Manifesto
Well... I think it's us that need some help, not the world. The world will be fine. It will adapt and evolve and find new ways of being. Perhaps some new form of life that thrives on microplastics will develop. This makes me think about the Great Oxidation Event (some 2 billion years ago oxygen levels in the atmosphere started rising due to growth of underwater plants that started producing it through photosynthesis. Any life form that existed prior to that basically went extinct as oxygen was toxic for it, but it gave rise to other life forms to develop, like ourselves...). Anyway, I think it's us we have to worry about, not the "world". The best thing for the world would probably be for us to go extinct. Let's face it and call it for what it is. But we'd generally prefer to survive. So the question is — are we helpless or can we figure out a way to help ourselves? Will AI save us? What does saving mean? What does it look like?
These are big and arguably hard to answer questions that deal with the macro. But we are social creatures — perhaps if enough of us choose to go about life differently it would be enough to tip the scales. I feel like it's one of those emergent things, like we can't possibly see the full picture and plan for it, we just got to work towards what we think is right with the best tools we have and to the best of our understanding in any given moment. I generally try to live by Sister Corita Kent's Immaculate Heart College rules:
I tried to come up with rules I think are in a similar spirit to sister Corita's, but that pertain more to the digital age. I guess back then access to information wasn't as easy, whereas today we are being pretty much constantly bombarded with new information all the time from all directions. It feels overwhelming at times. Like, for any particular topic I might not have previous knowledge (not to mention an opinion) about, if I look it up — more often then not I would find contrasting viewpoints of it, and it's likely I would stick with either what I encounter first or what people "similar to me" are thinking. There are so many things happening at the same time and yet we are all bound by time and space and can't really keep up with everything. But should we?
This morning on my way to school, on the bus, I saw this sign posted by the entrance to an elementary school saying "We are crew, not passengers" and it felt appropriate to mention here. We should remember we are active participants in the fabric of society regardless of if we are actually trying to or not. So might as well try. Might as well make conscious choices, leave a tiny (or a giant) dent, talk to others, figure out what works for us and what doesn't, acknowledge everything is a work in progress, try to feel painfully alive, and... be happy whenever we can manage it. This is all I can ask for. The following rules suggest a similar-spirited approach, one I deeply believe in.
I'm going to try and use the p5LiveMedia video sharing capabilities to draw each person's random face organ and create a variable layout made up of different people's face parts. Maybe I can make it so we create some sort of exquisite corpse thing? Let's see where it takes me.
Edit many hours later: I can't seem to be able to make it work! I started with the Live Media Face Canvas example, removed all the three.js stuff, and got detections of face parts. But I can't seem to be able to draw multiple people's video for some reason. I scaled it down to just trying to see everyone's stream at the same time and even this simple thing doesn't work. Copilot made everything so much worse too and I keep going back and forth between its suggestions and the original code. I tried both drawing a canvas per user (with createGraphics) and drawing all of them locally on one canvas. At some point I got a cool recursive thing going with the webcam stream but didn't take a picture unfortunately as I was busy trying to debug it.
As of the time of writing this (Monday morning) I wasn't able to make it work. Maybe I'll make it happen in time, or for next week or the final assignment. Not sure if I want to take this as a challenge now or never deal with this ever again but I need to stop trying now. Sorry.
