Sometimes, you’ve got the bandwidth for watching the extended cut of a superhero movie plus all its special features, or binge-watching an entire TV season. But other times, you only need a quick fix. We’re here to help with 10 of the best new sci-fi, fantasy, and horror shorts around.
Ideally, an artwork makes you question the world and looks beautiful doing it. A new installation from German artists Thomas Granseuer and Tomislav Topic, aka Quintessenz, does all that. Located on the Greek island of Paxos as part of the Paxos Contemporary Art Project, Kagkatikas Secret is made of spray-painted textiles hung in a 400 year-old Greek ruin. The trippy, pixelated effect will make you wonder if the matrix is glitching, while the beautiful design and gradient colors helped it go viral instantly.
The installation borrows from previous Quintessenz pieces Paradis Perdus in the south of France and Flickering Lights at Berlin’s Panorama Fashion Week. Gransaur and Topic’s work is inspired by graffiti art and chromatics, among other sources, and their overarching aim is to produce art that “makes/creates space for its color,” according to their website.
The piece uses over 120 shades of color, and the panels get larger as you walk toward the end of the ruin, called “Old Stone House” in the town of Kagkatika. As they’re also transparent, you can see through the panels to get a sense of the entire piece, which certainly pops against the gray-colored ruin. At the same time, it looks different depending on your angle of view, and is particularly weird if you view it through one of the windows.
Quintessenz’s work is being exhibited along with work from seven other artists displayed in multiple mediums and locations around Paxos. The aim is to “highlight the spirit of the island and support the work of young artists,” according to the curators.
The work might make you think about the place of digital art in an analog world, but when viewed in person, there’s a kinetic component from the wind that you don’t get from the photos (see the video, above). If you should be lucky enough to visit it in person, the artists don’t just want you to Instagram it and leave. Rather, “we hope that the visitors of our work leave their mobile phone cameras in their pockets for a moment and simply enjoy the light and the translation of the wind in the material,” they explain.
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Sometime in the late Eighties, I participated in a meeting organized by the Honda Foundation in which a Japanese professor—I can’t remember his name—made the case that the Japanese had more success integrating robots into society because of their country’s indigenous Shinto religion, which remains the official national religion of Japan.
Shinto, unlike Judeo-Christian monotheists and the Greeks before them, do not believe that humans are particularly “special.” Instead, there are spirits in everything, rather like “The Force” in Star Wars. Nature doesn’t belong to us, we belong to Nature, and spirits live in everything, including rocks, tools, homes, and even empty spaces.
The West, the professor contended, has a problem with the idea of things having spirits and feels that anthropomorphism, the attribution of human-like attributes to things or animals, is childish, primitive, or even bad. He argued that the Luddites who smashed the automated looms that were eliminating their jobs in the 19th century were an example of that, and for contrast he showed an image of a Japanese robot in a factory wearing a cap, having a name and being treated like a colleague rather than a creepy enemy.
The general idea that Japanese accept robots far more easily than Westerners is fairly common these days. Osamu Tezuka, the Japanese cartoonist and the creator of Atom Boy noted the relationship between Buddhism and robots, saying, ”Japanese don’t make a distinction between man, the superior creature, and the world about him. Everything is fused together, and we accept robots easily along with the wide world about us, the insects, the rocks—it’s all one. We have none of the doubting attitude toward robots, as pseudohumans, that you find in the West. So here you find no resistance, simply quiet acceptance.” And while the Japanese did of course become agrarian and then industrial, Shinto and Buddhist influences have caused Japan to retain many of the rituals and sensibilities of a more pre-humanist period.
In Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari, an Israeli historian, describes the notion of “humanity” as something that evolved in our belief system as we morphed from hunter-gatherers to shepherds to farmers to capitalists. As early hunter-gatherers, nature did not belong to us—we were simply part of nature—and many indigenous people today still live with belief systems that reflect this point of view. Native Americans listen to and talk to the wind. Indigenous hunters often use elaborate rituals to communicate with their prey and the predators in the forest. Many hunter-gatherer cultures, for example, are deeply connected to the land but have no tradition of land ownership, which has been a source of misunderstandings and clashes with Western colonists that continues even today.
It wasn’t until humans began engaging in animal husbandry and farming that we began to have the notion that we own and have dominion over other things, over nature. The notion that anything—a rock, a sheep, a dog, a car, or a person—can belong to a human being or a corporation is a relatively new idea. In many ways, it’s at the core of an idea of “humanity” that makes humans a special, protected class and, in the process, dehumanizes and oppresses anything that’s not human, living or non-living. Dehumanization and the notion of ownership and economics gave birth to slavery at scale.
In Stamped from the Beginning, the historian Ibram X. Kendi describes the colonial era debate in America about whether slaves should be exposed to Christianity. British common law stated that a Christian could not be enslaved, and many plantation owners feared that they would lose their slaves if they were Christianized. They therefore argued that Blacks were too barbaric to become Christian. Others argued that Christianity would make slaves more docile and easier to control. Fundamentally, this debate was about whether Christianity—giving slaves a spiritual existence—increased or decreased the ability to control them. (The idea of permitting spirituality is fundamentally foreign to the Japanese because everything has a spirit and therefore it can’t be denied or permitted.)
This fear of being overthrown by the oppressed, or somehow becoming the oppressed, has weighed heavily on the minds of those in power since the beginning of mass slavery and the slave trade. I wonder if this fear is almost uniquely Judeo-Christian and might be feeding the Western fear of robots. (While Japan had what could be called slavery, it was never at an industrial scale.)
Lots of powerful people (in other words, mostly white men) in the West are publicly expressing their fears about the potential power of robots to rule humans, driving the public narrative. Yet many of the same people wringing their hands are also racing to build robots powerful enough to do that—and, of course, underwriting research to try to keep control of the machines they’re inventing, although this time it doesn’t involved Christianizing robots … yet.
Douglas Rushkoff, whose book, Team Human, is due out early next year, recently wrote about a meeting in which one of the attendees’ primary concerns was how rich people could control the security personnel protecting them in their armored bunkers after the money/climate/society armageddon. The financial titans at the meeting apparently brainstormed ideas like using neck control collars, securing food lockers, and replacing human security personnel with robots. Douglas suggested perhaps simply starting to be nicer to their security people now, before the revolution, but they thought it was already too late for that.
Friends express concern when I make a connection between slaves and robots that I may have the effect of dehumanizing slaves or the descendants of slaves, thus exacerbating an already tense and advanced war of words and symbols. While fighting the dehumanization of minorities and underprivileged people is important and something I spend a great deal of effort on, focusing strictly on the rights of humans and not the rights of the environment, the animals, and even of things like robots, is one of the things that has gotten us in this awful mess with the environment in the first place. In the long run, maybe it’s not so much about humanizing or dehumanizing, but rather a problem of creating a privileged class—humans—that we use to arbitrarily justify ignoring, oppressing and exploiting.
Technology is now at a point where we need to start thinking about what, if any, rights robots deserve and how to codify and enforce those rights. Simply imagining that our relationships with robots will be like those of the human characters in Star Wars with C-3PO, R2-D2 and BB-8 is naive.
As Kate Darling, a researcher at the MIT Media Lab, notes in a paper on extending legal rights to robots, there is a great deal of evidence that human beings are sympathetic to and respond emotionally to social robots—even non-sentient ones. I don’t think this is some gimmick; rather, it’s something we must take seriously. We have a strong negative emotional response when someone kicks or abuses a robot—in one of the many gripping examples Kate cites in her paper, a U.S. military officer called off a test using a leggy robot to detonate and clear minefields because he thought it was inhumane. This is a kind of anthropomorphization, and, conversely, we should think about what effect abusing a robot has on the abusing human.
My view is that merely replacing oppressed humans with oppressed machines will not fix the fundamentally dysfunctional order that has evolved over centuries. As a Shinto, I’m obviously biased, but I think that taking a look at “primitive” belief systems might be a good place to start. Thinking about the development and evolution of machine-based intelligence as an integrated “Extended Intelligence” rather than artificial intelligence that threatens humanity will also help.
As we make rules for robots and their rights, we will likely need to make policy before we know what their societal impact will be. Just as the Golden Rule teaches us to treat others the way we would like to be treated, abusing and “dehumanizing” robots prepares children and structures society to continue reinforcing the hierarchical class system that has been in place since the beginning of civilization.
It’s easy to see how the shepherds and farmers of yore could easily come up with the idea that humans were special, but I think AI and robots may help us begin to imagine that perhaps humans are just one instance of consciousness and that “humanity” is a bit overrated. Rather than just being human-centric, we must develop a respect for, and emotional and spiritual dialogue with, all things.
Mars might not have the right ingredients to terraform into our planetary home away from home – even with the recent discovery of liquid water buried near its south pole.
Research published Monday in Nature Astronomy puts a kibosh on the idea of terraforming Mars. At the heart of the study is carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, is abundant on Mars — its thin atmosphere is made of the stuff, and the white stuff we often see on the surface is dry ice, not snow. CO2 is even tra
Hackers managed to steal $7.7 million dollars’ worth of cryptocurrency from the platform known as KICKICO by using a novel technique—destroying existing coins and then creating new ones totaling the same amount and putting them in hacker-controlled addresses, KICKICO officials said.
The technique evaded KICKICO’s security measures because it didn’t change the number of KICK tokens issued on the network. Such security measures are generally designed to spot thefts and other malicious actions by detecting sudden shifts in total cryptocurrency funds available on the market. The unknown attackers were able to destroy the existing coins and create new ones by first obtaining the secret cryptographic key controlling the KICKICO smart contract. KICKICO officials didn’t learn of the breach until they received complaints from several users reporting that $800,000 dollars’ worth of digital coins were missing from their wallets.
KICKICO officials said they have since recovered the stolen tokens and are in the process of returning them to their original owners. In a blog post disclosing the incident, KICKICO officials wrote:
The hackers gained access to the private key of the owner of the KickCoin smart contract. In order to hide the results of their activities, they employed methods used by the KickCoin smart contract in integration with the Bancor network: hackers destroyed tokens at approximately 40 addresses and created tokens at the other 40 addresses in the corresponding amount. In result, the total number of tokens in the network has not changed. But thanks to the rapid response of our community and our coordinated team work, we were able to regain control over the tokens and prevent further possible losses by replacing the compromised private key with the private key of the cold storage.
At the moment the problem is completely eliminated, the wallets of KickCoin holders are safe.
The post didn’t say how the hackers managed to steal the private crypto key or whether the hole that made the theft possible has been closed. The incident is the latest reminder of how susceptible cryptocurrency exchanges and platforms are to malicious hacks. People who use digital coins should keep them in cold-storage whenever possible, meaning wallets that aren’t connected to the Internet. Cold storage doesn’t prevent all thefts, but it will prevent many of them.
A Comcast Service Vehicle in Indianapolis, Indiana, in March 2016.
Getty Images | jetcityimage
Comcast recently installed Wi-Fi equipment in public rights of way without permits in the city of Corvallis, Oregon. But instead of settling the matter locally, a cable lobby group that represents Comcast told the Federal Communications Commission that it should override municipal permitting processes such as the one in Corvallis. In doing so, the cable lobby group made “misleading and inaccurate” allegations about what actually happened in the Comcast/Corvallis dispute, according to city officials.
NCTA—The Internet & Television Association, the cable industry’s chief lobby group, told the FCC last month that it “should declare that local governments may not abuse routine permitting processes for construction activity as a backdoor way of extracting unwarranted authorizations and fees from cable operators and otherwise delaying the deployment of new facilities.”
NCTA’s filing provided several examples allegedly demonstrating that cities and towns are unreasonably holding up network construction. These examples prove that “cable operators are facing unwarranted impediments in their efforts to deploy state-of-the-art broadband networks as a result of abusive permitting requirements,” the NCTA claimed.
Of Corvallis and Comcast, NCTA wrote:
A community in Oregon has refused to issue permits allowing installation of Wi-Fi equipment on cable facilities, on the grounds that the equipment does not support cable service, even though the equipment is used in part to allow cable subscribers to watch subscription video programming on their mobile devices.
City: Comcast needs permit for Wi-Fi service
But that isn’t what happened at all, Corvallis City Manager Mark Shepard told the FCC in a letter yesterday:
NCTA’s letter references a ‘community in Oregon’ that ‘has refused to issue permits allowing installation of Wi-Fi equipment….’ NCTA does not name the community that it is accusing in this statement. Corvallis has been addressing Comcast’s unauthorized placement of Wi-Fi equipment in the rights of way (‘ROW’), without either applying for the necessary permits or consulting with the City prior to installing its Wi-Fi equipment, so to the extent this allegation is referring to Corvallis it is misleading and inaccurate. Corvallis strongly objects to NCTA’s characterization of its actions as ‘abuses’ when it is Comcast that has failed to follow generally applicable City codes and the terms and conditions of its negotiated franchise agreement.
Here’s what really happened, Shepard told the FCC:
There are two issues regarding Comcast’s installation of Wi-Fi equipment in the City’s ROW. Initially, Comcast installed Wi-Fi units in the City’s ROW without application for construction permits. These installations would require a construction permit per Comcast’s franchise agreement. When the City inquired about the units, the installation and their function, Comcast stated that in addition to allowing wireless access to video services, the units also provided non-cable service to non-cable customers, even though Comcast’s franchise does not authorize use of the ROW to provide non-cable services to the general public. The City encouraged Comcast to apply for a telecom franchise to remedy the situation, just as the City would require a franchised telecommunications provider to obtain a cable franchise prior to using the ROW to provide cable services.
The construction is apparently for Comcast’s network of public Wi-Fi hotspots, which can be used by cable subscribers or by non-cable subscribers for a fee. Corvallis has more than 54,000 residents.
The NCTA’s “blatant misconstrual of facts casts a cloud” over the lobby group’s assertions, Shepard wrote. Given that, Shepard told the FCC that it should “not rely on NCTA’s vague accusations against Corvallis or any other unnamed jurisdiction” in its decision-making.
“Further, the City objects to NCTA’s proposals as stated in the letter, which would require Corvallis to ignore the terms of its negotiated franchise with Comcast and create disparities in the City’s application of its otherwise generally applicable rights of way use requirements,” Shepard wrote.
The FCC next month will vote on a related proposal, which it says will “preempt, on an expedited case-by-case basis, state and local laws that inhibit the rebuilding or restoration of broadband infrastructure after a disaster.” The proposal would also preempt “state and local moratoria on telecommunications services and facilities deployment.” But it’s not clear whether the FCC will act on the NCTA proposal that led to the conflict with Corvallis.
We contacted Comcast and the NCTA today and will update this story if we get any response.
