Danny Hillis on the future of entertainment, the power of game developers and the merging of man and machine
After the challenges Bill Gates faced with his "Future Machine" in the form of the X-Box, which until then had only existed as vaporware, painted the horizon for game developers (Bill Gates unveiled the X-Box), and after heated discussions about violence in computer games dripped "the genius" among the digerati, Danny Hillis, balm on the troubled souls of game developers at the conclusion of their industry meeting in San Jose on Saturday night: "You are a force that shapes the world", the pioneer of parallel computing and longtime Disney advisor gave the funky community a lift on the road to the future of entertainment.
For Hillis, the phenomenon of play is a "cultural universal". Children, adults and even animals are excited about it in the same mabe, he said. Play is also not a pure end in itself, but always has a "To do with learning". A mathematician by training who, while still a student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), developed computer toys for children and touch-sensitive robots at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory under Marvin Minsky, he now argues that the debate about learning is always confined to schools. The fact is that sitting in class is the only thing that is being "the least important and most interesting form of learning", where the absorption rate of children is limited to a few minutes "Bits" throttled. Video games like Nintendo’s Pokemon, on the other hand, give kids endless new skills.
To game programmers, the all-around Hillis attributes a crude power shaping the reality of computer generation: "You build the subconscious blocks from which kids construct their world." Today it is clear that kids draw their reality from interactive games in which they really live through the heroic stories with all their challenges that have been known since ancient times.
For Hillis, film and television, on the other hand, lose their power to shape reality because they do not offer comparable opportunities for interaction. Computer games were developed for Hollywood, the "everything interactive" than to be casual and "geeky" therefore to the gross danger of. Especially since Hillis ames that, thanks to the triumphant advance of the Internet, which has not yet been fully understood, every device will soon have the ability to interact: "Every tapsaule will play with you", believes Hillis, who has long been calling the "Internet in every handle" predicts.
With spab and play on the way to the cyborg
The visionary who began to think in long time dimensions before the millennium, a 10.The designer of the Long Now Foundation (digital culture discovers duration), who has built a 000-year-old mechanical clock and sits on the board of the Long Now Foundation (digital culture discovers duration), is also firmly convinced that the perception of the world is increasingly merging with a playful sense of life. Portable and networked game consoles were only the beginning; the future belonged to implants, even if they were still controversial today. "Once there is neuronal hardware that allows three-dimensional visualizations and expands our memory, then people will simply do it", Hillis is sure that he will set a good example in the virtual matrix (The Matrix): "If I could live a thousand years myself by downloading my self into a computer, I would be right there with you."
Hillis also reckons with the proliferation of virtual actors. Not only because Hollywood wants to save costs, but because they simply became natural to us after a period of habituation.
Until then, however, the machines and their developers still had a lot to learn. At the moment, the computer designer is not satisfied with ATMs, for example, which produce a mechanical "noise" after the money has been spat out "Thanks to" out of their sound membranes – when everyone knew they were not grateful. However, things have been "still in our lifetime" more and more intelligent and at the same time "emotional" become. And this in the confrontation of the device hardware with game worlds simulated by software – and by no means by the reproduction of thought-like structures in machines, as the founders of Artificial Intelligence initially believed. However, since the human likeness in the robots is formed in a playful way, "we will ultimately not know how they work."
It is only too understandable, in view of this power of the game developers to shape the future, that Hillis is the "Spielberg’s" and "Beethovens" the future that many Aubenstehende before the "Wizards" and fear the creators of the virtual worlds with which they, or at least their children, live. "There is a lot of talk about the have and have-nots", Hillis is excited. But the bigger gap is between the knowledgeable, the initiated, and the ignorant.
"People are afraid of what is going on in their computer." That’s why they also despised the game programmers and hoped, "that all this is only a preliminary threat."
What about morality?
However, the thinker, who was completely floating in his visions, could not completely avoid the matter of violence in games, in view of the beautiful new game world he had drawn. Although Hillis did not even touch on this delicate subject in his lecture, the first question from the audience was about the mixture of violence played out in games and violence carried over into everyday life.
"My wife wanted to enforce", Hillis countered with a tale from family life, "That our kids don’t get toy guns." The effect: "The guns became all the more interesting for them, so that they ended up playing with pistols made of branches." The moral of the story: "Children just have to go through certain things." And there it is nevertheless better to push with Doom on Aliens than to play Indians. A child that in the "Shooter stage" he has not yet experienced. This is only a preliminary phase.
And what about the gross influence that game developers have on society, a programmer not satisfied with the answer rephrased the question. Could one speak of responsible behavior?? "There I keep it with the nutrition model", philosophized Hillis, before he awakened the freaks from their hibernation for one night in the roller coaster-based Playground, especially for them, thanks to sponsorships from Microsoft and Sega "Great America" on the edge of the Bay: "You are responsible for the provision of sufficient nutritious building blocks. And when I look at the spectrum of obtainable matches, you guys are doing a better job than ever before."
He added to applause from developers: "Fear is easier to program than devotion and inspiration." Designers therefore had to take up the challenge even more forcefully, to also face the "hard things" to face.
Almost simultaneously with Hillis’ technical optimism about a playful future, one of his fellow computer gurus, Bill Joy of Sun, warned of the dangers of new technologies that are beginning to proliferate: Fear of the Future.