(backchannel from these two sessions can be found here)

Creating Alternate Realities - Jane McGonigal

She is a hacker - not in the coding skills, but in that she likes to hack the real world to make it more like a game. She thinks a lot about the future and is an existentialist. Alternate Realities are realistic, though not always atainable.

Future forecast (2012) - quality of life is the primary metric for evaluating everyday technology. positive psychology is principal design. public expects tech companies to have a clear vision of a life worth living.

Findings - 3 realms of Happiness. Pleasure (experiences), Engagements (immersive), Meaning (having a powerful role in the world around you.

"Bounce Out" scores high on engagement but that only lasts a few moments which goes away when you go back to your real life. Halo, Second Life and how those leak back into real life. Some examples of games spilling over into real life:

ministry of reshelving
cruel 2 b kind
tombstone hold'em poker
i love bees
world without oil (launching April 30)

new games are supergames - supersized, superimposed (ontop of real life), super heroic (you aren't playing a character, you are playing yourself), supercomputing (parallel problem-solving). So what does this have to do with hapiness? Persistent plesure, engagement in real life, purpose and meaning, and makes you part of something bigger.

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Why Can’t a Computer Be More Like a Brain? How a New Theory of Neocortex Will Lead to Truly Intelligent Machines - Jeff Hawkins

Jeff starts off by saying he's not a hacker, gammer, and finds enough alternate reality in the real world that he doesn't look for it elsewhere. A quick intro to the Turing Maching (Alan Turing 1937) - what has worked and what hasn't. Machines are great for somethings - mathmatics, databases, communications, video, images, etc.. but not so great at visual perception, auditory perception, languages, adaptive behavior, and other things that are super easy for people. So why aren't machines doing these things yet? Four answers to that question:

1. Computers are not powerful enough yet.
2. Brains are too complex to understand.
3. Brains work on quantum principles.
4. Brains are magic.

problem is most of these are the result of smart people thinking about brains and not figuring them out so assuming they can't be figured out.

however - brains are not too complex, they don't work on strange principles, we just don't understand how they work.

Now he shows a lot of slides showing how brains are wired that I really can't even pretend to try and describe. Then goes on to talk about Hierarchical Temporal Memory and how it works, and how it's similar to brains.

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