Networked Creativity section:
Aaron Koblin

I related to what Aaron is saying in this clip about making something – he calls it an entity – that can take on a life of its own and interact independently online and consequently be reshaped by other people. But at the same time I think that the thinking in this section of the film is still limited by the emphasis on human collaboration and networked humans. I tend to think that the open source movement, while creating software that is useful in the short term for humans, actually has long term effects on the “global code base” and the general development of machinic intelligence. These “entities” are not just communicative media but they have their own form of intelligence, as Aaron is implying. Maybe artificially intelligent interpreters in the future will be reading our github code and integrating bits and pieces of algorithms into their code bases? Who know what they will think of what we are creating now (though probably they’ll be disgusted by our ineffiencies)…

Machine Learning section:
Kyle MacDonald: “Eye-tracking will be embedded in all the cameras around us.”

My thesis is revolving around surveillant media consumption and I agree with this. In my own work I am starting to work with eye-tracking SDKs and the ability to measure attention (through this and similar techniques) is an incredibly powerful tool that has many ramifications for privacy and even the use of biometrics in advertising, political intelligence, media production, etc. Eye-tracking, face-tracking, gait recognition, and similar computer vision techniques turns the camera into a sensor where it is no longer capturing an image, but it is now capturing data – about people, objects, environments. The camera can now generate a simulation of our world (much as in the Clouds documentary) and the people often have no control or even knowledge of what data has been captured through these techniques (as in surveillance) or how or why it has been captured.