Virtual Boskone
Jun. 15th, 2022 10:21 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
studio1009Boskone (February 18-20, 2022) was held in-person and on-line. I was interested in attending because Ted Chiang was the Guest of Honor. I adore his writing, especially the stories about robots and software such as "The Lifecycle of Software Objects"
Some of the programming is streamed form the hotel, and some is Virtual in that the panel took place in Zoom. I like the Zoom panels because they are real-time auto-captioned and I am hard-of-hearing. Below are notes from the panels I attended. They may not be exact quotes from the participants, just my interpretation. There was a bunch of great discussion and ideas. Just the thing I go to cons for. I anticipate that even after things get back to normal, there will still be a demand for virtual programming. Accessibility and low cost will allow more people to participate.
FRIDAY
One Home: Sight of Earth as an Astronaut - Virtual - Presented by JeanPierre Goux. The subject was how to bring the "Overview Effect" to people on Earth. The Overview Effect was proposed by astronaut Edgar Mitchell. The idea is that seeing the planet without political boundaries helps people consider the effect of their actions on a global scale rather than just to their immediate locale. The was a very nice graphic describing Le Grange Points with gravity wells. He mentioned Triana and Al Gore (Blue Century). Mr. Goux wrote Siecle Bleu which wil be tranalated to English next year. He eventually gets to the DSCOVR spacecraft. I worked on this mission. I remember seeing that video of a full sunlight view of Earth rotating just after the images were downlinked and strung together. He mentioned Trump wanting to shut off the camera because it monitors climate change. I remember that; people had to figure out how much it cost to operate the EPIC camera. Probably cost more to do the accounting.
Mr. Goux discussed the One Home project. www.onehome.org They commissioned music to go with the video from EPIC.
What is strange is that the film shows a terminator. All images from DSCOVR are full sun. So they monkeyed with the images to create a false terminator. I think that lessens the validity. It does look dramatic. The idea is to project the video on buildings at events to publicize the project. I hope it helps get people interested in thinking about Earth as the home of all humanity, and our only home for the foreseeable future.
Facts Behind Folklore - Virtual - Fran Wilde, Greer Gilmen, Jane Yolen, Marie Brennan (Mod) Ms. Brennan is an academic folklorist.
The descussion got into Cartoon Saloon films, Secret of Kells, etc. I guess I didn't get much else out of the discussion.
Multilingual Authors
I learned that Philipines has 170 languages. English is a unifying language, so Filipinos are very fluent.
Singapore uses English and Chinesse
Spanish varieties all over the world.
Use of non-English words in context. italics or not
Long discussion of them being looked down on when what they write is not grammatically perfect, when it was a style choice, not a lack of knowledge.
Recommendation for Victor Fernandino R Ocampo
Infinite Library and other stories
SATURDAY
The live streamed panels were via Zoom, so they had the autocaptioning.
The Panelists did not use clear wndow masks, so I couldn't lipread, or even know for sure who was talking.
Pemale Anti-Hero - streamed
Panelists included Tamsyn Muir who wrote Gideon the Ninth, Clon Alexander, Sarah Langan
"Problematic ladies" Unlikeable, violent, selfish, bad mothers, alcoholic.
But still saving the world.
Respected but not loveable.
Loose cannons who get results.
Ted Chiang Guest of Honor Interview
by James Patrick Kelly
Ted lives near Seattle. His is a technical writer, married, has cats. His degree is in computer science. His high school goal was to become an astrophysicist and write SF on the side. He is a fan of the scientific world view. This runs through his work.
No one becomes a physicist because he likes to write grant applications. Mr. Kelly asks if computer science was a second choice. Ted says that when he was young, CS wasn't considered a career possibility. (Kelly doesn't realize how much programming is involved in doing astrophysics. This is something I learned when I worked on the Fermi mission.) Ted is glad he didn't persue a career in academia.
Choosing a career depends on how much of the ancillary BS you are willing to endure to get to do the thing you like.
Writing process:
He ponders an idea for years.
Freewill is compatible with physical determinism.
Humans are complex machines and perform very complex computations for every decision.
He wrote a time travel story that ended up being about freewill.
He thinks time travel or interdimensional travel would require a device at the destination (the way a radio communication requires two transceivers. This is in "The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate.")
A time machine would be the same machine that existed before a branch.
Stories about discredited world views counter factual (e.g., "Omphalos")
This was a delightful interview. I even remembered the stories that they were talking about even when they didn't mention the title. Ted Chiang is not a prolific author, but each story is a gem.
Xenobiological Hospital
The panelists have a variety of medical specialties, but there was no veterinarian. A vet would have brought a lot of insight into multi-species medical care.
They discussed the needs in the emergency room; Physical and psychiatric. None of the discussion really stuck with me.
Tamsyn Muir Interview
She is a Kiwi! Overseas experience is expected. She was a primary school teacher in New Zealand. Going overseas, you get paid more. She now lives in England near Oxford. When she lived in NZ, she wrote about America. Now in Oxford, she writes about New Zealand.
Gideon the Ninth contains NZ culture. (I guess I need to give it another try.)
Copy editors and odd words.
Tamsyn was excited by hearing a Bostonian use the term "wicked" to describe a bad paper cut on her finger.
Interviewr mentioned an artist Tommy Arnold(?) who is a cover artist for Tor
The Post Meridian Radio Players Present: Sherlock Holmes in Adventure of the Bruce Padington Plans. streamed
The spelling is probably incorrect.
The captioning was horrid, but I got the gist of the play.
SUNDAY
Ted Chiang on Time Travel - streamed
Greek Mythology: Prophecies are information that comes from the future. Hearing a prophecy never helped avoid the bad event. Oedipus Rex.
He thinks A Christmas Carol is the first true time travel story. Scrooge sees the future and changes it.
Free will versus Fate
Back to the Future (his favorite)
Terminator
12 Monkeys
Looper.
How Physicists think time travel would work.
Black Holes and Time Warps
Kip Thorne
(It is nice that his time dilation catoon shows non-white main characters.)
Time Portal on a spaceship. (Wow)
Time Travel via worlmholes
Two portals - Time dilation
Meeting your older self?
This time machine takes you to the actual future
Relativity , quantum mechanics
Hawking proposed time travel can't happen.
Determinism is not fatalism.
Even if Time Travel is not scientifically possible., SF stories about time travel are still worthwhile.
Stores about changing the past remind us that our actions can change an outcome.
Question: HG Well's Time Machine
Ted: Lots of ideas in it. Geological Deep Time, society can change dramatically
Evolution was a new idea at the time, Wells speculates about the future
Time travel is only the mechanism to see the changes. Well's novel is not about time travel.
Question: Wells was responding to Marx who thought revolution would bring utopia for workers.
Ted: 1800s people generally believe that society has devolved from the height in Roman/Greek era [MM: I can see this in Tolkien's work too]
Ted really likes "Back to the Future" trilogy. It doesn't take itself seriously.
Question: Fatalism versus Determinism.
Ted: Again the idea that humans are machines. Complex and unpredictable, nevertheless.
Kiefkegard - life must be understood backwards, but lived forward.
Ted: the actions you take have consequences.
(Don't accept the status quo)
Your choices matter
Multiple Versions of the Future - Virtual; Malka Older, Arkday Martine, Ann Rusche, Larry Niven, Karl Shroeder.
Rusche is Brazilian.
Niven mentioned being hired to write about a future with Cold Fusion. It was not published because the cold fusion idea crumbled.
Older: 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. She read it when she was young and enjoyed it, but didn't appreciate how revolutionary it was. Submarines didn't exist in Verne's time [although a couple of submersibles in the Civil War] His predictions of operations and people living on one is unique.
Apocalyptic Fiction; Currently, people are living in apocalyptic conditions. We need to get used to living in instability.
Niven states that Sf writers don't intend to predict the future, just to write good stories. He is glad FTL travel is not possible. We'd be constantly invaded.
Schroder: Elon Musk is trying to create the future he read about as a chold "Martian Frontier"
Neal Stephenson invented the idea of the Meta verse and Zuckerberg is trying to create it.
Older: predictive policing, ses "Minority Report" (She is crocheting during the panel) Society needs to get away from "Growth & Progress" as a goal, to save the planet.
Love and Sex with Robots - Virtaul
Ted Chiange, Chalres Stross, Malka Older, Tiago Lage
[Ted is joining the Zoom panel from the con. I am alarmed that his helper is not covering his nose with his mask.]
Ethics of sex with robots;
Can a robot consent?
Ted; most stories about robots are stories about labor. Robots as ethical slaves. Asimov's robots were designed to be non-threatening.
Lupe: Ethical robot relationship has to do with power.
Stross: The people who want a sex robot want it because it will do something you can't get with a consenual relationship.
[MM: I would use a sex robot if I did not want the complication of a relationship, not want to get disease, or pregnant.]
Chiang: Do we want to encourage a thing that caters to emotional immaturity
Waht about robots that would simulate a caring relationship. Humans often conflate sex and love.
Lage: feeling love/affection is different from the behaviors that indicate love.
AGI = Artificial General Intelligence
Some streaming issue with Older.
Stross: purpose of love. Bonding within a family or group to share goals and work.
Older: even simulated love behavours are beneficial. such as mechinical pets for old people.
"Life Cycle of Software Objects" addresses this.
Do we Allow the AGIs to develop sexual desire or love. Chiang thinks love is integral to the human experience.
Some of the programming is streamed form the hotel, and some is Virtual in that the panel took place in Zoom. I like the Zoom panels because they are real-time auto-captioned and I am hard-of-hearing. Below are notes from the panels I attended. They may not be exact quotes from the participants, just my interpretation. There was a bunch of great discussion and ideas. Just the thing I go to cons for. I anticipate that even after things get back to normal, there will still be a demand for virtual programming. Accessibility and low cost will allow more people to participate.
FRIDAY
One Home: Sight of Earth as an Astronaut - Virtual - Presented by JeanPierre Goux. The subject was how to bring the "Overview Effect" to people on Earth. The Overview Effect was proposed by astronaut Edgar Mitchell. The idea is that seeing the planet without political boundaries helps people consider the effect of their actions on a global scale rather than just to their immediate locale. The was a very nice graphic describing Le Grange Points with gravity wells. He mentioned Triana and Al Gore (Blue Century). Mr. Goux wrote Siecle Bleu which wil be tranalated to English next year. He eventually gets to the DSCOVR spacecraft. I worked on this mission. I remember seeing that video of a full sunlight view of Earth rotating just after the images were downlinked and strung together. He mentioned Trump wanting to shut off the camera because it monitors climate change. I remember that; people had to figure out how much it cost to operate the EPIC camera. Probably cost more to do the accounting.
Mr. Goux discussed the One Home project. www.onehome.org They commissioned music to go with the video from EPIC.
What is strange is that the film shows a terminator. All images from DSCOVR are full sun. So they monkeyed with the images to create a false terminator. I think that lessens the validity. It does look dramatic. The idea is to project the video on buildings at events to publicize the project. I hope it helps get people interested in thinking about Earth as the home of all humanity, and our only home for the foreseeable future.
Facts Behind Folklore - Virtual - Fran Wilde, Greer Gilmen, Jane Yolen, Marie Brennan (Mod) Ms. Brennan is an academic folklorist.
The descussion got into Cartoon Saloon films, Secret of Kells, etc. I guess I didn't get much else out of the discussion.
Multilingual Authors
I learned that Philipines has 170 languages. English is a unifying language, so Filipinos are very fluent.
Singapore uses English and Chinesse
Spanish varieties all over the world.
Use of non-English words in context. italics or not
Long discussion of them being looked down on when what they write is not grammatically perfect, when it was a style choice, not a lack of knowledge.
Recommendation for Victor Fernandino R Ocampo
Infinite Library and other stories
SATURDAY
The live streamed panels were via Zoom, so they had the autocaptioning.
The Panelists did not use clear wndow masks, so I couldn't lipread, or even know for sure who was talking.
Pemale Anti-Hero - streamed
Panelists included Tamsyn Muir who wrote Gideon the Ninth, Clon Alexander, Sarah Langan
"Problematic ladies" Unlikeable, violent, selfish, bad mothers, alcoholic.
But still saving the world.
Respected but not loveable.
Loose cannons who get results.
Ted Chiang Guest of Honor Interview
by James Patrick Kelly
Ted lives near Seattle. His is a technical writer, married, has cats. His degree is in computer science. His high school goal was to become an astrophysicist and write SF on the side. He is a fan of the scientific world view. This runs through his work.
No one becomes a physicist because he likes to write grant applications. Mr. Kelly asks if computer science was a second choice. Ted says that when he was young, CS wasn't considered a career possibility. (Kelly doesn't realize how much programming is involved in doing astrophysics. This is something I learned when I worked on the Fermi mission.) Ted is glad he didn't persue a career in academia.
Choosing a career depends on how much of the ancillary BS you are willing to endure to get to do the thing you like.
Writing process:
He ponders an idea for years.
Freewill is compatible with physical determinism.
Humans are complex machines and perform very complex computations for every decision.
He wrote a time travel story that ended up being about freewill.
He thinks time travel or interdimensional travel would require a device at the destination (the way a radio communication requires two transceivers. This is in "The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate.")
A time machine would be the same machine that existed before a branch.
Stories about discredited world views counter factual (e.g., "Omphalos")
This was a delightful interview. I even remembered the stories that they were talking about even when they didn't mention the title. Ted Chiang is not a prolific author, but each story is a gem.
Xenobiological Hospital
The panelists have a variety of medical specialties, but there was no veterinarian. A vet would have brought a lot of insight into multi-species medical care.
They discussed the needs in the emergency room; Physical and psychiatric. None of the discussion really stuck with me.
Tamsyn Muir Interview
She is a Kiwi! Overseas experience is expected. She was a primary school teacher in New Zealand. Going overseas, you get paid more. She now lives in England near Oxford. When she lived in NZ, she wrote about America. Now in Oxford, she writes about New Zealand.
Gideon the Ninth contains NZ culture. (I guess I need to give it another try.)
Copy editors and odd words.
Tamsyn was excited by hearing a Bostonian use the term "wicked" to describe a bad paper cut on her finger.
Interviewr mentioned an artist Tommy Arnold(?) who is a cover artist for Tor
The Post Meridian Radio Players Present: Sherlock Holmes in Adventure of the Bruce Padington Plans. streamed
The spelling is probably incorrect.
The captioning was horrid, but I got the gist of the play.
SUNDAY
Ted Chiang on Time Travel - streamed
Greek Mythology: Prophecies are information that comes from the future. Hearing a prophecy never helped avoid the bad event. Oedipus Rex.
He thinks A Christmas Carol is the first true time travel story. Scrooge sees the future and changes it.
Free will versus Fate
Back to the Future (his favorite)
Terminator
12 Monkeys
Looper.
How Physicists think time travel would work.
Black Holes and Time Warps
Kip Thorne
(It is nice that his time dilation catoon shows non-white main characters.)
Time Portal on a spaceship. (Wow)
Time Travel via worlmholes
Two portals - Time dilation
Meeting your older self?
This time machine takes you to the actual future
Relativity , quantum mechanics
Hawking proposed time travel can't happen.
Determinism is not fatalism.
Even if Time Travel is not scientifically possible., SF stories about time travel are still worthwhile.
Stores about changing the past remind us that our actions can change an outcome.
Question: HG Well's Time Machine
Ted: Lots of ideas in it. Geological Deep Time, society can change dramatically
Evolution was a new idea at the time, Wells speculates about the future
Time travel is only the mechanism to see the changes. Well's novel is not about time travel.
Question: Wells was responding to Marx who thought revolution would bring utopia for workers.
Ted: 1800s people generally believe that society has devolved from the height in Roman/Greek era [MM: I can see this in Tolkien's work too]
Ted really likes "Back to the Future" trilogy. It doesn't take itself seriously.
Question: Fatalism versus Determinism.
Ted: Again the idea that humans are machines. Complex and unpredictable, nevertheless.
Kiefkegard - life must be understood backwards, but lived forward.
Ted: the actions you take have consequences.
(Don't accept the status quo)
Your choices matter
Multiple Versions of the Future - Virtual; Malka Older, Arkday Martine, Ann Rusche, Larry Niven, Karl Shroeder.
Rusche is Brazilian.
Niven mentioned being hired to write about a future with Cold Fusion. It was not published because the cold fusion idea crumbled.
Older: 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. She read it when she was young and enjoyed it, but didn't appreciate how revolutionary it was. Submarines didn't exist in Verne's time [although a couple of submersibles in the Civil War] His predictions of operations and people living on one is unique.
Apocalyptic Fiction; Currently, people are living in apocalyptic conditions. We need to get used to living in instability.
Niven states that Sf writers don't intend to predict the future, just to write good stories. He is glad FTL travel is not possible. We'd be constantly invaded.
Schroder: Elon Musk is trying to create the future he read about as a chold "Martian Frontier"
Neal Stephenson invented the idea of the Meta verse and Zuckerberg is trying to create it.
Older: predictive policing, ses "Minority Report" (She is crocheting during the panel) Society needs to get away from "Growth & Progress" as a goal, to save the planet.
Love and Sex with Robots - Virtaul
Ted Chiange, Chalres Stross, Malka Older, Tiago Lage
[Ted is joining the Zoom panel from the con. I am alarmed that his helper is not covering his nose with his mask.]
Ethics of sex with robots;
Can a robot consent?
Ted; most stories about robots are stories about labor. Robots as ethical slaves. Asimov's robots were designed to be non-threatening.
Lupe: Ethical robot relationship has to do with power.
Stross: The people who want a sex robot want it because it will do something you can't get with a consenual relationship.
[MM: I would use a sex robot if I did not want the complication of a relationship, not want to get disease, or pregnant.]
Chiang: Do we want to encourage a thing that caters to emotional immaturity
Waht about robots that would simulate a caring relationship. Humans often conflate sex and love.
Lage: feeling love/affection is different from the behaviors that indicate love.
AGI = Artificial General Intelligence
Some streaming issue with Older.
Stross: purpose of love. Bonding within a family or group to share goals and work.
Older: even simulated love behavours are beneficial. such as mechinical pets for old people.
"Life Cycle of Software Objects" addresses this.
Do we Allow the AGIs to develop sexual desire or love. Chiang thinks love is integral to the human experience.
