The intellectual equivalent of a ham sandwich.

Posts tagged ‘Technology’

The Downside of Better Video Games

In the video game FIFA 14 you can choose to create a player and play through the career of that one person. This can lead to upgrading your rating as you get accomplishments, and playing for different teams if you prove yourself ready to play at higher or lower levels.

In other words, the game is tracking your stats to decide how to rank you and move you. Pretty neat.

What would not be neat is if the game got really good at this.

When playing the game I take turns between two skill levels: one offers a challenge where I have to play intelligently, my team could win or lose, and I will score a goal if I’m lucky/play really well. Also my rating (you are rated each match) is so-so. To offset this and advance my player I also play at an easier level in order to get more accomplishments, advancing my player faster and also, obviously, it’s just fun to score. In those matches I’m rated very highly.

Here’s what a write-up of my player might look like if the game got to the point where it had built in the ability to track trends in your play. (FYI: my character’s nickname is Slinky because it’s an old soccer nickname of mine.)

“Slinky is a decent player. He ranges from slightly below average to amazing, seemingly game to game.

“Some days he arrives and the game starts with him calling for the ball and he persists in calling for the ball without once distributing it, seemingly, until he has a hat trick. It is some of the most selfish play one could ever witness, and yet it works. Disturbingly, even after scoring multiple goals he seems to avoid passing to a specific teammate (it should be noted that this player is second on the team stat sheet for goals scored, first in assists). On some of these games he will take shot after shot that is nearly impossible – with his weak foot, from outside the box. It makes no sense.

“I would kick him off the team except he really can score at will. With enough time and chances he WILL score multiple goals, embarrassing the opponent. It is almost as if everyone around him is an amateur compared to his professional status.

“Then, on the ‘off’ days, Slinky is a good teammate, making runs, distributing the ball, coming back to help on defense. He does everything he should … But honestly, I’d prefer the selfish a-hole version who scores 4 times per game.

“It should be noted several teammates, independent of each other, have made attempts on his life.

“I think he deserves a raise.”

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Technology Can Be Awesome!

This is breaking from my usual type of post, but thankfully I have no standards for my blog.

First of all, UAVs. Unmanned Aerial Vehicle. They have become prominent recently with war, and now they may be coming to your home … if you have some time, read this.

Don’t want to read that? Fine. Here’s my quick takeaway: UAVs in the civilian world CAN be really cool, but they could be bad, and they can be slippery.

Cool:

  • Delivering tacos to you
  • Road signs saying “missing elderly, Ford truck, etc etc” … these bad boys can help look for the missing elderly
  • Traffic reporting (as mentioned in the article)

Bad:

  • Invasion of privacy (peeping tom, 2.0)
  • Hogging bandwidth

Slippery:

  • REPLACING HUMANS WITH ROBOTS

Seriously … this is a verrrry interesting thing to me.

A few years ago I was driving with a girl to visit the acquarium in Monterey Bay, California. While driving there we passed by some farms. There was someone out driving some farming machinery through the fields and I talked to the girl about how that job could be automated.

You have the dimensions of the field, you know where crop X is, where crop Y is (in case they need different machines). All you have to do is input this information into a central database (or directly into the machines), and whala, you’ve got yourself some automated farm hands.

With these UAVs it mentions shipping yards that could use drones. Imagine a drone crew lifting debris from the demolition of a building.

Here’s an interesting/bad part – the girl’s dad had a skilled manual labor job. It had slipped my mind at the time, but she was adamently against automation of certain jobs. Unfortunately, her stubborn resistance only made me want to list more jobs where people could be replaced.

You’ve probably been to a grocery store where there are self-checkouts. You’ve probably seen ATMs where you can deposit checks through them (or you can do this through your phone now). There are TONS of jobs people do that can be replaced by robots.

Think about how complex a football game is, and yet we have AI that figures out what to do with that in video games. VIDEO GAMES! I think any consistent motion, or set of motions, no matter how complex, can be automated.

That is both cool and scary.

Other slippery slope things … The article mentions the idea of police UAVs with some ‘crowd control’ non-lethal weapons. Oh, what tangled webs we have.

What do you think about all this? Scary? Cool? Have some brilliant business idea based on UAVs? If so, you should probably keep it to yourself.

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