I came downstairs and grabbed my cup of coffee and saw there was a new Silicon Icarus post, which coincidentally features Project Genie. Odd synchronicity, but then maybe not.
I’d like to suggest at this point that we have an obligation to do the hard work of understanding simulation modeling and prediction and the literal fabrication of digital “realities” through computation through the use of blockchain tokens (to make it quantifiable and visible to the machine) understanding that notions around digital “currency” social control mechanisms are the beginning of a much more expansive story.
Many people are exploring a variety of predatory crypto narratives, but not yet building off that base to explore the full implications of Web 3 and blockchain. Given what @stephers has been pulling out this week, I increasingly see it as being far more about shaping our perceptions of "reality "in far more subtle ways than simply programming money or enabling cross-border micropayments and derivatives markets in human behaviors. I know it’s challenge to get a bunch of knowledge under your belt only to realize there’s so much more to learn.
The work @stephers has been doing is central to this - the Voronoi patterns and complexity theory linked to the parametric calculations @leo had been exploring. Blockchain tokenization is central to artificial societies. I sense the mesh of tracked “transactions” will be the computational surface from which a new matrix of digital “life” emerges.
If people on the leading edge of thinking about this continue to discuss crypto primarily in terms of “money” as we are traditionally meant to think of it, the world will likely end up cocooned in a literal web of computation before we come to our senses. The new post is interesting in that it centers “Community Memory” backed by Bank of America, but in the end I think the end game is a universal distributed mindfile project ala Google’s “selfish ledger.” The finance part is part of the cybernetic governance, a tool to accomplish that end, but it is not an end in and of itself.
Project Genie birthed the computer program at University of Utah. The virtual objects there came out of DARPA, too. I have a sense that the cyclotron / isotope research at Berkeley National Labs comes into play as well. We need to take a wide view.
Also if you are curious for context on Project Genie and U of U, here is the talk Jason and I did on it.
Slide deck - Berkeley and University of Utah and Visualization slides 63-64
Bio of David C. Evans who was born in SLC, was on staff at UC Berkeley with Genie Project, and then started University of Utah Computer Science Division.
Another visual floating in the field for me today is Plato’s cave - Platonic solids - CAD modeling…I was looking into the GeoMagic platform with Ping Fu (mentor at Urbana-Champaign supercomputing to Marc Andreessen).
Isn’t this odd language for a mechanical engineering marketing piece? The images featured are motors, not museum objects. Note reference about controlling history, too.
“Recreating History in Geomagic Design X” 2015 Kenneth Wong, Digital Engineering 247
“Armed with an affordable handheld scanner or a tabletop digitizer, you can easily capture the contours and profiles of vases with odd shapes, sacred sculptures, and archaeological finds. This gives you the chance to import real-life geometry into your 3D modeling program as point clouds or meshes for modeling reference, much in the same way a digital artist might import a photograph into his favorite vector or raster drawing program to use as guide. But converting the scanner-generated point-cloud data into editable solid or surface geometry is not as straightforward. Many wish the conversion could be a template-driven, button-click operation. Alas, that is not the case. It still demands a fair amount of engineering intuition and manual modeling.”
This seems to fit the bill, doesn’t it? Think Blackrock’s Aladdin, ESG Portfolios and GIIN.
Meanwhile a friend took a trip to Longwood Gardens and told me how disturbed they were by this electronic light overlay on the meadows there. The fancy estate garden belonged to the Dupont Family (helped build Oak Ridge National Labs) and before that the land was a Quaker farm (children of the light). This person was VERY upset by the experience.
