Tag Archives: dystopia

Knightscope – for criminals who operate above the law

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That is a dated Knight Rider reference, for those who didn’t watch trashy but awesome TV in the 1980s. These things are operating in some parking lots in Philadelphia. Some people predict Philadelphians will destroy them in short order. But they thing is, they are basically just a camera on wheels. So if you destroy it, you are creating evidence of yourself destroying, which the owner of this thing will be motivated to use against you in court. Some people say this is dystopian, but I don’t see a huge difference between this and a plain old security camera.

I wouldn’t mind getting one to collect video evidence of whoever it is leaving dog poop on my block. And no, whoever you are, bagging it before you drop it on the ground doesn’t really excuse you. Somebody still has to pick up your feces, and if that plastic bag gets washed into a storm drain and eventually out to the ocean, the crap will biodegrade in a few hours (possibly suffocating a few nearby fish in the process) but the plastic bag will be there in 1,000 years.

what’s new with Kim Stanley Robinson

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Kim Stanley Robinson (who is a man named Kim – I covered this before) has a new book called The Ministry for the Future. In this article, Kim Stanley Robinson not only admits to being a socialist, but a “post-capitalist”. Basically, his plan is to get rid of capitalism and replace it with something much, much better. Something beautiful. And in this book, it sounds like he shows us what he thinks that could look like. It can’t be any less entertaining than Ralph Nader’s book Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us. (I’m just saying that was a book about serious ideas, that didn’t translate into a particularly entertaining work of fiction. Similarly, Kim Stanley Robinson can occasionally be heavy on ideas and world building, and a little lighter on engaging plots and characters, at least from my perspective. He has an astonishing first-class imagination though.)

I like it when authors talk about other ideas, authors and books that have interested them. He mentions a couple real-world economic systems that could be described as post-capitalist – the Mondragon system of the Basque region (which featured in his book 2312, as I recall) and another system in Kerala, India. He mentions Robert Bellamy’s Looking Backward: 2000-1887 and Thomas More’s Utopia. He talks about a number of his own books including New York 2140, Aurora, and Red Moon. He also mentions a movie (later a TV show?) called Snowpiercer that I hadn’t heard of, but the summary sounds intriguing:

In a future where a failed climate-change experiment has killed all life except for the lucky few who boarded the Snowpiercer, a train that travels around the globe, a new class system emerges.

IMDb

In a parallel universe where I have time to read and watch dumb movies, I will get a pizza and a six pack this weekend and settle in with some of these!

electroshock therapy for the brain

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Someday you might be able to have a device implanted in your brain which can give it a little electric shock each time it is thinking about reaching for that junk food. This has just been treid in mice.

Closing the loop on impulsivity via nucleus accumbens delta-band activity in mice and man

Reward hypersensitization is a common feature of neuropsychiatric disorders, manifesting as impulsivity for anticipated incentives. Temporally specific changes in activity within the nucleus accumbens (NAc), which occur during anticipatory periods preceding consummatory behavior, represent a critical opportunity for intervention. However, no available therapy is capable of automatically sensing and therapeutically responding to this vulnerable moment in time when anticipation-related neural signals may be present. To identify translatable biomarkers for an off-the-shelf responsive neurostimulation system, we record local field potentials from the NAc of mice and a human anticipating conventional rewards. We find increased power in 1- to 4-Hz oscillations predominate during reward anticipation, which can effectively trigger neurostimulation that reduces consummatory behavior in mice sensitized to highly palatable food. Similar oscillations are present in human NAc during reward anticipation, highlighting the translational potential of our findings in the development of a treatment for a major unmet need.

Maybe pedophiles could be given this option in exchange for getting out of jail. Or maybe it won’t be an option. Maybe it could be implanted at birth and used, just as an example, if someone is thinking of pulling the wrong lever in a voting booth.