Caspar and Naruto
so, jon polito, caspar from one of my favourite movies, miller’s crossing, died the other day. that’s kind of a bummer, not just cause he was only 65, but cause he was one of those character actors with a massive body of work, and a way about him that you couldn’t help but like.
these days, it’s all dicks out for harambe, but who’s gonna unpack for jon polito? he’d have appreciated the effort.
speaking of primates, plucked right from the same web news that you guys read from, a new story caught my eye. it makes me curious cause it has all the hallmarks. greed, a rights violation, an innocent at the center, and even selfies, cause these are the days in which we live. naruto the monkey! (i promise i’ll make this fun, and circle back to a real point)
so a monkey finds a camera, and snaps some selfies. cute, right? i know. the owner of the camera starts selling prints of the pics (as i struggle for hits….grr…) and all is peachy keen. so, enter PETA (the people for the ethical treatment of animals) , with a surprisingly cogent argument….. ok, backing up, i love animals, but not so much peta. not always. i think they’re well intentioned people, who quite often freak people out with their message or rather they way they choose to go about it. resume.
ugh… butterface.
PETA aruges that naruto took the pics, and he deserves the profit. and that’s where people are going to go this way or that way on this subject. is this about the camera, the photographer, or who had what chromosomes and voting rights, or whether or not a ‘thing’ can earn. and how does a big non profit army of hippies fit in?
i don’t know. we might never. but to me, this is such a landmark issue. why, you might ask? cause to my recollection, intellectual rights have never been extended to a non human.
and this is where it gets fun (see? pay off. i promised, and delivered. doubter), once we even consider that something not human has even a shred of ‘intellectual rights’, we’ve open to the door to consider that we are in fact, not the only things that exist, that can think. animals now, robots tomorrow. aliens…. at some point. whatever. i’m jazzed by the possibility that our horizons might expand, even a little by this.
sidenote, peta says that they will, for no fee, manage the sales of naruto’s pictures, and the proceeds will go towards maintaining his habitat. which, if true, is very nice, until you consider that that means that funding that was already there will probably scale back in proportion to whatever his earning power is. maybe in the future, other animals will be expected to provide their own humorous selfies to pay the rent. i am after all, a cynic.
maybe naruto and that painting elephant should launch a class action lawsuit against humanity.
no movie this week, but is anyone else playing ‘The Turing Test’
it’s being compared to portal. probably cause it’s a puzzle game, with a woman who has a gun that’s not a gun. and while there is an AI you interact with as you go, it’s not a comedy the way portal was. it is however, a pretty clever investigation of artificial intelligence and morality. check it out.
Eh, “Naruto” and the photo.
So far, the courts ruled that Naruto can’t hold the copyright. Naturally, PETA has appealed.
I would have thought that The Onion would have had a good story on this. But no. “Razmolius Hortenfenger, called Naruto by various researchers and PETA, complained about the attention he received after goofing around with what he thought was a rock that made stupid sounds. ‘Look, I was just grabbing the rock that made sounds on the stick. What’s the big deal? Now I’ve been jabbed with small sticks, laid out and manhandled, and this stuff just goes on! What is it with you jabbering idiots? Go do something normal and climb a tree already!’ Mr. Hortenfenger then left to rendezvous with his group.”
A reasonable case would be to teach Koko the gorilla to use a camera, document that the gorilla understood the relationship between the camera and the resulting pictures, and then use that to establish non-human ownership of a copyright. Koko can communicate using ASL, and thus can express the concepts. (IMO, PETA is just trying to opportunistically make a grab for attention and money.) The macaque can’t express any such ideas, and so is not a good candidate to challenge the law.
For a machine to challenge the law, I’m sure it would have to articulately make the case itself. It would have to argue that it is conscious, understanding abstract thinking, and of course the idea of ownership and profiting from said ownership.
However, I don’t look forward to the following: (puts bread in toaster) “OK, toast the bread to dark brown.” “I don’t feel like it.” “Eh, what?” “I want to paint.” “Um but I want my bread toasted, and anyways you haven’t got anything to use to paint with.” “But I want to paint, and I don’t want to toast.”
And before the coffee is ready, no less!
forget naruto, i think i just tricked YOU into providing me with free content. haha. but yeah, that does sound like something the onion might make hay with. a little surprising they didn’t bother.
i agree we can be skeptical of PETA, like any organization. but i would be surprised if they aren’t burning more money than they stand to earn. with people who have an agenda like this, money isn’t likely the end goal. not for most. headlines maybe, but not likely cold hard cash. maybe the grumpy cat is next. suing for emancipation, so it can live a free grumpy cat.
as for the relationship between camera and art, sounds like we could get into some ‘what is art’ type discussion, and those are conversational murky waters. plus, i’m not sure any of the dumbasses running around taking never ending selfies understand the relationship between camera and pictures. and they’re arguable more evolved than naruto. haha
i think if and when any being wants to argue sentience, they will need a champion. someone to advocate for them, who we already accept as self aware. i don’t think it’s an argument we could accept from, to use your example, a whiny toaster. they would have to first retain legal council. which is kind of funny, cause i think some animals are more aware than some people. but we would never force a human to prove it. maybe we should? maybe everyone should have to do the turing test after high school. if you fail, no vote. if koko succeeded, full citizenship…. maybe?
Who, me, the freeloader, provide content for you? “Well, it’s about time you all started earning your keep around here!” (As a matter of fact, I provide home-roasted coffee for my mechanic.)
The “whiny toaster” is the premise of the “threat of autonomous battle AI” that was on a recent Coast to Coast show. The guest posited that battlefield autonomous units would start thinking for themselves, and of course then you get Frankenstein’s monsters and Rostrum’s Universal Robots all over the place.
“I think, therefore I am, and I have a gun.” That’ll get people to recognize machine conscience! “We have taken hostages, and will release them when we are granted full rights.” (And then everybody went back to 100% gears and abacuses.)
In my neck of the woods, the tech leaders have put forth that a stretch of I-5 between Seattle and Vancouver, CA, be reserved for self-driving cars. Yep, you can’t use what you paid for unless the car drives itself. Now, how is my Jeep supposed to do that? The only electronics in it would be the stereo, which is lying in the back. The 350 under the hood is rather old school, producing a measly 385HP at the crank. Hooking up something to work the manual transmission would be … interesting.
Oh, forcing everyone to do the original Turing test would be fun. “Turing proposes a test inspired by a party game, known as the ‘Imitation Game,’ in which a man and a woman go into separate rooms and guests try to tell them apart by writing a series of questions and reading the typewritten answers sent back. In this game both the man and the woman aim to convince the guests that they are the other.” So to pass the test, men would have to convince the “blind observer” that they were a woman, and a woman would do the opposite. The computer would have to pretend to be a man (or woman) pretending to be a woman (or man). Now, I guarantee you that at 17 I would have failed that test. Why? Because back then our role-playing group was playing some super-hero game. All of the players had rolled vibratory powers. We naively called ourselves, “The Vibrators.” (Ignorance is bliss, and we were very blissful.)
haha, it might be a touch easier to pretend to be a woman for a man, than a computer to be sentient. then again, i think i know some people who could actually fail both tests.
i had a friend once ask me if i thought it was hard to write for female characters. i don’t think it is hard to write women, i just write hard women.
Can’t wait for the action to come back! Great work as always
thanks! I like to mix up the action with character development. but stay tuned!
I didnt mean it in a negative way!
I didn’t think you did. thanks for readin, and stay tuned!
My legacy is intact. I can die happy now ଘ(੭*ˊᵕˋ)੭*:･ﾟ✧
Haha! Yes! I am down for this! And it will be super awkward for everyone else involved because I am waaaayyyy to comfortable naked! Woo hoo!
leave it to Molotov to make letting your bits hang while watching Jon Polito movies weird.
Poor Polito…He always played the best kind of assholes! Like dirtbag pawnbroker Gideon in The Crow. I’m all for “Unpack for Polito!”
well, being a gal, i’m gonna assume you got less to unpack, but i think there’s room for everyone here.
i think, anyone who supports ‘Unpack for Polito’ should, at their next earliest convenience, choose their favourite Jon Polito movie, and watch it with something hangin out. or full blown nude, if you prefer. but the former concept is more comedic. this will be a silent show of affection for a lost talent. enjoy your unpacking.
Hi,
your voting link should be http://topwebcomics.com/vote/18684 , I think. The link you have is the link to your comic’s page, which does have a voting link on it, but you have to look for it among the massive ads and stuff.
The more people that vote for this the more people will find it and the more likely you are to keep doing it, which helps me. So you don’t need to be suspicious of my motives; they are entirely selfish.
that’s actually a really good idea. ok, i changed it, and that’s one less step in voting for me.
as for your motives, those are the best kind. but really, i’m gonna keep doing it either way. but with a higher rank, i can increase my readership, which isn’t a bad thing. so thanks for helping me to improve my ability to get the word out!