Swancon Panel notes 1

[alias_sqbr]

I pretty much only took notes on Friday, and it's going to take me a while to type them up.

Today has been pretty good, I mostly chatted to people and am taking a break before the masquerade.

Disability and social media: a presentation by Mike Kent. Who, I slowly realised over the course of the talk, is one of the people running the Second Life Chronic Fatigue Association study I was doing, and who I had only met in Second Life before. It was kind of surreal :) Anyway, he had a lot of interesting things to say about how accessible (or not) various social media are.

• Programmers/software engineers etc aren't taught this stuf at uni, it's not considered priority and is at best an afterthought after users complain
  
• Often third parties come and create accessible interfaces because the actual companies can't be bothered eg Accessible twitter
  
• Apple used to be terrible, have started paying attention to accessibility and are mostly pretty good, with the odd random exception (impossible to change text size on the ipad in Safari)
  
• In general a lot of this stuff would be ABSURDLY easy to fix (or not make so inaccessible in the first place)
  
• best practice is to make access to raw data as unfettered as possible eg plain text/html versus pdf.
  
• I asked about intersectionality eg both blind people and people using translators prefer plain text, could join forces to lobby for it. He said that would be awesome but is unfortunately not how things go, groups are barely aware of each other.
  

AI and the human mind: Sean Williams, Justina Robson, Dave Cake, Dirk Flinthart.

• Artificial intelligence is easy but boring and has no ethical issues. What we're really talking about is artificial consciousness.
  
• Two viewpoints: 1) bottom up, we are the product of our physical system/body. hardware/Engineering problem. (Scanning likely to be destructive) 2) Top down: see consciousness as a process. Software/Algorithm problem.
  
• Re top down: if algorithm models an uploaded personality as it is now either it is stagnant or evolves. But will it evolve the way a human mind would? Sean Williams apparently has a book about uploaded personalities degrading, sounded interesting but very depressing.
  
• Consciousness is a process, meaningless without an environment and time to interact in it.
  
• Bodies do a lot of processing, not just the brain.
  
• Human designed systems are very modular. Actual brain/body split incredibly complex and messy and integrated.
  
• Rec for Peter Watts "Blindside"
  
• COG