Jan 11: some thoughts before I forget them

Just some passing thoughts from this week:

• I feel like there's been a shift at some point where we have become backwards-thinking instead of forwards-thinking in terms of all things technology. This relates not only to the technology itself, where we see the usage of generative AI models that only know how to replicate the past, but also science fiction, where the worlds of "tomorrow" are mostly just alternatives of the present. I feel like in the mid-20th century, we had sci-fi that actually attempted to imagine a future of technologies that are quite different — not just flying cars, but teleporters and universal language translation handhelds. Sci-fi today seems like the same old riff on androids and robots and uploading your brain into the internet — what's a dramatically new technology that's thought of? With the release of Cyberpunk 2077 a few years ago, someone mentioned that instead of it feeling like an imaginary of a possible future, it feels more like a retrospective on what someone in 1988 (specifically, Mike Pondsmith) imagined for the future. We're no longer imaginging anew, but simply following the imagination of the past. Similarly with technology, we're so fixated on machine learning technology that "learns" from past data, to make "predictions" that align with the past. There's nothing "new" about it. Someone posted about a piece of generative AI imagery that was so fixated on the past that it could only depict characters as the actors who have played them, unable to break from that nostalgia. What if, in a larger sense, that's where we're at?
• Still thinking about vtubers, and not just about possibilities of digital yellowface but also affordances for trans streamers to be seen as themselves, but also about the face tracking technology needed to make vtubing possible.
  And what other technologies use this (image filters? real-time emotion detection systems?). I'm pretty pro-vtubing, especially in the case of allowing people to stream without showing their actual faces (good for privacy and safety), while being seen the way they want to be seen, but someone more critical might ask if the core issue is with how viewers engage with streamers and our culture around visuality that needs to change. Anyways, more to think about...