Seen in → No.61
- How Doug Engelbart Pulled off the Mother of All Demos.
- Dungeons and Dragons, not chess and Go: why AI needs roleplay.
“These experiences have none of the open-ended collaboration of D&D. Which got me thinking: do we need a new test for intelligence, where the goal is not simply about success, but storytelling? What would it mean for an AI to ‘pass’ as human in a game of D&D? Instead of the Turing test, perhaps we need an elf ranger test?” - Helena Sarin: Why Bigger Isn’t Always Better With GANs And AI Art.
I love this! “The second way artists can protect against homogeneity in AI art is to ignore the computational arms race and focus more on training models using your own hand-crafted data sets. By training GANs on your own artwork, you can be assured that nobody else will come up with the exact same outputs.” - Delphi. “[A] pioneering interdisciplinary review of emerging technologies as seen through the perspectives of experts from the fields of science and technology, ethics, economics, business and law.”
- Climate Change Is Stealing Our Children’s Futures 📹. Fabulous short talk by 15-year-old Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg at COP24. Come for the 🔥, stay for the polite (shamed?) clapping by the audience she just schooled.
- Spain Wants to Ban Cars in Dozens of Cities, and the Public’s on Board. “In the Northwestern region of Galicia, a favorable attitude toward such bans went as high as 78 percent.”
- 😡😤 Climate change: COP24 fails to adopt key scientific report.
“But negotiators here ran into serious trouble when Saudi Arabia, the US, Russia and Kuwait objected to the conference “welcoming” the document.” - The Extremely Fast Peopling of the Americas. “In a matter of centuries, these people had gone down both sides of the Rockies, across the Great Basin, and into Mexico’s highlands. Within a couple more millennia, they had zipped down the Andes, through the Amazon, and as far south as the continent allowed.”
- Scientists solved a decades-old swamp-monster mystery in Florida. “This strange giant salamander has a slimy spotted body that extends about two feet. It has two forelegs, no back legs, and a set of gills that fan out like leaves just behind its head. Basically, it looks like a long eel—hence the local moniker.”
- Eviation Alice Is an All-Electric Airplane That May Replace Turboprops. Good looking plane. “An all-electric mini-airliner that can go 621 miles on one charge and replace many of the turboprops and light jets in use now.”