Former BBC execs and sources detail Project Kangaroo, BBC's 2007 attempt to create a Netflix-like service which was blocked by UK's Competition Commission — Insiders reveal just how close the BBC came to launching a credible Netflix competitor - only to have the door slammed in its face
There’s plenty to like about “Mythic Quest: Raven’s Banquet,” a new series on Apple TV+ — its sympathetic-but-critical portrayal of the video game industry, its goofy-but-likable characters and a couple of big surprises that come at the end of the season.
But what really stood out to us — as we discuss on the latest episode of the Original Content podcast — was a single episode, “A Dark Quiet Death.”
Without getting into spoilers, it’s probably safe to reveal that the episode mostly stands apart from the rest of the season, telling a self-contained story about two characters (played by Jake Johnson and Cristin Milioti) who, after they create a quirky horror video game that turns into a surprise hit, discover that success isn’t all its cracked up to be.
Where the rest of “Mythic Quest” is a broad comedy (with the aforementioned likable characters and surprising plot), “A Dark Quiet Death” is more of a drama that quietly — but agonizingly — portrays the tensions between commerce and art. And if we have a criticism, it’s that the episode’s achievement can make the rest of the show feel a little silly in comparison.
We also discuss Anthony’s interview with the creators of the show and how “Mythic Quest” might have been shaped by the involvement of video game company Ubisoft. And before we begin the review, we react to this year’s Oscars.
You can listen in the player below, subscribe using Apple Podcasts or find us in your podcast player of choice. If you like the show, please let us know by leaving a review on Apple. You can also send us feedback directly. (Or suggest shows and movies for us to review!)
And if you’d like to skip ahead, here’s how the episode breaks down:
0:00 Intro
0:27 Oscars discussion
17:54 “Mythic Quest” review
50:31 “Mythic Quest” spoiler discussion
Oxford VR, a spinout from Oxford University's Department of Psychiatry that wants to use VR simulations to treat mental health problems, raises £10M Series A — Oxford VR, the UK developer of virtual reality therapy, has secured a £10 million Series A round led by Optum Ventures with support from Luminous Ventures.
For the next installment of the informal TechCrunch book club, we are reading the fourth story in Ted Chiang’s Exhalation. The goal of this book club is to expand our minds to new worlds, ideas, and vistas, and The Lifecycle of Software Objects doesn’t disappoint. Centered in a future world where virtual worlds and generalized AI have become commonplace, it’s a fantastic example of speculative fiction that forces us to confront all kinds of fundamental questions.
If you’ve missed the earlier parts in this book club series, be sure to check out:
Some questions for the fifth story in the collection, Dacey’s Patent Automatic Nanny, are included below.
And as always, some more notes:
This is a much more sprawling story than the earlier short stories in Exhalation, with much more of a linear plot than the fractal koans we experienced before. That wider canvas offers us an enormous buffet of topics to discuss, from empathy, the meaning of humanity, and the values we vouch for to artificial entities, the economics of the digital future, and onwards to the futures of romance, sex, children, and death. I have pages of notes from this story, but we can’t cover it all, so I want to zoom in on just two threads that I found particularly deep and rewarding.
One core objective of this story is to really interrogate the meaning of a “person.” Chiang sets up our main character Ana as a mother of a digital entity (a “digient”) who was a zookeeper in a past life. That career history gives us a nice framing: it allows us via Ana to compare humans to animals, and therefore to contextualize the personhood debate around the digients throughout the story.
On one hand, humans uniquely value themselves as a species, and even the most dedicated digient owner eventually moves on. As one particularly illuminating passage discusses when a digient’s owner announces that his wife is pregnant:
“Obviously you’re going to have your hands full,” says Ana, “but what do you think about adopting Lolly?” It would be fascinating to see Lolly’s reaction to a pregnancy.
“No,” says Robyn, shaking her head. “I’m past digients now.”
“You’re past them?”
“I’m ready for the real thing, you know what I mean?”
Carefully, Ana says, “I’m not sure that I do.”
…
“…Cats, dogs, digients, they’re all just substitutes for what we’re supposed to be caring for.”
This owner has made a clear distinction: there is only one form of entity worth caring for, only one thing that a human can consider a person, and that is another human.
Indeed, throughout this short story, Chiang constantly notes how the tastes, values, norms, rules, and laws of human society are designed almost exclusively with humans in mind. Yet, the story never takes a definitive stance, and even Ana is not at all convinced of any one point of view, even right up to the end of the story. However, the narrative does offer us one model to think through that I thought was valuable, and that’s around experience.
What separates humans from other animals is that we base decisions on our own prior experiences. We collect these experiences, and use them to guide our actions and drive us toward the right outcomes that we — also from experience — desire. We might want to make money (because experience tells us that money is good), and so we decide to go to college to get the right kind of learning in order to compete effectively in the job market. Essential to that whole decision is lived experience.
Chiang makes a very clear point here when it comes to a company called Exponential, which is interested in finding “superhuman AI” that comes without the work that Ana and the other owners of digients have put in to raise their entities. Ana eventually realizes that they can never find what they are looking for:
They want something that responds like a person, but isn’t owed the same obligations as a person, and that’s something that she can’t give them.
No one can give it to them, because it’s an impossibility. The years she spent raising Jax didn’t just make him fun to talk to, didn’t just provide him with hobbies and a sense of humor. They were what gave him all the attributes Exponential is looking for: fluency at navigating the real world, creativity at solving new problems, judgment you could entrust with an important decision. Every quality that made a person more valuable than a database was a product of experience.
She wants to tell them that Blue Gamma was more right than it knew: experience isn’t merely the best teacher; it’s the only teacher … experience is algorithmically incompressible.
Indeed, as the owners start to think about when they might offer their digients independence to make their own decisions, experience becomes the key watchword. Their ability to make their own decisions in the context of past experiences is what defines their personhood.
And so when we think about generalized artificial intelligence and the hope of creating a sentient artificial life, I think this litmus test starts to get at the real challenge what this technology can even be. Can we train an AI purely through algorithms, or will we have to guide these AIs with their open but empty minds every step of the way? Chiang discusses this a bit earlier in the story:
They’re blind to a simple truth: complex minds can’t develop on their own. If they could, feral children would be like any others. And minds don’t grow the way weeds do, flourishing under indifferent attention; otherwise all children in orphanages would thrive. For a mind to even approach its full potential, it needs cultivation by other minds.
Indeed, Ana and the other main character Derek are forced to keep pushing their digients along, assigning them homework and guiding them to new activities to continue propelling them to get the kind of experience they need to succeed in the world. Why should we assume a generalized AI wouldn’t be any less lazy than a child today? Why would we expect that it can teach itself when humans can’t teach themselves?
Speaking about children, I want to head over to the other thread in this story I found particularly trenchant. Clearly, there is a whole parallel to real-life human childrearing that is sort of intrinsic to the whole story. I think that’s obvious, and while interesting, a lot of the conclusions and meanings from that concept are obvious.
What’s more interesting is what affection and bonding signifies in a world where entities don’t have to be “real.” Ana is a zookeeper who had deep affection for the animals under her care (“Her eyes still tear up when she thinks about the last time she saw her apes, wishing that she could explain to them why they wouldn’t see her again, hoping that they could adapt to their new homes.”) She vigorously defends her relationship with those animals, as she does with the digients throughout the story.
But why are some entities loved more than others if they are all just code running in the cloud? The main digients featured in the book were literally designed to be attractive to humans. As Blue Gamma scans through the thousands of algorithmically-generated digients, it carefully selects the ones that will attract owners. “It’s partly been a search for intelligence, but just as much it’s been a search for temperament, the personality that won’t frustrate customers.”
The reason of course is obvious: these creatures need attention to thrive, but they won’t get it if they are not adorable and desirable. Derek spends his time animating the avatars of the digients to make them more attractive, generating spontaneous and serendipitous facial expressions to create a bond between their human owners and them.
Yet, the story pushes so much harder on this theme in layers that connect with each other. Derek is attracted to Ana throughout the story, even as Ana stays focused on developing her own digient and keeping her relationship with her boyfriend Kyle going. Derek eventually realizes that his own obsession with Ana has become untenable, which is a subtle parallel to Ana’s own obsession with her digients:
He no longer has a wife who might complain about this, and Ana’s boyfriend, Kyle, doesn’t seem to mind, so he can call her up without recrimination. It’s a painful sort of pleasure to spend this much time with her; it might be healthier for him if they interacted less, but he doesn’t want to stop.
Indeed, the book’s strongest thesis may be that this sort of love just isn’t reproducible. Ana wants to join a company called Polytope in order to raise funding to port her digient to a new digital platform. As part of the employer agreement, she is expected to wear a “smart transdermal” called InstantRapport that uses chemical alterations in the brain to rewire a human’s reward centers to love a specific individual automatically. Ana’s love for her digient pushes her to consider rewiring her own brain to get the resources she needs.
And yet, the digients eventually develop similar thought processes. Marco and Polo, two digients owned by Derek, eventually agree to be copied as sex toys, in order to provide funding for the port. Their clones will have their “reward maps” rewired to make them love the customer that purchases them.
The story gives us a haunting reminder that we are ultimately a bunch of neurons that respond to stimuli. Some of that stimuli is under control, but much of it is not, instead programmed by our experiences without our conscious intervention. And there we see how these two threads come entwined together — it is only through experience that we can create affection, and it is precisely affection and therefore experience that creates a person in the first place.
Profile of Chainalysis, a crypto analytics startup helping government agencies like FBI, IRS, DEA, and ICE in tracking illicit cryptocurrency transactions — It started with a $9,000 data software contract for the FBI in 2015. — But just five years later, Chainalysis …
In Part 1 of my conversation with Ben Tarnoff, co-founder of leading tech ethics publication Logic, we covered the history and philosophy of 19th century Luddites and how that relates to what he described in his column for The Guardian as today’s over-computerized world.
I’ve casually called myself a Luddite when expressing general frustration with social media or internet culture, but as it turns out, you can’t intelligently discuss what most people think of as an anti-technology movement without understanding the role of technology in capitalism, and vice versa.
At the end of Part 1, I was badgering Tarnoff to speculate on which technologies ought to be preserved even in a Luddite world, and which ones ought to go the way of the mills the original Luddites destroyed. Arguing for a more nuanced approach to the topic, Tarnoff offered the disability rights movement as an example of the approach he hopes will be taken by an emerging class of tech socialists.
TechCrunch: The Americans with Disability Act has been a very powerful body of legislation that has basically forced us to use our technological might to create physical infrastructure, including elevators, buses, vans, the day-to-day machinery of our lives that allow people who otherwise wouldn’t be able to go places, do things, see things, experience things, to do so. And you’re saying one of the things that we could look at is more technology for that sort of thing, right?
Because I think a lot about how in this society, every single one of us walks around with the insecurity that, “there but for the grace of my health go I.” At any moment I could be injured, I could get sick, I could acquire a disability that’s going to limit my participation in society.
Ben Tarnoff: One of the phrases of the disability rights movement is, “nothing about us without us,” which perfectly encapsulates a more democratic approach to technology. What they’re saying is that if you’re an architect, if you’re an urban planner, if you’re a shopkeeper, whatever it is, you’re making design decisions that have the potential to seriously negatively impact a substantial portion of the population. In substantial ways [you could] restrict their democratic rights. Their access to space.
Enlarge / Three-time Oscar winner Bong Joon-ho makes his statuettes kiss. Legend. (credit: David Swanson / Shutterstock)
Late last year, Ars picked Parasite by South Korean filmmaker Bong Joon-ho as the best movie of 2019. Last weekend, so did the Oscars. The only conclusion that can be drawn from this is that 100 percent of Academy voters must read Ars.
After recovering from our self-congratulatory champagne showers, however, we were stunned to see Bong's earlier films poorly represented in our archives. I've come to rectify that, since the South Korean writer-director fits into the Ars mold of creepy, stylish, and cutting-edge filmmaking.
Because I'm basic AF, my first exposure to Korean cinema was when the jury at Cannes (headed by Quentin Tarantino) awarded Oldboy the 2004 Grand Prix. From there, I watched the rest of Park Chan-wook's Vengeance Trilogy and The Handmaiden as well as making my way through flicks like The Chaser, A Tale of Two Sisters, A Hard Day, Attack the Gas Station!, and Train to Busan. If you've heard one thing about Korean films in general, it's that they are violent. I am by no means an expert on every movie put out below the 38th parallel, but I am reasonably erudite about the Korean films that US distributors have seen fit to bring stateside in the last couple decades as part of what's called "New Korean Cinema." This reputation for violence is partly warranted and partly marketing.
Read 29 remaining paragraphs | Comments
Estonia, which created a volunteer Cyber Defence Unit after cyberattacks in 2007, offers key lessons to the US in attracting tech talent and educating citizens — The tiny European nation has come a long way after crippling cyberattacks in 2007. Now, it offers key lessons in attracting tech talent and educating citizens.
If things had gone a little differently, the Rotodyne could have been a more convenient way to short haul air travel than the regional jets we now use. [credit: Hulton Archive/Getty Images ]
The phrase "Urban Air Mobility" (UAM) seems like it's been with us for quite a while, but really it's only been in widespread use for two or three years. NASA officially recognized UAM in 2017, calling for a market study of remotely piloted or unmanned air passenger and cargo transportation around an urban area. Most people would probably call this the "air taxi" idea—a vision of hundreds of small, unmanned electric multi-copters shuttling two or three passengers from nearby suburbs or city spaces to vertiports at about 100 mph (144 km/h).
But if things had worked out differently in the late 1950s and early 1960s, we might have a very different understanding of UAM—something more like mass-transit. We might have had a city-center to city-center 55-passenger vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) airliner shuttling between urban heliports at 180 mph (289 km/h).
Actually, we did have that, it's just few people remember. It was called the Fairey Rotodyne.
Read 39 remaining paragraphs | Comments
The Macan S comes standard with 18-inch wheels. Our review model had the $3,140 gloss-black 20-inch wheels. [credit: BradleyWarren Photography ]
The name Porsche conjures images of fun time behind the wheel. For me, that means tooling around in a friend's 1969 Porsche 912 on sunny Colorado afternoons with the top down. Of course, while many of us grow up dreaming about cruising winding roads in a roadster, reality ends up looking like squiring our kids and groceries around sprawling suburban streets in something with at least two rows of seats.
Like every other carmaker that wants to stay in business, Porsche has embraced the SUV. Indeed, the Macan was the Stuttgart-based OEM's best-selling model worldwide, with nearly 100,000 shifted in 2019. (The Cayenne was second, with 92,055 sold—we truly live in an SUV-ified world).
Launched in 2014, the Macan is still in its first generation, albeit with a modest makeover in 2019, the visuals of which are seen mostly in the interior and in new front and rear fascia. From a performance standpoint, last year's refresh made the front wheels a half-inch wider, added some new tires, and swapped out steel for aluminum in the forks that connect the front-axle carrier to the spring and damper. There is little change to the 2020 model.
Read 12 remaining paragraphs | Comments
Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)
Last month, the cryptographer and coder known as Moxie Marlinspike was getting settled on an airplane when his seatmate, a midwestern-looking man in his 60s, asked for help. He couldn't figure out how to enable airplane mode on his aging Android phone. But when Marlinspike saw the screen, he wondered for a moment if he was being trolled: Among just a handful of apps installed on the phone was Signal.
Marlinspike launched Signal, widely considered the world's most secure end-to-end encrypted messaging app, nearly five years ago, and today heads the nonprofit Signal Foundation that maintains it. But the man on the plane didn't know any of that. He was not, in fact, trolling Marlinspike, who politely showed him how to enable airplane mode and handed the phone back.
"I try to remember moments like that in building Signal," Marlinspike told Wired in an interview over a Signal-enabled phone call the day after that flight. "The choices we’re making, the app we're trying to create, it needs to be for people who don’t know how to enable airplane mode on their phone," Marlinspike says.
Read 19 remaining paragraphs | Comments
The court filing sheds light on how US was able to attribute the Equifax hack to China and the techniques alleged state sponsored hackers used — Even for U.S. law enforcement, the Equifax hack was different. — Unlike in previous examples of apparent Chinese government-backed cyber-operations …
Cheng Ting-Fang / Nikkei Asia : MediaTek says it has started to use Intel Foundry's advanced chip packaging in addition to TSMC's...
