Decipher SciFi

Latest Episodes:

Altered Carbon: Zoltan Istvan on transplant immortality, identity, and consciousness uploading Feb 06, 2018

Show notes

Immortality by transplant

Analogy with developments in head transplantation. Consciousness uploading. Preservation of identity. Conflict of human immortality with religion.

Transhumanism and Identity

The meaning of race and gender in a world where anyone can be any variety of human (and more). Merging with AI and technology in general.

Sleeving

The boundaries of the “self” and the “mind” and the meat. Hard to draw! The influence of the greater body system over the “self” part and boners. So many boners. But not from nipple stuff, no sir. ?

Zoltan: ZoltanIstvan.com
Altered Carbon (the novel) by Richard K. Morgan: iTunes Amazon

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Philip K Dick's Electric Dreams: self-replicating AI, the illusion of self, and parasites Jan 30, 2018

Show notes

Philip K Dick

Callback to some.of.our.episodes on PKD and his stories. Pulp scifi of the 50s and 60s. General appreciation for his ideas and the return of thoughtful anthologies.

Autofac

PKDpocalypse. Consumerism something something. Supreme dedication to a task. The Paperclip Maximizer and the possible danger of a highly-capable AI dedicated to its task. Universal Paperclips. The unconscious, apathetic skynet.

Real Life

PKD was all about that hash tag life. The malleability of our perception of “reality.” Am I Anna Paquin? Neurological explanations for Deja Vu. Gaslighting. Dick moves. Colbert’s joke-telling disability.

Convincing your girlfriend she’s crazy or paranoid is called gaslighting, and it’s a dick move. But convincing her she’s a robot with artificial implanted human emotions is called bladerunning. It’s a Phillip K. Dick move.

Nathan Anderson

The Father Thing

Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Stranger Things. Really really affordable spacecraft for extremophiles. Parasites cleaning up after themselves poorly. Sometimes you just gotta step up and try to murder someone. Home alone booby-trap techniques, poorly applied. Compressed parasite operating systems.

Universal Paperclips: DecisionProblem.com
Blade Runner: "androids," the AI control problem, and brain design: Decipher SciFi
A Scanner Darkly: the surveillance state, drug abuse, and rotoscoping: Decipher SciFi
Minority Report: Eliot Peper on freedom and algorithmic precognition: Decipher SciFi

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Black Mirror Season 4 Part 2: dating, robots, and pain w/ Liam Ginty Jan 23, 2018

Show notes

Episode 4 - Hang the DJ

The one with the dating. Like The button, but instead of one person it’s thousands. And instead of a million dollars you get a date. And still only maybe. Calculating Black Mirror horribleness for comparison between episodes. Massive data-crunching techniques.

Episode 5 - Metalhead

The one with the robot thing. Comparison with the new SpotMini.

Episode 6 - Black Museum

The one with the museum. Weird sex stuff. Don’t touch my nipples! The Schmidt Pain Index. The value of actually doing and recording research. Black Mirror trashy romance novels. Pleasure buttons. Sensory mapping. Consciousness partitioning. Liam was on Turn with this dude from this episode! Diffuse vs localized brain injury. Communicating with locked-in patients. Split brains! You Are Two! Waiting for law to catch up with dystopian technology.

Liam's appearance on "Turn: Washington's Spies" AMC STudios ARR

Voices from L5: Voices From L5
Problems with Mind Uploading by exurb1a: YouTube
You Are Two by CGP Grey: YouTube
Blindsight by Peter Watts: iTunes Amazon

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Black Mirror Season 4 Part 1: AI control, surveillance, and lotsa murder w/ Fraser Cain Jan 16, 2018

Show notes

Episode 1 - USS Callister

The one with the Star Trek. Protecting the new kinds of consciousnesses we will eventually create. Sleeping through the AI apocalypse. What our solo video game habits say about us. Posthumous digital simulations. Data sources for creating a digital simulacrum and how DNA is one of the least useful. Designing your brain-machine interface to not possibly ever lock someone in ever.

Episode 2 - Arkangel

The one with the helicopter parenting. Mundane parenting concerns writ large in tech. Becoming luddites and finding your breaking point. But then you die and it doesn’t matter. The danger of cloud services. Computer vision and visual input filtering.

Episode 3 - Crocodile

The one with the murders. Would you like a little more murder on your murder sandwich? The genius of the automatic, unmanned pizza truck. The pointlessness of human testimony. Crowdsourcing accurate memories. Memory obstruction strategies.

Fraser’s things: Universe Today Astronomy Cast Fraser Cain @ YouTube

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Nothing but GIFs, all day - Q&A #2 - Episode 124 Jan 09, 2018

Show notes

Our second Q&A episode, wherein we ask our friends to help us answer the the MOST INTERESTING QUESTIONS FROM THE INTERNET!

Question: “Could you have x-ray vision?”

Answerer: Fraser Cain

X-ray vision. Cybernetic eye replacements. Wavelengths of light. The visible spectrum. Ghost in the Shell. Riddick. Light amplification. Gamma rays. Cancer avoidance.

Question: “What if numbers are wrong?”

Answerer: Adrian Falcone

Math. Numbers. Logic. Ted Chiang’s short story “Divide by Zero” was in the collection Stories of Your Life and Others. Adrian mentioned Faith Physics.

Question: “What if black holes didn’t exist?”

Answerer: Daniel James Barker

Physics! Black holes. Neutron stars. Gravity. Collapse.

Question: How long before all the gasoline spoils in the zombie apocalypse?

Answerer: James Peterson

The eternally-unanswered concern that zombie shows ignore always. How long after the zombie apocalypse before all the gas is spoiled? Chemical engineers vs chemists. Oxidation. Inert gas vapor displacement.

Question: Could there be a Star Trek-style universal translator?

Answerer: Nick Farmer

Please also see our Arrival episode with Nick for a ton more on alien languages. Machine learning. Man vs machine. Man vs alien languages. Universality of language. GIF communication.

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Avatar: cryo sleep , terrestrial bioluminescence, and mooons vs planets Jan 02, 2018

Show notes

Alpha Centauri

Closest star systems to Earth. Sudden outbursts of James Cameron appreciation. Alpha Centauri {A,B}, Proxima Centauri. Sub-light space travel.

Cryo sleep

Continuation of consciousness. Perceptions of meatsackness.

Pandora the moon

Adaptive definitions of moons and planets. Learning about moons aside from our own. Disney World’s Pandora.

Bioluminescence

The utility of light in dark environs. Bioluminescence evolution on Earth. Useful wavelengths of produced light in water/air. Standard human bioluminescence. Japanese gameshow science.

Pandoran flora and fauna

Megafauna and megaflora and lower gravity. Hexapodality.

Na’vi

Na’vi anatomy. Avatar differences, e.g. 5 fingers, eyebrows. Boobs? Dr. Manhattan.

The Pandoran internet

Neural networks. Brain-machine interface vs brain-everything interface. Na’vi adaptability to remote neural control. Data-transfer

Unobtanium

Superconductors. High-temperature superconductors! Floating “mountains.”

The Science of Avatar by the Seattle Public Library: SPL.org

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The Last Jedi: FTL ramming, salt geology, and real green milk Dec 26, 2017

Show notes

Space combat

Naval analogies and a callback to a similar discussion in our Valerian episode. Magnetic (fused) torpedoes!

(FTL) Ramming speed!

Ramming vs telefragging. Kamikaze fleets, or attaching telefrag Warp Drives to asteroids and the like. Energy levels with ramming operations at lightspeed. Ruining Star Wars combat by introducing telfragging.

Explosions in space

Explosions in space shouldn’t make noise, because there isn’t (noise). Not across the near-vacuum, at least. Production of light and shrapnel. Starbursts!

Explosive decompression

Teleporting Colbert to his doom. For science! Multimodal attacks. Explosive decompression. Sausage people and asphyxiation. Freezing in space and how thew force disables all bets. Sausage people and elasticity of human tissues. Consciousness vs useful consciousness.

Skimmer ships

Hydrofoils cum “alasofoils.” Flight engineering and “dragging sticks.”

hydrofoil boat U.S. Navy CC-0 Salt planet

“Salthoth.” “Hey, it’s salt.” How salt flats form on earth. Salt rising and drying from seasonal flooding. Salt-friendly bacteria and weird oxidation.

Green milk

Yum! Domesticating mammals for their milk. Mailing baboons. Milk’s macronutrient ratios and the micronutrients that color it with the bulk removed e.g. for cheese). How it’s kinda green irl too. Domesticating the aurochs and testing the nipples.

Star Wars Meta: How to Star Wars, machete order, and the best Star Wars fan edit: Decipher SciFi
Star Wars: the death star, planet science, and appreciating the original Star Wars trilogy: Decipher SciFi
The Last Jedi - Science Fiction Film Podcast: LSG Media

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The Osiris Child: floating cities, terraforming, and the reverse Moreau maneuver Dec 19, 2017

Show notes

Indie scale

Scifi adventure throwback. Corporations are always evil. Ambition in scope of indie scifi.

Cloud city

Floating cities and air bases. Energy requirements. Floating cities on Venus, where balloons of an atmosphere of Earth-like density can float safely and happily in the high clouds. Hamster ball pleasure cruses. IRL “floating aircraft carriers.” Realizing that all aircraft carriers are “floating.”

Space settlement light and dark

The apparent necessity of slave labour. Western expansion analogies. Naval analogies. Australian analogies. Hoping that space settlement becomes mundane.

Backwards Dr Moreau A comparison Individual picture elements property of their respective owners

“Raggeds.” Reverse mode on Dr. Moreau. Echoes of evil ninja turtles and goombas. Send the gorillas to get the mongoose.

“Terraforming”

Maybe “ecoforming?” Ecological manipulation. Seeding new ecology vs tearing down existing ecology. NASA sterilization practices and caution in avoiding contamination vs throwing turtle monsters at it.

Self-destruct cleanup mode

[Rule 34](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_34(Internet_meme)? Nuclear reactors can explode, but they don’t explode _like a nuclear bomb. Chernobyl as example. Hot water and pressure reactive with metal and exploding. Metldown and the elephant foot.

Taking risks

Character elimination and happy fairy tale endings.

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Blade Runner: replicant discrimination, synthetic farming, and virtual girlfriends Dec 12, 2017

Show notes

Replicant discrimination

Is racism the right word? Hate and discrimination against replicants. Replicant slavery.

Synthetic farming

Whatever that means. But in the meantime, let’s eat some grubs okay? The benefits of cricket and grub farming. Necessity breeds insects.

Solar concentrators

Hey these are neat

Replicant birth

Pooped out of the goo shoot. Like real life. And then replicants replicating themselves.

Space settlement

Thank you creepy Jared Leto. Tyrell’s original mission versus the cohesive effort lead by creepy Leto.

Digital Girlfriend

Narrow v general artificial intelligence. Awesome magic projector technology.

Data storage

DNA or other biological data storage. Holographic storage.

BLADE RUNNER 2049 - "Black Out 2022" Anime Short: YouTube
BLADE RUNNER 2049 - "2036: Nexus Dawn" Short: YouTube
BLADE RUNNER 2049 - "2048: Nowhere to Run" Short: YouTube
Blade Runner: "androids," the AI control problem, and brain design: Decipher SciFi

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Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets: alien evolution, intelligence exaptation, and layered universes Dec 05, 2017

Show notes

International Space Station

Contemporary space station size comparisons. ISS transformation over time.

Alien life

Bipedalism. Bilateral symmetry. The assumption of humanoid structure in the “world.” Duck-billed Ferengi information brokers and neurological RAID modes.

Alpha Station

“Critical mass.” Vital stats. Population, demographics. Modular growth over time. Racial job specialization.

Alpha Station location and travel

FTL(?) via “exospace.” The plan to exit the solar system. The issues re planetary orbits when you build a brand new moon around earth with tons and tons of foreign (to the solar system) mass. Languages! 5,000+ languages are spoken on the station, not even including “computer languages.”

Mül and the Pearls

Beach-dwelling N’avi (with no tails). Math and science. Intellectual ability and exaptation of base rational abilities to science and math.

Space battles

Should they happen so near planets? Travel and planned space battle. Don’t fight on a planet because you’re vulnerable to Christopher’s favorite: the Brannigan maneuver.

The Fifth Element: space turtles, magic stones, and LeeLoo Dallas multipass: Decipher SciFi

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