subtle difference perhaps. Also, in ME2 I seemed to get odd renegade points at random from perfectly innocuous conversations.

Another problem I had was that I found myself wanting to take renegade options so that my cool looking facial scares wouldn't go away. Sure, the idea that the protagonist's facial skin should represent a cumulative moral judgement of their choices is right up there with phrenology, in scientific terms, but I kinda liked it as a frivolous game mechanic.

[FemShep's Facial Scaring (ME2)]

The game would like you to believe that 'renegade' equates to ruthlessness; a willingness to sacrifice other peoples lives for the greater good. But of course, this is never *necessary* because it must always be possible to play through using the goody-two-shoes option instead. Even thwarting Zaeed's loyalty mission objective, to save hapless idiots from burning, can be rectified by having a couple of paragon points already stashed away.

From looking at the break-down of rewards for completing various missions either way, there appears to be a consistent reward bias towards taking the high road. Add to this the fact that if one goes around killing everyone you meet (and any squad mate possible) there will be less accessible content in the subsequent game (or at least less interesting conversations in ME2 after importing a fully renegade ME1 save). I suppose this moralistic bent might help keep the classification age from going too high. And, at any rate, the games aren't that judgemental, given that it is possible to finish both games making entirely nasty decisions.

The “context-sensitive interrupt system”, where one quickly clicks a mouse button in response to a brief prompt during a cutscene, is a good idea. Blue prompts are paragon, red are renegade. It keeps the player alert during dialogue, just in case an input option crops up. My problem with this system, in practice, was that it was even more difficult to guess what taking action would involve (than the sometimes unpredictable conversation choices). On the 'Archangel' mission I clicked a renegade action, thinking Shepard would steal a hyper-spanner thing, but she actually put it through the back of the guy's head!... D'uh!; I cottoned on after that. Generally, activating this fleeting options yields more entertaining results, and as far as I can tell, taking a renegade option doesn't damage one's paragon progression (other than in the odd cut-scene where there are 2 successive options).

[Paragon Interrupt]

+ Value (£$€!):

Like many big PC games these days, both Mass Effects require an internet connection to work, which generally doesn't seem like an issue until the internet breaks and one is left with *nothing* to do. ME1 at least does not require a DVD to be in and spinning too (just to start up). Buying these games on disc was significantly cheaper than downloading (on Steam), which is perverse given that Steam downloads have no resale value (because you can't sell them on!). Even the DVDs severely limit the number of 'activations' you're allowed (dissuading resale or lending).

Beyond this, DLC (downloadable content) seems to have been turned into the latest anti-customer weapon: My ME2 box came with a one-time-only activation code to get the "Cerberus Pack" for free (one extra squad member, extra planets, missions, weapons and amour). If a buyer/borrower of my game wants this content, it will cost them about £10. The other two major DLC packs ("Kasumi" and "Overlord") work out at about £5 each, are only available from the official website (which is often unnavigable), and require the intermediate purchase of "Bioware Points" (sold in lumps that don't quite split exactly to you purchase amounts). Despite this, I still shelled out £10 for the another extra character (with loyalty mission only) and the 5 part Overlord mission (which was more obviously worth the expense).

[Pic - ME2 DLC - http://social.bioware.com/page/me2-dlc?lang_id=1&path=masseffect2/pc/launcher/banner5/en/ ]

I only paid £15 for my ME2 box (6 months after it's first release), a very reasonable price for a week worth of solid entertainment (highly recommended). But that makes the DLC seem disproportionately expensive (particularly given that intermediary retailers are excluded).

DLC is a good idea, bridging the wait between releases. I expect that, if ME2's DLC is found to be sufficiently profitable, it might become a game distribution model in it's own right. I would not be surprised if ME3 leaves, in it's wake, a sting of episodic content, released monthly, like a spin-off series from a film. Currently it is 2 months between ME2 DLC slated to “bridge the gap” between games.

I just hope that high pricing and single use status are not leveraged to the point of leaving a sour taste of in the mouths of fans. By the sounds of it Blizzard are already doing their best to milk fans dry with their long anticipated "Starcraft II", having had plenty of experience in such matters with WoW (World of Warcraft), a type of gaming that already takes a monthly fee.

* Summary:

Although I have gone to some length to point out places where ME1 trumps it's sequel, it is easy to be nostalgic when one sees through the rose tinted vision of hindsight. After careful inspection I conclude that ME2 is the better gaming experience. It duly deserves the perfect review scores it received. So, if you are only going to play one of them, ME2 it is. Otherwise, I highly recommend starting at the beginning with ME1, as buying both titles on disc (for PC) will now leave you change from £20.

This franchise has wide appeal. Because fighting difficulty (enemy health) scales up to match character experience ME1 can be successfully played as either a 40 hour RPG with action sequences *or* an 12 hour long, story heavy, squad shooter. Although taking one's time yields little overall tactical advantage in combat, exploring the detailed fictional universe is it's own reward.

Some are calling Mass Effect this generation's Star Wars. I think they could be right. The games themselves represent large contributions to culture, but the amount of secondary content published to the internet by fans is staggering. In terms of YouTube videos (great and poor), wikis, walkthroughs, internet memes, parodies, fan art, general discussions and reviews (like this), Mass Effect has had a far more tangible impact than even decade defining movies like the Matrix Trilogy.

Forty Eight Percent...

2010-07-27T17:32:00.004+01:00

Seems that 2010 is a crossover time for both genetically modified laboratory animals (vs regular) and PC game distribution (downloads equal other sources). Personally, I'm no advocate of animal suffering, but continued increases in the volume of testing is only to be expected as the rate of scientific progress accelerates.

Links:

[1] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-10774409

[2] http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2010/07/21/whee-downloads-now-48-of-pc-game-sales/

On Christopher Nolan's "Inception"

2010-07-18T01:58:00.014+01:00

Despite the glaring synopsis similarities, “Inception” was more like “Ocean's Eleven” than “Paprika” (2006 - recommended). The film has some promise, real world insight wise, and artistically: there are some small sparks of imagination, but they are doused as Christopher Nolan cements the plot into a simple, audience friendly concept.

+ First Thoughts (simulations, memes and strange loops):

It has rigid levels of dreams within dreams: 5 minutes of real world time dilates to an hour in dream, with the same factor applying to a dream within a dream, and so on down. This doesn't ring true: yes, I've dreamt I've woken up, while still asleep, but that is because any known concept can appear in dreams, it does not literally imply the existence of another level of (un)consciousness.

Nolan's rigid framework would have worked better in a computer simulation type setting. The Matrix is apparently attributable, in part, for his inspiration, according to some. "Feersum Endjinn" (I.M.Banks) features heavy time dilation within an unexpected computer substrate, with a protagonist spending years (decades) of subjective time roaming a virtual world, while mere hours/days pass outside. "Accelerando" (Charless Stross) has versions of people run at high speed, executing romanic compatibility tests that last subjective months. This is what came to my mind when the film had hustband and wife trapped in the deepest deeps of 'limbo' together for a one night lifetime.

The DiCaprio character has a spiel near the start (and end) saying something like:

What's the most successful parasite? *Ideas*, more so than bacteria, viruses, stomach worms; they have the power to totally change everything a person does.

I'm thinking: Hell yeah - memes! (Susan Blackmore)

Then the 'projection' of DiCaprio's dead wife (“Mal”) turns up to sabotages things during an 'extraction' (attempt to retrieve industrial secrets from a CEO using a forcibly shared dream).

I'm thinking: Hell yeah - “Strange Loops” (Douglas Hofstadter); we carry virtual, interactive dolls of people we know around in our heads, detailed enough to approximate their responses.

Amalgamating the two author's ideas: this free-willed apparition (or “projection”) would be a 'Selfplex' (Blackmore's Meme-plex of ideas that makes up our "I"/“me”/self) but of another person. If this 'Other-plex' (my contrivance) is of someone very well known (e.g. spouse), they could have as much depth of personality as one splinter of a person with multiple personality disorder.

This topic alone is enough for a movie; pseudo-immortality, brain/body hopping, identity questions, etc. This is explored only marginally, when DiCaprio laments to his wife's projection that she is not as detailed as the real thing. Well, at least the movie avoids religious conections altogether. Ironically, Hofstadter, while atheist, might argue that the imagined wife did have a sizable 'soul'. Particularly as the couple were supposed to have spent a subjective lifetime alone together (in deepest dream-land: 'limbo'). (IRL) Hofstadter's wife died, but he states that he makes an effort to continue her strange loop inside his brain, doing things she would have wanted, etc.

+ Second pass (summary, reality and lucid dreams):
The title, objective and revelation of the film is "Inception": the act of planting an idea in a person (through clever in dream trickery) that changes their very core, their raison d'etre even. In my language: re-writing their selfplex. His wife commits suicide because she remains convinced that her experiences are not real, even after waking from limbo, where DiCaprio planted the idea as a kindness.

Nolan has it that ideas can't be forcibly implanted, as the recipient naturally recognises (and rejects) foreign thoughts; they need to be coaxed towards original thought of their own...

Again, this seems ironically backwards; In reality, humans are meme machines, continuously, uncontrollably copying ideas, thoughts and behaviours off one another. One's entire selfplex is a pastiche of experiences from our environment, mostly from other selfplexes. There is no original thought, only conjunctions of memes (ideas) into new memes.

On the other hand, direct brain-to-brain interaction is nearly impossibly hard. Prudently, the functioning of the enabling technology is entirely glossed over in the film (reduced to a timer in a briefcase with a cord for each dreamer). I am pretty sure that fine-grained structure of each brain is quite different. Unlike computers, brains don't store and compare absolute representations of faces/buildings/etcetera as (digital) images. Each person's brain will likely have their own proprietary system of perception that has grown like a long established city; new conurbations adjoin existing ones, every city/brain is unnavigably unique to an outsider, yet provides all the same functions for it's residents.

Anyway, it's not my intention to pick out technical flaws here (trivially easy). The point is that detailed absolutes are hard to impart brain-to-brain. Video/film technology takes this kinda of brute-force approach, but are limited to 2 senses and require complete passivity. The words in a book take a minuscule fraction of the information to encode, but still impart complex experiences over the same kind of time frame. This is possible because words are a common interface between brains.

A receptive reader/listener can be coaxed to conjure up, in their heads, an endlessly convincing reality. A future brain-to-brain interface operating (covertly) at this high level, used to guide some form of lucid dreaming, could allow perfect deception. No mismatch between memory and dream experience would be possible, as the target would perceive only in terms of their own experiences/memories. Any level of detail they know would automatically be blended into perception; expectation = reality. So, for example, the texture of a rug's fibres would not trip up a thought thief, and a 'totem' would be useless.

Regular dreams tend to transition fluidly between disparate settings, people and any number of details. This could make observing a particular memory as hard as pulling a breath of air from a tornado, or as easy as getting a hypnotised subject to tell you their name. The lack of boring, predictable reality might be the 'tell' that one was dreaming. The lack of anything surprising might be a tip-off too (given that you can only perceive things your already know). Then again, surprise is just a subjective concept.

From my experience, dreaming looks to be a free-for all meme orgy; an explosion of ideas going off willy-nilly; random memes colliding in the night. The waking selfplex then tries desperately to force the chaos through it's clothes mangle of perception, flattening it, linearising it, to make sense. Of course all it ever gets out is a tie-dye of pseudo-gibberish, with the fading assurance that it felt real at the time...

Perhaps I'm biased because I've never had a lucid dream. This being so, I can't know for *certain* that reports of such things aren't just regular dreams themselves. After all, practitioners advise consciously training oneself to 'identify' dream states, repeatedly imagining what you're going to dream about, etc. i.e. the "lucid dream" meme is bound to end up partying with the rest eventually, and when it does, one's waking self would naturally assume that all the other memes that joined in where chosen deliberately. I think this is too sceptical, and I'd sorely love to spend some time in infinite fun space...

+ Conclusion:

Inception is easily an above average film, so take my criticisms with salt. The lack of creativity in the dream spaces is probably down to:

a) The context of a heist plot; the thought thieves are trying to create a plausibly realistic world to avoid the target realising it is a dream. More imagination might have been seen inside the old folks shared dream if we'd been allowed to look in. DiCaprio and wife's lifetime dream could plausibly have been limited to building and imagined cityscapes if they are indeed both obsessive architects.

b) Nolan's self proclaimed proclivity for analogue (real world) film technology over CGI.

c) The desire to create a palatable piece for mass consumption. Paprika was almost certainly intractably imaginative for most casual viewers. Although there is no apparent sex appeal in Inception, guns, special effects, ingenious gentlemen thieves and big name cast are all movie memes that are heavily selected for; bound to aid box office popularity.

+ Appendix Notes:

- Apparently the music score composer read Hofstadter for inspiration (“ Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid”).

- References: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inception_(film)

Tesla and Toyota Join Forces

2010-06-08T00:10:00.003+01:00

From Ecogeek: http://www.ecogeek.org/component/content/article/3172

These two automotive companies from opposite extremes of manufacturing scale are starting a 'joint project' to build electric cars together. Somewhat like the Geely/vovlo/PML merger I blogged; upcoming new-tech companies being assimilated or formally backed by the powerful existing market leaders.

Toyota-Tesla should have a sizeable lead over Geely et al, with the Prius already dominating the hybrid market, not to mention Geely currently produce less than 4% as many cars as Toyota (the world leading manufacture). However, looking at it from another angle: Geely's vehicle sales shot up 59% in 2009, outstripping their own targets during a global recession. Also, they are China based. China overtook the US to be the country producing the 2nd most road vehicles in 2008. By the end of 2009 they had almost doubled Japan's yearly figure; that's more than the US and Japan combined.

I don't see as much raw technology innovation within Tesla (as with PML's drive system), and the Prius still has fairly modest capabilities. My prediction is that the Toyota-Tesla partnership will either:

- Come up with some equally advanced electric drive train advances.

- Loose market share, perhaps even market dominance, in the longer term.

Of course, pretty much every car manufacturer has *something* electric due out in the next few years: Plug-In Vehicle Tracker: What’s Coming, When

+ Of the worlds most fecund manufacturers:

- GM's volt is due out this year. It has offerings for Israel and Denmark too, which is significant because they are trial locations for ubiquitous electric car infrastructure rollout. Renault and Nissan are partnered up for that already. See YouTube video explanation, or Shai Agassi's inspirational TED speech.

- Nissan's "Leaf" has sold out in for 2010 (though no production until 2012/2013).

- VW has good solid diesel cars, which are going to be more environmentally friendly over for some time, but the company could get left out if their 'halo' electric concept cars don't start rolling of production lines too.

- Honda has hybrids out, right now, that presumably square up to Toyota's. However, no plug-ins with release dates, and they've wasted a lot of effort on hydrogen powered research.

+ Source for Automotive Industry figures (with pretty graphs): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automotive_industry

"River of Gods" by Ian McDonald (2004)

2010-06-07T18:29:00.011+01:00

This is a difficult novel, both to read and review. It doesn't fit any one sci-fi sub-genre. Some of it's best attributes are also seriously problematic. It is big, 576 pages my in my pretty paperback edition. It tries to do too much.

Each of the first 8 chapters are devoted entirely to separate main characters, which is quite an ambitious idea, but does not a page-turner make; it's page 79 before we get to follow up on a storyline. This places a big burden on one's memory, it is not a casual read, particularly as nearly all the characters and places are Indian. Perhaps it would make a good TV (mini) series, particularly if it features the suggest soundtrack: Thievery Corporation, Asian Dub Foundation, Nitin Sawhney, Portishead, Sigur Ros, etc.

I do like the idea of a sci-fi novel in this setting, it presents a conduit for fans of the genre to be introduced into a geographically new cultural background. It certainly got me to look up information about Hindu deities and such. There is a glossary at the back too, but it often didn't have an entry for the words I wanted to look up, and using it further interrupts reading flow.

A truly futuristic tilt is implicitly acknowledging that the world will be far less western centric in several decades time (though China is barely ever mentioned at all). The US is still exerting political pressures on the Balkanised remains of India, but the height of AI science is taking place in our fictional splinter state: "Bharat". Admittedly, this is largely because it hasn't fully given in to US demands to apply it's Hamilton act, banning high level AIs (originally cooked up on basis of bible belt moral views it seems). Politically, this kind of situation seems aptly plausible, with DMCA type IP law being exported around the world at the moment, ACTA, etc.

+ Characters and Plot Summary:

While I felt the whole novel could just about squeeze into the same universe as Vernor Vinge's "Rainbows End" (a little novel I really liked and should have blogged by now), while some of the character's chapters have specific other feels:

"Shiv" seems to be stuck in a claustrophobic, William-Gibson-esque, sprawl, but one that looks more like contemporary India than anything else. His plot arc is bleak and ultimately futile, showing the cheapness of human life.

"Lisa Darnau" spends half the story in a mini-space opera that mostly shows how ill suited humans are to even near earth space travel (somewhat like Stross does in "Saturn's Children"). This sub-plot peaks in intrigue, along with the rest, about 1/3 the way through the book. The asteroid ("Darnley 285", AKA the "Tabernacle") turns out to contain a mysterious core, impenetrable like one of A.C. Clarke's monoliths, but spherical, covered in a rapidly changing cellular automata pattern (and the occasional facial portrait).

Concurrently, "Lull's" newly found travel companion, a mysterious and confused Indian teenage girl: "AJ", is displaying Keanu Reeves type control over real world robots (in addition to localised omniscience). This is not all that innovative considering this book came out shortly after The Matrix sequels. But perhaps, unlike “Revolutions” it goes somewhere cool...

[major spoilers ahead]

... It doesn't. Sure, it is revealed (unsurprisingly) that she is a personality constructed by one of the superhuman 'Aeias' (A.I.s); an effort to understand and open a dialogue with the human race. Presumably what they discover is that the human race is a hopelessly desperate mob of animals, because the Aeias abandon their creation, alone in this frightening world, to be ruthlessly dispatched by the efficious 'Chrisna Cop': "Mr Nandha".

[Kali - Lord of Death, consort of Shiva]

This pitiable suit is the mirror opposite of Schwarzenegger's Terminator: an overworked, diminutive asian, English-aristocrat-wanabe, who goes around 'excommunicating' (slaughtering) 'rogue' (unlicensed) Aeias. His chapter provides a brief cyberpunk thrill at the beginning. A 'Men In Black' type sequence, with the adition of towering effigies of helpful Hindu deities (his deadly AI helper tools). Gradually, his life falls apart under the pressure of his unstinting loyalty to the job. There's a whole sub-sub-plot with his neglected wife slowly falling for, and eloping with, the hired hydroponic gardener (which also fails tragically). Ultimately Nandha fails to have any real influence, loosing his job along with his wits, as the Aeias escape into another dimension. They commandeer an experimental 'hot zero point energy' reactor recently placed under the remit of millionaire playboy "Vishram".

Vishram is a horny, British educated, stand up comedian, who finds himself in charge of the R&D wing of his dad's massive electricity generation company. Apart from getting in his solicitor's panties, he eventually gets to meet the corporate lawyer fronting an Aeia, one that has been throwing inordinate amounts of money into various hi-tech research projects (including his).

There's a mini Smörgåsbord of sex, most novel in the case of the 'nute' "Tal". I've read sci-fi that has dabbled with the idea of gender swap and third genders, but not deliberately un-gendered. 'Nutes' have mortgaged their bodies to have advanced surgical techniques take them apart and reassemble them into a subtle new form. They are devoid of sex organs, but sub-dermal controls still allow orgasmic type responses along with programming new states of mind. A little like the drug glands in Bank's Culture.

That's not to mention "Najia", the foreign reporter who interviews "Lal Darfan" (an Aeia soap star actor) and later deals with "NK Giovanni" (an illusive revolutionary leader who turns out to be part of the same Aeia). Or "Shaheen Badoor Khan", direct secretary to (and brains behind) the Prime Minister, who is disgraced out of office following a scandalous fling with "Tal", while the rest of government is assassinated (either by the 3rd Aeia, or neighbouring "Awadh", with whom they are at war with over river water rights, I forget which).

It is explained that the super human Aeias tried 3 parallel paths when they were faced with extermination by a clamp down on artificial intelligences in the one remaining haven of Bharat: one was "AJ", another was a play for outright power (by overthrowing government, etc), and the third was to run away into a universe of their own, which is what they do. An obvious reference to the Hindu holy trinity. However, the sources of these revelations are somewhat dubious, so the human characters would be unable to know definitively what transpired (which is realistic I guess).

[The Hindu Trinity: Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva; Creator, Maintainer, Destroyer.]

+ More Ideas Explored:

As well as the myriad Indian cultural references. there are a plethora of name drops pertaining to interesting real world philosophy/physics futurism: Boltzmann brains, zero point energy, etc...

- One of the memes that resonated most with me, was of (superhuman) AIs that 'think' incomprehensibly differently to humans; naturally able to copy (parts of) themselves on a whim, being legion with instantiated parts common to existentially separate AIs. For them the natural ability of humans to move bodily through space is bizarre. Cool, but perhaps mentioned once too often. However, when they escape through the zero-point reactor at the end, they transfer themselves entirely, leaving no copy behind. "Town and Country" soap opera is no more, "Altere" alternative evolution simulator is dead, presumably some major financial instruments vanish too. It makes no sense to me that they would go to the trouble of erasing their original copies, when they loose nothing by hedging their bets, going two separate directions at once.

The Aeias live atop human systems, almost unaware of the levels of implementation bellow. This makes a sense from a memetic point of view (having read "The Meme Machine" recently) if computer systems (internet, etcetera) create a new environment that allows selection of a truly independent third replicator. "Temes" (as Susan Blackmore calls them in a new scientist article I blogged here) would be distinct from digitised memes (like mp3s, jpgs, and traditional computer viruses) because they would not be selected for by human brains. They would exist and evolve purely inside computer systems, initially selected based on unlikely nuances of system architecture. These forerunners seed an increasingly complex ecosystem; an emergent environment mostly invisible to humans in the real world. (except it might slow things down as happens in "Feersum Endjinn", blogged here)

Ok, so I don't think McDonald states that this kind of bottom up, generative process actually created his 'Aeias', although he does include a massive, online, simulated world for biological evolution (that, like many things in the book, ultimately plays little part in anything).

- I don't know if McDonald was trying stick to vaguely plausible physics (brane) theory, but I would have much preferred it if the incandescent new universe that the AIs create at the end turns out to be one and the same object as the tabernacle. It would go something like this:
The tabernacle breaks orbit and falls into Earth's atmosphere, astronauts evacuate hastily, the outer layers of asteroid break off during re-entry, leaving the strange, light-weight-black-hole-oracle-thing to merge with the new mini-universe created at the lab. i.e. it turns out that the thing was travelling backwards through time (from the end of the story), hence appearing to be extremely old, yet holding effigies of living people. A nicely rounded end.

Instead there's some talk of the Aeias tweaking the starting conditions of our universe and leaving the oracle thing, which is still in the sky, and the genius guy has figured out what mathematical transformation will let us make sense of what it's saying in the future... meh.

- 'Hoek' ("So new it's scary") is like a bluetooth headset that talks directly with the user's brain. I like the notion that this kind of technology may well just turn up, 'indistinguishable from magic' (as A.C. Clarke says), with perhaps no human even really understanding how it works. I would have liked there to have involved some kind of user specific calibration process though, to make it more plausible. Possibly quite a lengthy ordeal in which as many neural pathways as possible are stimulated, so the device can map where exactly to stimulate/scan.

This user interface tech was pretty isolated too; no goggles or contact lense screens knocking about too. Perhaps it gets away with this, because in this India there is no middle class, just rich and poor (have hoeks, and have nots). That's not to say there aren't still castes that McDonald goes on about.

- 'Slow missiles' are a vivid example of the possibilities for future (asymmetric) warfare. When intelligence is cheaper than raw materials. Basically, build a cat like robot, with roughly equivalent intelligence, and stuff it's belly full of high explosives. If major overkill is desired, have 100 of them converge on an urban target from all different directions.

Even if one knows they are coming, one would need a fortress to keep them out. Even then, the chances of one crafty cyber-feline suicide bomber slipping through is pretty worrying. Conventional rocket powered missiles would be expensive to manufacture in comparison, needing high tolerances and lots of expensive materials. Heading straight for one's target as fast as possible is not such a clever tactic if/when anti-missile technology comes of age. It's not exactly subtle: speeding through open space with a massive heat signature and a distinctively high velocity. A fast, computerised defence system would spot and track it from miles away.

Small, stealthy and intelligent is the way to go. Imagine if a military had pinhead sized, anti-matter warheads; there are already butterfly sized UAVs being demonstrated these days (and remote controlled cockroaches). Or if you wanted to be uncouth you could just stick them in guided bullets.

- There are also car sized, bipedal, ninja robots, bristling with overkill. Originally controlled remotely by US soldiers in a bunker back home, some have ended up in the hands of gangsters and “data-rajas”. Running at speeds that would put a T-1000 to shame, and moving (I imagine) like Michael Bay's Transformers monstrosities.

These fit in with current trends in US arms technology; the continuation of expensive, brute force battlefield superiority and deadly force, despite no risk to human operators. Something I keep saying needs drastically rethinking.

- 'Brahmin babies' are the designer children of the super elite. They all age at half rate, in body, but not mind. McDonald makes much of how this causes disquiet: prepubescent rajas with the sexual appetite and social requirements of their 20 years on earth. Seems a bit arbitrary to me though, it stinks a little of zero-sum thinking, that you can't get something for nothing. Maybe early efforts at genetic engineering will have similarly awkward side effects, but there would likely be various different trade-offs on offer, and solutions offering the best of both worlds would be likely appear not much later.

[Daseshwamet ghat, Varanasi by "kinginexile"]

+ Verdict

"River of Gods" is a bloated sci-fi tragedy. It presents novel perspectives on ideas, but nothing ground shattering. While much of the time spent on some main characters failed to go anywhere, I was not left anywhere near as frustratingly disappointed as I was with John M Harrison's attempt at avant-garde surrealism ("Nova Swing"). This is primarily a massive diorama; an epically detailed snapshot of a foreign future. If you want a slick, post-cyber-punk, film noir affair, or a space opera romp, look elsewhere.

15 Big Reasons to Vote Liberal Democrat This Year

2010-04-20T19:18:00.017+01:00

[Section A] A Lib Dem vote is not wasted this year - they will gain power in one way or another:

1. The ~~Obama~~ Clegg Effect:

I am genuinely excited that they could win this election outright! After the 6 pack of whoop-ass Clegg doled out on Cameron and Brown in the first debate, the press is talking about it as a possibility. A new, enigmatic leader, a plausible protest vote against the expenses lunacy, Iraq and slapstick politics. Dissatisfaction with Labour hasn't transferred to great enthusiasm for the Tories, leaving an apathetic balance where neither has much chance of an overall majority.

Last week, 'swingometers' were recalibrated for a third direction and colour, with news presenters talking of a 16% swing necessary for an overall Lib Dem majority. But that's nonsense talk!: With only 60% of the electorate voting in the last two elections, a couple million *extra* votes would make up the necessary difference. The extra 10% turnout that voted in New Labour, in 1997, would be sufficient. However, the BBC are now showing Lib Dems in second position, 3% behind the Tories, and the recent Yougov/Sun poll states that if people believe a Lib Dem government is possible, not only do we get a Lib Dem Prime Minister, the 49% popular vote would yield the biggest majority seen for decades.

2. Victory next time through electoral reform in a hung parliament:

If the popular vote goes the way the opinion poles currently show (split fairly equally 3 ways) the Lib Dems will still trail far behind on seats, due to the 'First Past the Post' voting system for Mps. (Their support is about the same right across the country, where as Lab/Con policies produce a strong bipolar City/Country split; a Tweedle Dumb vs Tweedle Disingenuous act that has kept sensible parties out of 65 years.) This guardian article thinks a 3 way tie would spell the end for 'FPTP'.

No overall majority means there would need to be a coalition government or some other agreement between Lib Dems and the dominant party. They given they are the only party able to co-operate). Both Scotland and Northern Ireland had 'Hung Parliaments', last term, which have worked out fine. Number one on the Lib Dem policy list is political reform, something Gordon Brown is now pledging, presumably with the expectation of needing Lib Dem support.

3. Out of Context Outcome:

If Lib Dems win the popular vote by a significant amount, but still trail (in 3^rd place) on seats, there could be a huge public outcry from all directions. Something unprecedented could happen. Electoral reform followed by an immediate election re-run would be expecting too much, but something dramatic. Alternatively if the conservatives win the most seats and then fail to come to an agreement with the Lib Dems (they've said they won't do a deal, due to insurmountable differences), then parliament may have to be dissolved.

[Section B] They are the best party:

4. The cleanest party:

It's MPs were least damned by the expenses debacle.
They tried to make the house of lords fully elected years ago.
Nick Clegg co-founded the Campaign for EU Parliamentary Reform, including expenses, transparency and accountability.
They receive no massive donations from dodgy business millionaires (just that £2M from a con-man on the run, back in 2005, which is their biggest receipt by a factor of 10).
Their MPs take parliament seriously, sticking to business despite the Labservative rabble making pantomime audience noises at them.

5 The only democratic party:

All Lib Dem policy is determined by the whole party, unlike Labour and the Tories who dictate it from the top.

This mechanism saved the Lib Dems from making the same blunder as the other two parties over the Digital Economy Bill: Lib Dem policy on this issue was brought swiftly into line with reality during a 40 minute debating slot at a recent party conference, with a unanimous vote against supporting the bill. Lib Dem leaders then stood up during the bill's reading to officially oppose it. The ruling parties call this a U-turn, implying weakness of dictatorial control, but it's actually an inspiring example of common sense prevailing through democracy.

6. Contemporary politics is already liberal:

Tories have had to step towards the 'middle' (prioritising the NHS, etc) to even get a look in. Labour took an even bigger step in the opposite direction when they became “New” (giving bankers the keys to the country, etc). Why not dispense with the remaining legacy of inappropriate policies they both harbour?

Labour still have a tendency towards big, inefficient governance (more NHS managers than nurses, etc). Conservatives would reduce this wastage, but still quietly support disproportionate financial breaks for the wealthy. Liberal Democrats are the perfect compromise, employing the best of each, in an honest, common sense approach. For example, Clegg led (and pushed through in record time) the EU legislation for "local loop unbundling" of telecoms operators, successfully using free market forces to benefit consumers.

7. They are the safest bet to avoid a future Orwellian dystopia:

With government mysteriously bending to the will of the record industry, and dodgy implementation of counter-terrorism laws, this is a serious issue. Lib Dem's raison d'etre is personal rights and freedoms, from sexuality to data protection. As an MP, Clegg has personally campaigned against ID cards and excessive counter-terrorism legislation, and defended the Human Rights Act. Lib Dems champion a “fairness” that is practically anarchic compared to the other's.

8. They are the best qualified:

If the stereotypical Labour MP is an idiot glad-hand, and the Conservative is a self interested, trust fund baby, career MP, then the Lib Dem guy is the one who's actually experienced the real world and knows how thing's work; Vince Cable is the only potential Chancellor with formal training and appropriate experience. He won the Chancellors debate on Channel 4, recanting how he warned the government of the unsustainability of our economic 'growth' during the bubble, and finally having his policies used during the crash.

[Section C] They have the best policies:

9. Electoral and political reform has been at their core since formation in 1988:

Proportional representation – so house or lords membership reflects national support.
Elected House of Lords – a process started by the Parliament Act of 1911, under a Liberal government. A New Labour manifesto promise that didn't come to fruition.
Presumed abolition of the First Past the Post (safe seat) system - encouraging multi-party politics by removing the need for negative voting.

10. They will fix the Digital Economy Act:

Not only did they oppose it, Clegg has gone on record saying it was unfairly biased towards big corporations and “badly needs to be repealed”.

http://www.thestudentroom.co.uk/showthread.php?t=1240561 (Question 6)

11 Most pro-environment, pro UK green economy:

Opposing coal fired power without maximum carbon capture, refusing any new Nuclear power (it would coast a ludicrous amount and not come online for another 10 years), opting instead for northern shipyards recommissioned for building off-shore wind turbines, home owners getting higher rates from micro generation, feed-in tariffs, a national smart grid and international super-grid connection. Basically, all the good parts of the Obama stimulus package.

40% clean energy by 2020, 100% by 2050. If there's going to be a 'Green Bubble', it's best to get on it as early as possible.

12. They won't force us into the Euro:

Some might be scared they would rush us blithely into the Euro, based on previous pro-European policy. However, while they're still the most pro-Europe party, and still vow to get deeply involved in EU politics (for the benefit of the UK and the world), they acknowledge it is currently unsuitable to join their currency. They will campaign for EU reforms and hold a referendum if and when conditions are right for monetary union.

13. Robin Hood:

They're talking about taxing the banks to make back their bail outs and such. The closest to a "Robin Hood tax" that I've heard of; if anyone were to level the score here, it would be them.

14. Anti-war, anti nuclear warheads:

The sole justification for the Trident (nuclear warhead delivery) system, is that it gives the best odds of Mutually Assured Destruction (the scary stalemate that kept the Cold War cold). There is no longer that climate of animosity between America and the USSR (which ceased to existed decades ago). Continuing to hold on to nuclear weapons is perpetuating an expensive and insanely dangerous Mexican stand-off: holding a gun to the head of every person on the planet. Stockpiles are slowly being reduced through treaties anyway, why don't we (as a country) take the lead for once and scrap a significant part of our arsenal. As suggested by retired NATO commanders: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7859046.stm

Brown, or maybe even Cameron, might bring up the threat of rogue nations developing/stealing warheads of their own. It's a real, genuinely terrifying, possibility, but one that our own nukes can do nothing to deter: mutually assured destruction is hardly something 'Al-Qaeda' would be expected to shy away from.

North Korea too is unlikely to respond rationally to the threat of MAD, given they are under despotic rule (that's if they even have nukes). Conventional weapons and tactics would be the only way to humanly disarm a country like this (i.e. without massacring it's helpless populous). Spending on anti-ICBM platforms would be far more justifiable (no longer a destabilising factor) if Western countries had fewer/no nukes.Ditching a load of nukes would also set an example for countries like Iran, who rightly say the NATO countries are hypocritical. The threat of invading Iran is counter-productive to the reform movement there; carrots instead of sticks please.

An interesting note is that Clegg was originally more pro-Trident: it was a major point of contention during his 2007 battle against Chris Huhne for leadership of the party. However, since the recession he has changed his tune, making his line that Trident is plain unaffordable sound all the more genuine.

On the other hand, Clegg is pro “liberal interventionism”, so he might have advocated getting involved in Iraq for humanitarian reasons alone, not for oil resources backed up by fictional WMD claims. Very much my opinion when I was approached by knee-jerk, anti war petition wielding students back in 2004.

[Section D] You already support the Liberal Democrats!:

15. Add your good reason here:...