NASA has been talking about the moon a lot lately. The idea is to send the first living, breathing humans to touch foot on the ground since 1972. This is not merely to collect some rocks and come back like we’ve done before, but rather to build a permanently inhabited colony. As one official NASA video phases it, “We are going to the moon, to stay.”
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With Cyberpunk 2077 now delayed until November, let’s take a moment to talk about one of the best old-school cyberpunk games of all time: Shadowrun on Sega Genesis. The game is a moderately faithful recreation of the pen & paper Shadowrun game, except with some of its weaker points blissfully altered for sensible gameplay.
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Today we’ll be discussing anonymous internet & web browsing. First let’s get the low-hanging fruit out of the way. If all you want is for your girlfriend or roommate not to find all that furry porn in your browser history, that’s easy. Just delete both your history and your bookmarks, and call it a day.
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Cyberpunk involves many elements we wouldn’t necessarily want to experience in real life. As audiences, we cheer when we see Neo in The Matrix wearing his trench coat and gunning down agents. As genre enthusiasts, we look skeptically at Star Trek and wonder if maybe the future will have a little more misery and oppression than that.
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These image-processing wonders are called deepfakes, and they are the end result of a process that starts with Generative Adversarial Networks. That is, two machine-learning neural networks that have been trained against each other in an escalating arms race. One, the generator network, does nothing but produce images. The other, the discriminator network, is fed a mix of images produced by the generator along with real images.
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Privacy may be dead, but in this series we’ll be examining various small ways to take back control of your life and secure your data, as well as how to generally subvert the organizations trying to control you. First step: anonymous mail.
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It’s clear that the “Bigscreen” team has “Bigplans” for the future, and it’s fair to speculate that their offerings will continue to expand in the coming months. If anything, this should serve as an early glimpse into the future of VR. If you have a headset, the price of admission may be worth it even simply to be able to look back and say you were here when it all started.
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As the COVID-19 lockdown hopefully approaches its end in the US, many have been left wondering how our long-term future will be impacted by recent events. With fresh memories of Chinese mass decontamination efforts and growing concern over the world economy having been generally flushed down the toilet, the internet has thankfully come to our rescue by releasing a whole slew of sexy virus memes and snuggleable Coronavirus-chan body pillows.
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While sex robots are inevitable eventually, in the meantime, many are trying are circumvent the technical barriers of manufacturing by producing sex robots . . . minus the sex robots. And for reasons that can best be explained as “God damn it Japan,” these virtual girls are generally anime-esque. Ladies and gentlemen, presenting — the virtual waifu.
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It doesn’t take very much imagination to envision the biohacker community, the same people who are right now slashing open their own fingers to stick magnets inside, applying genetic tools to give themselves superpowers more interesting than being able to pick up bottle caps with a touch.